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Gov. M. Jodi Rell cut $15.9 million from five state agencies that are part of the system last month, part of her effort to reduce the state's projected $150 million deficit for fiscal year 2009. State law allows her to cut up to five percent of department line items.
Five days later Rell, a Republican, signed a comprehensive reform bill that will pump nearly $10 million into the system. The money will go to hire more police, correction and parole officers, improve information sharing between departments and boost the monitoring of offenders living in the community.
Those reforms passed the legislature by large margins in April with Rell's support, but Democratic leaders and at least one Republican senator are concerned that her budget cuts will endanger progress.
"The governor has cut back all that money to ensure that nonviolent offenders could be accommodated in the community," said Rep. Michael Lawlor, a Democrat and co-chairman of the legislature's Judiciary Committee. "My sense is that kind of pulls the rug out from some of the bigger policy decisions that were made. ... Those cuts that the governor unilaterally made do jeopardize the whole thing and could lead to the early release of violent offenders."
With tougher sentences required for repeat convicts, the expansion of alternative incarceration programs was intended to free up beds in the state's prisons for violent criminals.
The state already supervises some sex and minor drug offenders and convicts with mental health needs outside of prison walls. Rell, however, slashed $4.3 million to expand those programs as part of her cost-cutting efforts.
Lawlor called that move ill-informed, and said it could prompt the state to release convicts early to ease overcrowding.
"The only reason we put the (alternative incarceration) money in there is so we would not have to build more prisons," he said.
But Rell spokesman Chris Cooper downplayed Lawlor's concerns. The cuts constitute no more than five percent of any program. Alternative incarceration will expand, but at a slightly slower rate, he said.
"With 95 percent funding, we would expect those to go forward," Cooper said Tuesday. "By the time they need more money, we'll be in the next fiscal year."
Rell also didn't cut any money from the Department of Correction, which runs the prison system. Staff reductions there by former Gov. John G. Rowland helped force the state to send nearly 500 inmates to Virginia at the start of this decade. Rell ended that practice in 2005.
The bulk of her cuts came in the Judiciary Department, but the $11.2 million reduction is only about two percent of its budget, Cooper said, an amount that should be absorbed through efficiencies, not program cuts.
Rell is committed to meeting the goals of the reform bill, Cooper said: keeping violent inmates in prison longer and improving their rehabilitation and monitoring once they return to the community.
The state's projected surplus for the 2008 fiscal year, which ended June 30, is now $22.3 million, money Rell wants to use for emergency home heating aid this winter.
Lawlor said that issue is important, but that the state shouldn't skimp on criminal reform dollars.
For Sen. Samuel F. Caligiuri, R-Waterbury, "criminal justice is the last place that we ought to take money from."
He would prefer that Rell delay plans to reinstate the Department on Aging next year and spend the money instead on the reforms.
"That has nothing to do with the merits of the aging issue," said Caligiuri, the ranking member on the legislature's Aging Committee. "The issue is more the idea of creating a new bureaucracy and the cost associated with (it)."
Both Caligiuri and another Republican, Rep. Alfred C. Adinolfi of Cheshire, said they would continue to press for a "three strikes" law next year if they are re-elected.
Both men have talked with Dr. William A. Petit Jr., who survived the home invasion, about his support for the measure, which would target repeat violent offenders.
"He's still looking for a three strikes law and tougher laws," said Adinolfi, who lives a few doors down from Petit's former address at 300 Sorghum Mill Drive and had lunch with him last week.
Democrats have said the improved persistent-offender law that passed this year will help prosecutors more than a three-strikes bill, and have called three-strikes legislation cumbersome.
But Democrats who represent Cheshire, including state Sen. Thomas P. Gaffey of Meriden, have supported the law in opposition to party leaders.
awittenberg@record-journal.com (203) 317-2231
