Governor@pa.gov November 23, 2013 Dear Governor Corbett: I am concerned about some of our funding priorities in Pennsylvania. In 2010, the state of Pennsylvania spent 2.1 billion on prisons. This is an average of over $42,000 per prisoner per year on a population of over 48,500 inmates. In your current 1013 -2014 budget, the Correction Department got a 75 million dollar increase. At the same time funding per student for education is lower than in 2011 and is a small fraction of what we spend on prisons. Many districts are seriously underfunded and local funding is impacted by the income levels of the local districts. This results in lower income communities that have a larger percentage of children with special needs having more and more students in a classroom and fewer resources to support them. In their document “Responsibility, Rehabilitation, and Restoration: A Catholic Perspective on Crime and Criminal Justice” the USA Catholic Bishops speak of the need for non prison alternatives. They state that “Current approaches to crime, victims, and violence often fall short of the values of our faith. We should resist policies that simply call for more prisons, harsher sentences, and increased reliance on the death penalty. Rather, we should promote policies that put more resources into restoration, education, and substance-abuse treatment programs. We must advocate on behalf of those most vulnerable to crime (the young and the elderly), ensure community safety, and attack the leading contributors to crime, which include the breakdown of family life, poverty, the proliferation of handguns, drug and alcohol addiction, and the pervasive culture of violence. We should also encourage programs of restorative justice that focus on community healing and personal accountability.” We support this direction and encourage you to initiate policies in the state that will reduce the prison population and free up resources for education, health care, food programs and other priorities. Further we ask that you consider these options as you prepare your next budget. If the inmate population were over time to be halved by expanding non prison alternatives for non violent offenders, as much as $1.05 billion could be available. Thank you for your attention to this. Sincerely,