Florida prisons took in more inmates in June than in any month in the past decade, which creates a problem for which Gov. Jeb Bush has a ready solution. While the Legislature is in session this week to deal with the medical malpractice crisis, he wants lawmakers to hand the prisons a quick $60-million to meet the new demand.
The request seems reasonable. After all, the state prison population is now projected to reach 81,266 by the end of the year, and new inmates mean new costs for housing and supervision. But the governor can't possibly expect Floridians to ignore the contrast with his approach to another population explosion: university enrollment.
Over the past two years, universities have been asked to accept 22,000 more students without a single new dollar from the state. Yet when university presidents said they could no longer afford to enroll new students, the governor was quick to reject their solutions. They don't need more money, he said, and they ought not be allowed to cap future enrollment either. "I hope the flexibility that they have and the reserves that they have will allow them to get through this year," he advised. His education commissioner, Jim Horne, went so far as to accuse the presidents of "playing God" by trying to match enrollment with budgetary capacity.
When Bush confronts the crunch of 2,695 new inmates, he finds no similar "flexibility" and "reserves." He seeks no new alternative programs that might divert some of the inmates admitted for nonviolent drug offenses. Rather, he argues: "We undercounted the number of prisoners we anticipated. In order to make sure we don't release prisoners early or do anything foolish, we need to . . . accelerate our efforts to build more capacity."
In portraying the only two options as more money or inmates in the streets, the governor is embellishing to make his point. And his rhetorical excess wouldn't be so jarring if he showed a similar sense of urgency for young people who are not in trouble with the law. Louis de la Parte, a respected Senate budget chairman in the 1970s, used to display a poster in his office picturing a young man in a jail cell and advising that "it costs more to send a boy to prison than to college." In this case, the governor is asking for $60-million to house new inmates while the universities are denied $66-million to accommodate eight times as many new students.
The prisons get the money. The universities get a scolding.
