Joint Budget Committee
The Joint Budget Committee spent its afternoon figure-setting the Department of Corrections and Division of Criminal Justice, where staff warned the prison budget can only be sustainably shrunk by closing prisons — and where the panel killed the department's request for 941 new prison beds, rejected a plan to cap the state's share of inmate phone costs, and tabled a costly correctional pay fix over pointed frustration that the same problem keeps returning year after year.
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Notable Quotes
“it's a security agency that does some rehabilitation, but it's not funded to do a lot of it or do it particularly, particularly well on a large scale.”
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Sign in to subscribeThe Joint Budget Committee will come to order. We are figure a setting on the Department of corrections today. Mr. Bracke. Thank you Madam Chair. Justice Brackey, Joint Budget Committee staff starting with the Department of Corrections. We'll take just a quick look at the table of contents on the first page where we got 24 decision items in this department to contend with today. And I'll try to be efficient as we go about that. Let's go ahead and turn now to page one, the summary of staff recommendations. This is the summary table for the department. There are a couple of long bill add ons or current year changes that I'm recommending on the unfunded para liability and food service. I've also kind of subdivided the different categories of funding for the budget year 2627 you're looking at recommendations totaling about 74.1 million for personnel related issues, 58.3 million for caseload and capacity issues. And then the net for all of the others comes out to minus 3.8 million general fund. And then there's some common policy costs as well for the operating at about 8.2 million. All told on page two of the document changes from the…
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