Steller: Pass the bucks - Inmates are hot commodities

It’s nothing new to think of inmates in terms of money.

Building and operating jails and prisons has always cost taxpayers.

But the idea that you can view inmates as a profit-making commodity is more recent thinking — an idea that’s been integral to the 20-plus year existence of private prisons in Arizona. More heads in prison beds means more money in pockets.

Lately it’s not just the private sector that views them this way. Two recent moves by Arizona counties, including a perplexing one by Pima County, make it clear that they, too, view inmates as either a financial boon or a burden to shift.

It’s a viewpoint that distracts from the fundamental facts of what state prisoners are: people we need to be protected from and people who need to be rehabilitated before they’re released.

On June 16, the Arizona Sheriffs Association sent a letter to the governor telling him that a request for proposals, or RFP, to house 1,000 more state inmates unfairly favors private prisons.

“This process has been tailored to benefit private prisons, as evidenced in numerous poison pills included in the RFP that would preclude any sensible Sheriff or Board of Supervisors from participating,” the association wrote in a letter approved by all 15 Arizona sheriffs.

Among the objections was that the RFP gave all enforcement authority to Department of Corrections personnel, rather than to the sheriff’s department staff, and that it put no limits on the burdens of health-care costs.

“Building and diverting precious millions to construct new prisons sends the wrong message and is wasteful when county jails have immediate availability,” said the letter, signed by Yuma County Sheriff Leon Wilmot, the president of the association, and Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, its vice president.

Babeu has been angling especially hard for the contract. Last year, Pinal County opted out of a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to put the federal agency’s detainees in the county jail. That has left beds open, and Babeu is looking for a way to fill them — now, at state expense instead of federal expense.

While Babeu is looking at prisoners as a source of income, Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry is looking at them as a financial burden to shed.

He wrote a memo July 6 saying he plans to “work with the presiding judges of the superior and justice courts” to sentence fewer defendants to jail and instead sentence them to state prison.

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He noted that on June 22, 246 of 1,814 inmates in the jail were serving sentences as opposed to being in jail awaiting trial. Their sentences will cost the county around $3 million, he said. Typically, any inmate serving a sentence in jail would be serving months, not years, but Huckelberry wants to minimize that practice.

“A county jail is a detention facility,” he told me. “It’s not a prison.”

The idea of the administrator telling judges how they ought to sentence inmates caught my attention. It also raised the eyebrows of recently retired Pima County Legal Defender Isabel Garcia, who originally pointed out Huckelberry’s memo to me.

“Sentencing people to probation, with jail as a condition of probation, serves the community safety and well-being much more than prison,” Garcia wrote me via email. Families can see their loved one and some can work during day and return at night. Both of these are critical for any rehabilitation or halting recidivism, allegedly important to the county now.”

It is a little curious, as Garcia noted, that Huckelberry would try to shift inmates to the state prison system at the same time the county is competing for a MacArthur grant intended to reform the county’s justice system by refining who really should go to jail.

The presiding judge of Pima County Superior Court, Kyle Bryson, told me he doesn’t view the memo as affecting judges’ sentences.

“I don’t think that he is going to try to influence judges’ sentencing decisions,” said Bryson, who was appointed presiding judge just last month. “I’m getting to know him pretty well. I’m sure he understands quite clearly that that’s not in the cards.”

Huckelberry himself acknowledged to me, “There may be cases, due to length of sentence and support systems, where jail is appropriate.”

But you can’t really view his memo as anything but an effort to treat the sentenced inmates at the jail as a cost — a cost he wants judges to shift onto the state.

It’s the flip-side of how Babeu and the private-prison interests see inmates.

Either way, viewing inmates as a commodity is a dangerous point of view that can blind us to the most important factor for our safety and their lives — the outcomes of their sentences.