Beverley Lumpkin: Halls of Justice
W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 9 -- After years of watching steadily increasing Justice Department budgets, it was quite a surprise to see one that was essentially flat (factoring in the post 9/11 supplement, there was actually a drop from the last fiscal year).
But the real shock was to see funds transferred from Justice to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for domestic preparedness. In Washington, the bureaucratic imperative demands more resources, more troops, more funds, to prove one's mission is essential. (This is why Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge is having such trouble; it echoes various drug czars' frustrations — with no money or troops you're powerless.)
Losing $234.5 million to another agency ain't beanball and some are wondering how and why Attorney General John Ashcroft let that happen. One Capitol Hill staffer was "pretty amazed," noting, "There's a whole new set of issues and they've taken Justice out of it."
A former top Justice official was also surprised to see the Bureau of Prisons' budget for FY03. He noted that for the last several years, with prison population projections going through the roof, Justice had been adding essentially a new penitentiary each year. Now all they're doing is activating or expanding.
"Something's radically changed here," he said.
He asserted that federal prisons had been 50 percent over capacity and there had been plans to cut that overcrowding by half over five years. Especially with the increased prosecutions of gun and drug crimes that Ashcroft has been promising, the population is unlikely to decline.
Budget officials, through public affairs, responded they are "aware that BOP facilities are overcrowded, operating at 31 percent over capacity system-wide. Medium- and high-security facilities are even higher, including 58 percent overcrowding at medium security facilities … The president's FY 2003 budget request has balanced the funding of this challenge with that of his other top priorities, such as counterterrorism."
It was also somewhat surprising that the budget — at least to my non-green-eyeshaded eyes — does not appear to reflect Ashcroft's grand new vision of Justice, first announced during his "restructuring" speech last November, when he said 10 percent of total resources would be shifted from headquarters to the field to fight terrorism.
It may simply be that by then the budget process was too far along to be able to reflect these changes, but it does seem a bit counterintuitive, given the daily mantra we've been fed post-9/11 of Justice's changed mission to placing counterterrorism above all else. At this writing no one has been able to explain this to me.
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