Head of Michigan prisons seeks to pare Corrections' mandate

Paul Egan/ Detroit News Lansing Bureau

Lansing — The head of Michigan's prison system said he wants to return the department to its "core mission" and offload responsibilities that others are better qualified to perform.

"Corrections has had a kind of mission creep over the years," Dan Heyns said in an interview with The Detroit News. "We're doing mental health stuff, we're educators and job trainers, you name it.

"We need to bring the Michigan Corrections Department back to its original mission, which is corrections."

Heyns, the former Jackson County sheriff who has been director of the Department of Corrections since June 1, said he wants to develop a long-term strategic plan to refocus the department and how it spends its nearly $2 billion appropriation. He didn't have a date for release of the plan.

Heyns and his spokesman Russ Marlan said he would like to explore the "hand off" of responsibilities in the following areas:

Treating the mentally ill.

Educating

Job training

Providing housing and transportation for parolees.

Officials estimate 25 percent of the department's 43,000 prisoners have some form of mental illness and about 10 percent are seriously mentally ill.

"I've got institutions that are just packed with people who are very, very seriously mentally ill," Heyns said. "These aren't stress cases. I can't exactly provide a therapeutic environment. We're struggling with that."

Though they are more costly to house, Heyns said he doesn't expect he can hand off the mentally ill prisoners he has now. But he said he wants to work with sheriffs, prosecutors and other local officials to try to ensure fewer mentally ill people come to prison to begin with.

He cites the example of a man who is bipolar and breaks into a vacant house to find a place to sleep.

"You can say there is clearly a felony there. But is that the right place for him? It gets him out of the patrol car and off the street. But get out the check book."

Instead, such a person could be evaluated by local mental health providers, he said.

Heyns said he understands such a change would not be simple, given factors such as the closure of mental health hospitals in the 1990s. Like him, local mental health officials are "under the gun to reduce costs," Heyns said.

Michael Vizena, executive director of the Michigan Association of Community Mental Health Boards, said all 46 boards in Michigan have programs to identify the seriously mentally ill and "work with the local judicial systems to develop treatment plans to divert these persons from incarceration if appropriate."

He said "resources are always a challenge," especially for those who do not have Medicaid, but his members would like to work with Heyns and others at the state level to make improvements.

Veda Sharp, executive director of the Detroit-Wayne County Community Mental Health Agency, said the county is one of a few that has a mental health court aimed at diverting the mentally ill from jail and prison and into community treatment. The county would expand this and other programs for the mentally ill if it had more funding, she said.

Mission includes education

As for education, Marlan said it is part of the department's "core mission," which includes providing offenders with the tools to become productive members of society. But he said the department, which employs more than 100 teachers and school principals, may not be the best agency to provide the service.

Heyns said when he was sheriff of Jackson County, he worked with the local community college to provide educational services and he might be able to use a similar model in his new job. Marlan said the department also is exploring the idea of using some of the thousands of volunteers who visit prisons — in many cases to read the Bible to prisoners — to perform non-religious teaching.

On job training, the department works with agencies such as Michigan Works!, but Heyns said he wants to focus more of the job training and preparation work inside the prisons, rather than after the offender is released.

Marlan said he repeatedly hears parolees still need help with resumes and other skills and often are not ready to work for a couple of weeks after their release. That needs to change, he said.

The department spends about $12 million a year on housing for paroled prisoners and also spends considerable amounts to arrange transportation for parolees, to get them to job interviews and other appointments, Marlan said.

Asked to do more with less

In the case of housing, the department often contracts with landlords but corrections officials are not experts on rental rules and market rates, Marlan said. It might make more sense to hand off that job to the state's affordable housing agency, the Michigan State Housing Development Authority, he said.

Similarly, in transportation, the department sometimes contracts with cab companies or hands out gas cards, Marlan said. Ideally, it would shift the responsibility "to folks who are experts in that and could do it probably most cost effectively."

Paul Sutton, a professor of criminal justice at San Diego State University, said "mission creep" is not unique to corrections in that all types of public agencies are being asked to do more with fewer resources.

"There is absolutely no reason in the world prisons should be saddled with treating mental health," Sutton said. "They just can't do it and it gets in the way of them doing what they should be doing."

Jeffrey Ian Ross, a criminologist at the University of Baltimore, said much of the work corrections officials do can be done "cheaper, though not necessarily better" by contracting it out.

pegan@detnews.com