Commentary—

The Correction Department’s

Dilemma Over Overcrowding

 By Chris Powell

One day Connecticut’s Correction Department is facing protests about its responding to prison overcrowding by transferring prisoners to Virginia. The next day the department is facing protests about its responding to prison overcrowding by converting the New Haven armory into a prison.

In the first issue, the relatives of prisoners don’t want them sent beyond visiting range to a state whose prison practices are suspected of being less humane than Connecticut’s. Almost 500 already have been transferred to Virginia and the Correction Department is seeking the General Assembly’s authority to send another 500 out of state. The prison guards union objects as well – not for reasons of humanity, of course, but because it doesn’t want to lose the business.

In the second case, New Haven residents and city officials don’t want in their back yard something with the negative connotations prisons have, and recently they persuaded the legislature’s Finance Committee to reject the necessary appropriation.

Actually, Connecticut’s prisons have been pretty good neighbors under the circumstances. Northern Connecticut, which hosts prisons in Enfield, Somers, and Suffield, has found them to be reliable and generous major employers as well. The prisons have not been without hazards, but in recent years those hazards have been not to the neighbors but to correctional officers, and even there the prisons’ occupational safety record has been improving.

But given that most people still won’t want a prison in their neighborhood, just what is the Correction Department supposed to do here? How is it to accommodate the growing prison population? It’s damned if it moves prisoners out of state even though money can be saved that way, and damned if it provides for keeping them at home by building or expanding prisons.

Since crime is created not just by criminal conduct itself but by criminal law – that is, a state gets only as much crime as it legislates – part of the solution may be less criminal law, particularly with the victimless crime responsible for putting in prison most of the people there: drug abuse.

Connecticut has been a leader among states in diverting nonviolent drug offenders from prison to probation and treatment. But many drug abusers who might take well to treatment still go without it because there isn’t enough, and the state still sends even some 17-year-olds to jail for selling drugs, even as police say illegal drugs are more prevalent and cheaper than ever. Recently it was reported that a dose of heroin now can be obtained in Hartford for less than a pack of cigarettes. By these standards Connecticut’s “war on drugs” has been lost even as it remains costly.

The legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco, kill and injure many more people than the illegal drugs do, an anomaly that legislators and criminal justice authorities always have declined to address. Until they do address it, Connecticut’s Correction Department will be locked in an impossible situation, condemned no matter how it tries to do its difficult and thankless job.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)