No Easy Answers

Prison Commissioner Louis Giorla tackles the overcrowding question.

by Tom Namako

Overcrowding in the city's prison system isn't just unimaginable to inmates and correctional officers. Prisons Commissioner Louis Giorla also can't fathom how conditions got the way they are — though not necessarily for the same reasons.

"No matter how horrifying it is, the inmates are coming back," he said in an interview last week. "Maybe the streets are more horrifying than jail. Maybe we ought to lock the door and not let them in. I have an old lieutenant here who used to ask, 'How far do you have to chase the police wagon before they let you in?' What I'm saying is, [inmates] need to be held accountable to not get locked up again."

Giorla's frustration is profound. Since he can't turn away inmates, he has to find a way to house whomever the police and courts send him. As a result, prison costs are rising drastically, by an average of about $9 million a year for the past 10 years, according to a 2007 report by the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority (PICA), a budget watchdog. And the city has to pay them.

Past administrations have failed to address this problem because of a massive hurdle: The prison population increases about 4 percent each year, so the city is always playing catch-up. The judicial branch has tried to pick up the executive's slack by pushing for the closure of the decrepit Holmesburg prison in 1995 and assuming oversight of some prison functions in 1970. But that oversight ended in 2000, and the inmate population has continued to increase. In April, civil rights attorney David Rudovsky filed a lawsuit against the city over prison conditions, and is seeking to make every inmate part of a class-action lawsuit. (The plaintiffs aren't seeking money, just change.)

This intractable problem has now been dropped onto the Nutter administration's doorstep. PICA has already criticized the mayor's first budget for not directly addressing prison costs, though some progressive ideas have been discussed — like opening a mental health court and expanding drug court — and others enacted, like creating a Mayor's Office for Re-Entry of Ex-Offenders.

It remains to be seen whether two of the most promising ideas — electronic monitoring and improved social services to prevent recidivism — will take hold.

Before moving on the latter, Giorla is waiting on a report by Dr. Marjorie Dugan, a consultant, about prison services, such as drug and alcohol rehab, which are often overbooked.

Though the study is still under review, Giorla shared some of Dugan's findings. "The delivery of services needs to be more immediate," he said. "When [an inmate] gets here, they should start services when they hit the door. Traditionally, they start when approaching release ... that has not seemed to work over the past several years."

This observation is not new, however. Before leaving office, former Prisons Commissioner Leon King issued a report in November 2007 that read, "Due to resource limitations, not all inmates are able to sufficiently participate in treatment programs as much as their individual needs dictate."

Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Everett Gillison has also been touting the city's "virtual prison" plan, which would have nonviolent inmates wear GPS monitors that limit where they can travel. (If an inmate goes out-of-bounds, the monitoring guard can tell him so through the device's speakers. Loudly.) Gillison wants 200 anklets to be used on nonviolent offenders by the fall, at a price about 90 percent cheaper than housing an inmate at a city jail.

But not everyone in the justice system is necessarily on board: Asked for comment by the Daily News, District Attorney Lynne Abraham merely said the idea needed "a lot of discussion." And Seymour Collier, a former captain in the prison system, quietly laughs it off. "We used to get monitors back in the mail," he says. "They'd be cut off. Someone once called from Detroit, Mich., and told us they had one out there. 'Throw it in the mailbox,' we said. That may work for people who care [about obeying the terms of their release], but not for someone who's not involved, who's not working and isn't going to work."