For a state budget that keeps getting squeezed tighter and tighter, some good news finally emerged the other day. It came as a surprise of sorts, but state officials (and taxpayers) will happily accept whatever budget breaks they can get.
The news comes from the state Department of Corrections, which reports that the population of state prisons and local jails is dropping. As Media General News Service reported over the weekend, no one is exactly sure why the inmate population is dropping or whether it will last.
But it’s welcome news for the state budget, which lays out more than $1 billion a year for prisons. A little more than a year ago, state officials warned that so many people were being locked up in Virginia that it might take a new prison a year — at a cost of $100 million — to keep pace.
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In state government parlance, there’s an important distinction between prisons and jails. Prisons are where long-term felons are sent to serve their sentences, while jails, including regional jails, are local facilities that hold people awaiting trial and those serving relatively short sentences, usually less than a year.
State figures show that while the number of prison inmates grew an average of almost 3 percent a year from 2001 to the end of June 2008, the figure has dropped by 1.1 percent or more than 400 inmates since then.
In the jails, the average daily population grew 5 percent a year from 2001 through 2007. But in 2008, the number declined 1.7 percent and it has fallen almost 3 percent this year.
The inmate population in state prisons is about 33,200. Nearly 28,000 are behind bars in local and regional jails, of whom nearly 6,000 are “state-responsible inmates” awaiting transfer to a state prison.
The inmate population story is not exactly the same for Lynchburg. The population is down slightly, according to Elton Blackstock, director of the Blue Ridge Regional Jail Authority. But crowding still remains an issue.
The total jail count for the combined populations of jails in the system in June was 951 compared to 1,026 in July 2008. Taking out inmates housed for other localities, the jail population stood at 825 in June compared to 858 last July.
Blackstock attributes some of the decrease to the newly constructed regional jail in Montgomery County.
Despite the lower jail count, the Lynchburg jail remains crowded. Department of Corrections standards set the jail’s capacity at 760, which means that the Lynchburg facility “is still doing a lot of double bunking,” as Blackstock put it.
So why are the prison and jail populations decreasing? No one really knows. Blackstock said, “You’d think with the economy in shambles like it is, that there would be more.”
A couple of statistical reports do offer clues. State police report that while some types of crime have shown increases in the past year, violent crime that can lead to stiff prison sentences has been down two years in a row across the state.
A recent report to a legislative subcommittee showed that felony drug arrests in the third quarter of 2008 were nearly 9 percent below the same period the year before. Also, the number of people awaiting trial for felony drug charges dropped 26 percent from December 2006 to December 2008.
For the time being, at least, the inmate population is dropping, which means perhaps that more money can be diverted to public education and higher education. That would be a welcome change f rom budgets of the past.
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