House Budget Proposes Dangerous Cuts to Healthcare, Food, Youth Justice

The budget calls for major across the board cuts. As our fiscal sponsor, the Michigan League for Public Policy notes, it calls for $5 billion in cuts to health care, human services, food safety programs, environmental health and more. Incarcerated people are especially targeted for these cuts to health care, food services, and essential programs. Other cuts threaten constitutionally-mandated public defense, programs to support kids in the juvenile justice system, and the courts. 

Here’s a summary of some of the key proposals in the House budget: 

Prisons

• Reducing the reentry (aka “offender success”) budget by $7.8m from current levels, including
  • Cutting $1.25M from the Goodwill “Flip the Script” reentry program. 
  • Eliminate $2.5M in criminal justice reinvestment programs to fund “evidence-based programs designed to reduce recidivism among probationers, parolees, and prisoners.”
  • Maintain, but not increase, the $1.25M currently allocated to higher education in prison (the Governor and Senate budgets proposed $2M)
• Cutting $2.6M from prison food service
• Cutting $12.7M and 100 FTE from MDOC “Clinical complexes”
• Eliminating 775 authorized positions within the Department of Corrections
• Failing to include funding to reimburse healthcare providers who were not paid for services by an MDOC contractor, as noted by the Michigan Health & Hospital Association 

Juvenile Justice

• Eliminating $195K from the Committee on juvenile justice administration
• Maintaining the committee on juvenile justice grants at $300k
• Cutting the budget for Juvenile justice, administration and maintenance by $1M and cutting authorized staffing in half. 
• Eliminating At Risk Youth grants

Judiciary

• Cutting the State Supreme Court budget by 33% or $30M
• Reducing the Community dispute resolution by $0.5M
• Eliminating funding for jail reform advisory support, Justice For All Initiative, the Swift and Sure Sanctions Program, and the next generation Michigan court system
• Cutting the Michigan Indigent Defense Commission operations by $400k and the Michigan indigent defense commission grants to local communities by $50M, 19%

Analysis

Reductions in prison population should lead to reductions in prison spending, but spending cuts without decarceration are dangerous and irresponsible. 

Michigan Collaborative to End Mass Incarceration is committed to ending over-incarceration and reinvesting the money saved in the Black, Brown, and low-income communities hurt by the overgrown prison system. 

But we’ve also seen how premature cuts to prison spending can further harm incarcerated people and their families. Just look back to the Aramark moldy food scandal to see the risk of focusing only on prison costs. 

Today Michigan prisons are facing a serious overcrowding and understaffing situation. Everybody suffers when corrections officers are regularly forced to work double shifts and when there aren’t enough staff to support family visits and educational programming. 

MDOC currently has over 775 vacancies, so the proposed cuts would not further reduce current staffing levels. Instead the budget gives up on reaching full staffing. Any reductions in prison staffing should go hand-in-hand with reduction in prison population, otherwise all it creates are degraded conditions that endanger workers, incarcerated people, and public safety. 

Furthermore, proposed cuts to healthcare and food service can end up costing more over the long haul. When anyone, whether incarcerated or not, forgoes medical care because of high cost or low quality, their medical needs don’t go away. Instead, they face more expensive, long-term needs. Already, the low quality and insufficient quantity of prison food requires people to supplement their diet with food from commissary, but since not all incarcerated people have family support, some people have to turn to stealing or other illicit activities to get adequate food. Short changing on food and medical care creates unsafe dynamics in prison that undermine the rehabilitative goals of the Department of Corrections. 

As a recent report by the Ford School of Public Policy and American Friends Service Committee shows, there are safe ways to reduce the prison population by reviewing the sentences of people who have already served long prison terms and who are least likely to recidivate. This is the path to meet and exceed the cost and staffing reductions proposed in the House bills, but it requires either enabling legislation to allow for the review of significant numbers of people who have served long sentences or a vigorous commutation push by the Governor to use executive authority to address the overcrowding/understaffing problem. 

What happens next?

What we have now are three different state budget proposals: one introduced by the Governor, one passed by the Senate, and this one passed by the House. Now negotiations begin to try to reconcile these three budgets. Complicating the matter is that the Governor and Speaker Hall have both called for a roads plan to be part of the final budget. If the three branches of government don’t reach an agreement (or at least a short-term continuation budget) by Sept 30, the state government could shut down non-essential services. 
Over the next three weeks expect a lot of posturing from the different factions, and make sure your voice is heard by letting your senator, representative, and the Governor know that you want a budget that invests in public safety through prevention, rehabilitation, and reentry.