Bad Way to Spend Our Tax Money

IN HIS NOV. 26 letter, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections Secretary John Wetzel tries to use progressive language to mask Gov. Corbett's unjustifiable $685 million prison expansion project. Wetzel's two main points are disingenuous and misleading.

First, Wetzel cites a decline in the prison population since June to bolster Corbett's Justice Reinvestment efforts. This is a sleight of hand - using numbers that merely reflect a decline from the sharp increase that happened just before. Pennsylvania's prison population has gone down since June only because the population spiked significantly in the middle of the year. If Wetzel compared today's population to the amount one year ago, he would find that there are actually slightly more people in Pennsylvania's prisons today than there were in October 2011, up from 51,323 to 51,382.

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