Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 28, 1995 TAG: 9510300077
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURA LAFAY LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The numbers could mean that as many as four prisons now proposed by the Allen administration would not be needed, and that the administration has overestimated the cost of housing inmates by hundreds of millions of dollars.
The report, compiled by an interagency group of state forecasting experts, predicts that by 1998, there will be about 4,000 fewer inmates than Allen officials projected in reports last year. Those reports were circulated as part of the Allen administration's pitch for a $408.6 million prison-building bond package during the last legislative session.
The Democratic-controlled legislature rejected the bond package and passed a $180 million compromise bill instead. The move, in which 13 GOP legislators also participated, prompted administration officials to accuse the legislators of sacrificing the safety of Virginians for political gain.
Now, with the Nov. 7 election looming, GOP candidates are using the compromise bill to denounce their opponents with fliers proclaiming that the bill ``could result in 8,700 violent criminals being put back on the street.''
But Democratic incumbents are using the new report as evidence that the administration inflated the numbers last year, and that their decision to reject the governor's plan was wise.
House Majority Leader Richard Cranwell, D-Roanoke County, who brought up the report in a debate this week with Republican challenger Trixie Averill, is especially critical.
``Look, there's a whole pattern here,'' he said this week. ``When [the Allen administration] did Disney, we couldn't get the numbers. When they said parole abolition would cost about $1 billion, we looked at it and we came up with $2 million. They are notorious in massaging numbers to make them what they want to make them.''
Cranwell's allegations outraged Deputy Secretary of Public Safety Carl R. Baker, who heads a policy committee that is supposed to review and amend the report before handing it over to Allen's secretary of public safety, Jerry Kilgore. Because his committee has not yet reviewed it, Baker said, the report is preliminary and incomplete.
``I find it unacceptable for anyone to send out the technical report and say that's the forecast. There is no forecast,'' he said. ``The policy committee has to look at factors that cannot be reviewed empirically.''
Such factors, Baker said, include new sentencing guidelines, the impact of parole abolition and the recent arrival in Virginia of a ``new Mexican brown heroin.''
But staff members for the House Appropriations Committee, which oversees the forecasting process, say the technical committee that produced the report took most of those factors into consideration, including a drug epidemic.
The sentencing guidelines, said staff member Ron Jordan, were not considered, because they are voluntary and there is no way to know the extent to which judges are complying with them. So Baker's policy committee will have only anecdotal information to consider.
Last year, said Jordan, there was no policy committee. Employees of Criminal Justice Services, working under Kilgore, used a strict technical method to come up with their forecast.
The Forecast of State Responsible Offenders, as it is called, is distributed to General Assembly members every year on Nov. 1. In anticipation of the special session on parole abolition, last year's forecast was released early. In contrast, Baker said, this year's forecast will be late. A final meeting of the policy committee, originally scheduled for Sept. 20, was postponed to Oct. 24 and then postponed again. A new date has not been set.
Cranwell charges that the meetings have been intentionally postponed so the new, lower numbers will not be made public before the Nov. 7 elections.
``It would appear to me that they're sitting on these numbers so that their campaign rhetoric is not exposed as the distortion and misrepresentation that it is,'' he said Thursday.
But Baker insists that Cranwell, not the Allen administration, is injecting politics into the forecasting process.
``I don't care if the numbers are lower or higher,'' he said.
``All I want to do is make sure that they're accurate. What difference does it make right now if [the forecast] comes out before the election? The important thing is that it comes out accurately so we can build the correct number of prisons.''
by CNB