I thought the below news editorial was a great read. Public defenders protect some of the most vital fundamental rights enshrined in our Constitution. We need adequate funding.
Here is the editorial copy pasted below. Or click on this link. ——————————————
Buried in an angry and important letter from the head of the Missouri Office of Public Defender to Gov. Jay Nixon is a recipe for fixing the state’s budget.
On Monday, Michael Barrett, who is a former deputy counsel to Mr. Nixon, wrote a scathing three-page letter to his former boss, asking him to come up with $10 million to help solve the problems identified by the Department of Justice in its recent report about civil rights violations in the St. Louis Family Court.
The DOJ found that young defendants in the county’s juvenile justice system, particularly black defendants, received inadequate representation because there is only one public defender for the entire system. Also, inherent conflicts of interest are baked into the court’s operation; the juvenile officers who should be representing the rights of the children work for the judge deciding the defendants’ cases. Sometimes the same employees also act in a prosecutorial role.
The result is children are not receiving a fair shot. Their civil rights are being violated and they are more likely to end up in jail than receive the services that might help them avoid future troubles with the law.
That Missouri’s public defender system is in crisis has been well-known by Mr. Nixon and the Missouri Legislature for years. As Mr. Barrett points out in his letter, two separate national reports paint a bleak picture of enormously high caseloads and absurdly low pay. Missouri ranks near the bottom among all states in meeting its constitutional obligation to provide adequate counsel to poor people charged with crimes.
“Missouri’s contempt for the rights of poor persons is further evident by its rank of 49 among 50 states in the amount of support provided for indigent defense. Existing caseloads coupled with abysmally low salaries for assistant public defenders create a turnover rate that exacerbates the resource issue,” Mr. Barrett wrote. “Given the unwillingness to provide an adequate defense for poor people, it is not surprising to me that taxpayers have had to, in turn, carry the enormous financial burden of an artificially inflated prison population that continues to rise despite the opposing national trend.”
Therein lies the problem.
Missouri’s politicians — including the Republicans who run the Legislature and Mr. Nixon, a Democrat and former attorney general — are addicted to putting more and more people in jail. Being “tough on crime” is more important to them than being smart on crime.
The result is that the state’s corrections budget is eating a bigger and bigger piece of the pie while important services required by the constitution — such as funding schools and, yes, public defenders — fall behind.
One comparison tells the story. In 1997, the state’s corrections budget was less than $300 million a year, which was about 5 percent of the budget. Higher education funding at the time was 12 percent of the state budget. By the first year of Mr. Nixon’s second term, in 2013, the higher education budget in Missouri was down to 9.7 percent of the budget, while corrections had climbed to 7.5 percent. As Mr. Barrett points out, in Mr. Nixon’s tenure as governor, the corrections budget has climbed by $55 million.
Inmate populations also continue to climb. In 1990, Missouri had about 14,000 inmates. Now that number is about 32,000, with 2012’s weak legislative attempt to cut the prison population being virtually worthless. People are churned in and out and back in to the system.
This is one of Missouri’s fundamental budget problems. It defies a changing philosophy among conservatives nationally who have recognized the economic sense in reducing prison populations among nonviolent offenders. In many red states, money that used to be spent on prisons is spent instead on early childhood education or higher education. In the long run, that keeps people from going to prison.
Until Missouri starts making a dent in its school-to-prison pipeline and investing its savings into young people — particularly those living in concentrated poverty — then the state’s budget priorities will be upside down. It will rank low on the things that matter — like schools, health care, public defender funding and economic growth. It will rank high in such dubious categories as prison population and school suspensions for poor black kids.
Mr. Barrett’s letter should be a must read for lawmakers — and the governor’s office — because it outlines much of what is broken in this state.
“Candidly, your administration’s lack of effort to address the problem coupled with the steps that you have personally taken to maintain the status quo leaves the impression that you are not so much uninformed as you are unconcerned,” Mr. Barrett wrote. “This disregard is emphasized by your administration’s recent efforts to improve the State Fairgrounds at a cost of $4 million, build the 88th state park at $52 million, to say nothing of a new football stadium estimated to cost in excess of $860 million. These luxuries, while appealing to some, cannot compare to the state’s obligation to ensure that every Missourian, regardless of means, enjoys equal protection under the law.”
Mr. Nixon is fond of saying that budgets are about priorities. These are the ones he and his Republican friends in the Legislature have chosen:
Stadiums over people. Prisons over schools. Tax breaks for the rich instead of health care for the poor.
Until those priorities change, Missouri will be broken.