Del. prison count rises, dashing hopes for long-term drop
Inmates increase 3.4% in 2001, after a decline in 2000
By JAMES MERRIWEATHER
Dover Bureau reporter
01/27/2002
Hopes for a long-term leveling out of Delaware's prison population are fading, prompting talk of another building program.
Prison officials had recorded a year-to-year decline in the number of inmates near the end of 2000, which Correction Commissioner Stanley W. Taylor Jr. said was the first since he became commissioner in 1995.
But at the start of this year, state prisons held 6,341 inmates, an increase of 3.4 percent from the count of a year earlier.
"The trend has been climbing," he said, "so the good news we thought was in store for us is not as good as we had hoped."
A gradual climb generally has been the pattern since July 1, fueled in part by aggressive policing policies in Wilmington that have produced more arrests for drugs and other crimes, Taylor said.
The prison system usually maintains a few extra beds on a daily basis, he said.
But there was little room at Wilmington's Gander Hill prison, where crowding and other alleged shortcomings inspired a lawsuit by 37 inmates in June 2000. Swelled by inmates awaiting trial in New Castle County, prisoner counts there continue to be a problem.
As of Saturday, the prison held 1,779
inmates, including 80 inmates housed in overflow space in the gymnasium and seven housed
in the booking-and-receiving area. The prison was designed for 872 inmates but has an operational capacity of 1,480.
Because Delaware's inmate population includes people waiting for trial, big rounds of arrests like Wilmington's recent crackdown can push up short-term prisoner counts, Taylor said.
"That will likely run its course at some point, and the numbers will start dropping back," he said.
If not, he said, he might have to call for a new building program by the end of this year.
A four-year, $186 million building program was completed in late 2000, increasing the prison system's operating capacity by 2,500 beds to a total of 6,585. During emergencies, correction officials say, the prison system can safely house as many as 7,200 inmates on a temporary basis.
Taylor sounded the alarm during a Nov. 8 appearance before Gov. Ruth Ann Minner's budget writers.
"If this rate of growth continues," he said at the time, "we will need to start planning new construction."
Consultants who prepared a 10-year master plan for the Department of Correction, issued in May 2000, said the building program nearing completion at the time was insufficient to meet even short-term needs.
Given no change in sentencing and incarceration policies, the consultants said, Delaware would need 2,978 more beds - not counting the existing 2,500-bed addition - by 2010. The new building program would cost an estimated $200 million.
A national prison population report for 2001 is not due out until next month, but preliminary figures indicate prison populations continue to be flat, said Allen J. Beck, chief of correction statistics for the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics in Washington, D.C.
"They're not going down much, but they're not increasing appreciably, either," Beck said.
For all of 2000, he said, the count of state prisoners was up slightly. But it dropped by 6,243 inmates - from 1,242,719 inmates to 1,236,476, or about half of 1 percent - over the last six months of that year, the first such decline in 28 years.
"The last six months [of 2000] were remarkable because we had numbers of inmates being released that obviously were greater than the numbers being admitted," Beck said.
Prison population figures from the bigger states usually are reliable indicators of what is happening nationally, he said. In New York, for instance, officials are sticking to projections for a 9 percent population decline during the two-year period that ends April 1.
"Our population is still on the decline," said Linda Foglia, a spokeswoman for the New York Department of Correctional Services.
Policies that allow selected nonviolent inmates to leave prison before their sentences expire have helped account for some of the drop, Foglia said.
Beck said declines in prison populations generally reflect drops in crime rates, as well as the eroding impact of 1990s policies that imposed longer prison terms and offered little alternative sentencing.
"Now we're looking for alternative sanctions - ways to divert offenders which are cost-effective yet attentive to public safety," he said.
In Delaware, critics have failed to persuade key legislators to scrap mandatory sentences blamed for contributing heavily to prison crowding.
But former Gov. Russell W. Peterson says legislative sponsors are being rounded up for a bill intended to do away with minimum mandatory sentences for drug offenses.
Peterson is honorary chairman of Stand Up for What's Right and Just, an organization he says is building quickly toward a goal of at least 10,000 members. The group is pressing for alternative sentencing, speedier trials and programs to attack the root causes of crime, including drug abuse and poverty.
A primary goal in the group's sentencing reform effort, he said, is repealing a law that poses a mandatory three-year sentence for possession of five grams or more of cocaine.
"I think we have a 50-50 chance of making it happen this year," Peterson said, "and a 100 percent chance of having it happen within two years."
Reach James Merriweather at 678-4273 or jmerriweather@delawareonline.com.
