Wanna pay for a tax cut? Start here.

Philip Trostel pointed out the obvious a few days in the WSJ: Wisconsin's corrections spending is out of control.

According to Trostel:

Combined, Census Bureau and Justice Department data, reveal that in fiscal years 2000-04, the Wisconsin state government spent $48,773 annually per inmate (adjusted for inflation).

No one doubts that prisons are expensive to operate, but it is not clear why this needed to be 40 percent above the national average and 44 percent higher than the state's per capita income. If Wisconsin had spent the same as the national average, the state would have saved $301 million annually.

And conservative legisalators want to complain about waste, fraud, and abuse in the UW System? Maybe they should spend just half that energy trying to figure out what in the hell is going on over at the Department of Corrections. Our corrections budget has nearly quadrupled in the last 15 years.

Of course, part of the reason Republicans are unwilling to be tough on DOC is that they were largely responsible for corrections costs going through the roof in the '90s. The problem escalated quickly when King Tommy and his pals in the Legislature started seeing prisons as economic development tools for rural communities where no business in its right mind would ever locate. So we built in Boscobel and New Lisbon, and purchased a private facility in Stanley for far more than we ever should have paid for it.

How bad was the Stanley boondoggle? Check out the following summary from the Legislative Reference Bureau:

In August 1998, Dominion Venture Group, LLC, an Oklahoma company, began construction of a 1,500-bed medium-security prison at Stanley without express legal authorization from the State of Wisconsin. At the request of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Chvala, Attorney General James E. Doyle issued an opinion (OAG 2-99), dated May 28, 1999, stating that, while a private company could build a private prison, it could not operate the facility without statutory authorization that do so. According to the opinion, Dominion could not house either Wisconsin inmates or prisoners from out-of-state because state law as it then existed gave the private company no power to do so. Without any formal directive from the State of Wisconsin, the company indicated later in 1999 that the “goal of the project is to build a modern prison. . . that will be operated by the [state] to house Wisconsin inmates.”

In other words, there was only one potential buyer for a prison in Stanley: the State of Wisconsin. Our state government held all of the cards. And how did we leverage that power? That's right, in 2001, the State of Wisconsin purchased the facility for $79.9 million. Man, what a steal. A big shout-out to departing senator Dave Zien for leading the charge to hang that albatross around our neck.

Conservatives sometimes complain that K-12 schools are spending upwards of $10K a year to educate students. But strangely, I never hear them complaining about the fact that we spend nearly five times that to incarcerate prisoners. Perhaps they would be wise to start.

I've long held that any true conservative would not use incarceration as a first resort, but as a last resort for punishing crime. Locking someone up is expensive, and personally, I believe that "tough on crime" Republicans are too quick to use prison as a cheap method to get votes.

But Trostel isn't even arguing to lock fewer people up. He's only arguing that we investigate why our spending per prisoner is so much higher than other states.

$301 million in annual savings just by spending the national average. That's $602 million in a biennium.

Our 5% sales tax generates approximately $4 billion annually. So if we reduced corrections spending to the national average, we could also afford to reduce our sales tax rate to 4.7%, and that would still leave us with an additional $60 million each year kicking around. We could use that to pay down the state's debt, or to shore up MA.

Or here's another idea. Use the funds as an earmark to encourage the UW System to create additional seats at UW campuses for in-state students. After all, Wisconsin's graduating high school classes keep getting bigger and we aren't paying for any more slots at UW campuses to accommodate them. We also know that students with college degrees make more money, which increases tax revenue, are less likely to go to jail and consume other public services. At a cost of $11K annually per student, phasing in the $60M over four years and indexing it for inflation eventually buys you 1,360 more slots for each incoming class at UW schools. That's 1,360 students each year who are either opting to attend school out of state (think they come back?) or just not go to a four-year school at all.

Tax cuts. Paying down debt. Shoring up existing programs. Investing in the economic health of our state. Four things that any conservative should believe in more than paying for bloat at DOC.

Will Mike Huebsch and Scott Fitzgerald have the nerve to demand fiscal accountability at DOC where their predecessors have not? For the sake of Wisconsin, let's hope so.