Oregon Might be Spending $13 Million More on Prisoners Than Predicted Next Budget

Ever since the state announced much-touted prison reforms passed last year wouldn’t be as potent as originally predicted, we’ve been trying to figure out what that means in dollars and cents.

Oregon’s plan is this: Ease up on certain crimes (low-level robberies, driving with a suspended license, certain identity thefts and drug offenses), thereby reducing prison use. All that money saved on housing inmates is then supposed to be funneled out to the counties, who can use it figuring out ways to cut crime, which further reduces prison use, which leads to more savings, and so on.

It could be beautiful, if it works, but there have already been hiccups. The state’s criminal justice commission said earlier this month some of the sentencing reforms aren’t actually reducing prison use, and some aren’t working as well as they predicted. That makes it unlikely Oregon will save the $66 million predicted in the 2015-2017 biennium.

How much are we going to save? Tough to say. The criminal justice commission initially said it would provide an estimate, then backed off, deferring to the governor’s budget staffers. No one we’ve reached out to has offered exact dollar figures. But the state’s own numbers suggests Oregon counties may take a 20 percent hit to the money they were expecting.

According to a breakdown provided to us by the state’s Office of Economic Analysis, Oregon prisons were initially supposed to house 19,555 fewer prisoners from July 2015 to June 2017 as a direct result of lighter sentences. The latest forecasts suggest those more-lenient punishments will still save us, but not as much as hoped. The Oregon Department of Corrections is now expected to house 15,780 fewer prisoners in that same time period, a 19.3 percent drop.

That potentially means there’s around $13 million less than predicted to feed into Oregon’s cash-strapped local justice systems in the near future (and since Multnomah County can count on about one-fifth of available money, it could mean around $2.5 million less for sometimes-controversial local programs).

As we’ve reported, though, local officials are hoping it doesn’t turn out like that. Despite the revised forecasts, the state’s most-populous counties have asked Governor John Kitzhaber to go ahead and dole out the full $66 million in order to assure his dreams of prison reform have a fighting chance.

Kitzhaber’s in the middle of a suddenly competitive fight just to keep his job at the moment (vote, by the way), but we’ll know in December how much the governor is willing to reinvest into Oregon’s great prison reform experiment.