Our society has evolved to the point where we focus on problems only when they become money problems. The traffic congestion in southwestern Connecticut started to draw serious attention only when it was determined that perpetually snarled traffic along I-95 had begun to put a drag on the state economic engine along the gold coast. Open space acquisition got a second look only when rampant residential development started driving up tax rates in exurbia at an alarming rate. Now, the state’s red ink-stained General Assembly is considering a special session to review a package of reforms aimed reducing Connecticut’s inmate population. This is not social enlightenment. It is all about the money.

Connecticut has been packing more and more inmates into its correctional institutions for years. In 1990, the state had 9,589 men and women behind bars. Thirteen years later in a state that is losing population that number has doubled. As of July 1 this year, 19,121 men and women were incarcerated in Connecticut, according to the Department of Correction. The highest percentage of those inmates (2,293) are in jail for violating the terms of their parole or conditional discharge, followed closely by those convicted of selling hallucinogens and narcotics (2,161), and by those convicted of possessing narcotics (806). It costs the Department of Correction $72.43 a day, or $26,436 a year, to accommodate an inmate. It was only a matter of time before the state’s number-crunchers figured out that they could save $1 million annually for every 38 prisoners they trimmed from the prison rolls.

Connecticut’s crowded prisons are part of the “collateral damage” of the state’s long and spectacularly unsuccessful war on drugs. This war has been largely a political war waged under the banner of moral vengeance. More cops and lockups have always sounded better to voters than more counselors and clinics. This strategy not only hasn’t worked, it is turning the Department of Correction into a money pit. One legislator observed pointedly, “We call it the Department of Correction, but for the most part it is not correcting behavior of people.”

 The state has had some success in the past in moving nonviolent drug offenders from prisons into treatment programs and probation, but these efforts traditionally have been funded far below the level of need. It is interesting to see in the current climate of fiscal desperation in Hartford that money trumps even moral vengeance. The cost-effectiveness of substance abuse treatment, halfway houses, and job training programs is getting a second look.

It would be nice if we lived in a society that could quickly find the best solutions to its social problems through an enlightened examination of causes and effects. But the truth is that we live in a society that chases dollars. Sometimes in that chase we have the good fortune to end up, eventually, in the right place.