Call them halfway houses, community confinement centers or transitional housing. For decades states around the country have used the concept to reduce prison populations and save taxpayer dollars.

They are virtually everywhere … but Rhode Island.

While lawmakers grapple with a potential multimillion-dollar budget deficit and Governor Carcieri talks of somehow reducing the prison census by 500 to save $4 million, just next door Connecticut has contracts with 50 halfway houses, has freed up 1,200 prison beds and has saved millions.

Halfway houses are a “critical” component to Connecticut’s correctional philosophy, says its correction commissioner, Theresa C. Lantz.

“It’s a cost savings,” she says. “It frees up the beds inside so you are concentrating your limited resources where needed. And to me, it’s important because the offender is going back to the community with some transition that allows [the convict] to be law abiding and productive.”

Earlier this month a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts said Connecticut, a state which once had one of the fastest-growing prison populations, is now one of only three states projected to buck the national trend of growing inmate populations through this decade.

So why isn’t Rhode Island using a tool that’s been hanging in the correctional shed for decades?

Three main reasons, says Corrections Director A.T. Wall:

• Leaders of the union representing correctional officers have successfully sabotaged every effort.

• The General Assembly has failed to tweak existing laws to ensure that halfway houses have a big enough pool of eligible candidates.

• And a systemic abhorrence to any correctional program not run on the Howard Complex in Cranston, home to the Adult Correctional Institutions.

“Trust me,” says Wall. “We’ve tried.”

Halfway houses have been repeatedly studied and repeatedly recommended for use in Rhode Island for almost 25 years.

In 1984, a task force appointed by Gov. J. Joseph Garrahy recommended, among other suggestions, instituting halfway houses before prison overcrowding “becomes critical.”

Even then the concept wasn’t a new one; Rhode Island had actually used two halfway houses in the late 1970s, which were then federally financed. But once the grant money dried up, the halfway houses closed.

Five years later, in 1989, prison overcrowding indeed reached critical.

Inmates and the American Civil Liberties Union had sued over unconstitutional prison conditions and a federal judge, furious with recalcitrant public officials, fined the state $164,250 and ordered the money used to start bailing inmates out of the crowded ACI.

“They’ve been on notice for years,” Senior U.S. District Judge Raymond J. Pettine said the day he fined Gov. Edward DiPrete and his administration. “Time and time again I’ve said the situation is explosive, you better start doing something and they’ve never done it.”

Asked later that day why he hadn’t moved to open halfway houses or start a bail fund sooner as advised, DiPrete said he simply didn’t want to. They were “the last alternatives.”

Former Senate Majority Leader Jack Revens further explained the thinking at the time: “the problem is you have had a judge saying reduce the [prison] population and the public saying put them in jail.”

Ultimately Rhode Island decided to fight prison crowding using another method, a means that all sides agreed would be necessary no matter how many halfway houses it might have wanted to open: build new prisons.

Through out the 1990s the state spent millions of dollars renovating and expanding existing facilities at the ACI and building a new medium-security prison. The plan worked and for a time concerns about overcrowding faded. But state and corrections officials knew it would only be a matter of a few years before they could be facing the problem again.

With the luxury of time now in his favor, Wall in 2000 resurrected the idea of halfway houses, advocating that not only were they cheaper than housing an inmate nearing release in the ACI, but through proper job and life-skills counseling also improved the chances that the convict would remain lawful and not return, saving more money.

(In Connecticut, for example, convicts who transition through a halfway house are half as likely to re-offend than convicts who don’t, says Commissioner Lantz.)

Knowing the reluctance the idea had garnered before, Wall moved cautiously.

This time around the concept was called “transitional housing.” The pilot program would involve a house for about 15 women convicted of nonviolent crimes who were within six months of release.

In one of the few victories for supporters of alternative sanctions to prison, the General Assembly approved the concept and, in 2001, a home for female offenders nearing release opened in Exeter.

In an olive branch offering to the correctional officers union, Wall said he held open a couple of the positions at the women’s center for correctional officers, hoping the union would “warm to the idea” of community corrections and see the positions as possible promotions to shoot for.

Soon thereafter Wall also proposed four “community confinement centers” for men. Each would house 73 nonviolent criminals nearing release. They would receive drug counseling, help in finding jobs and homes, and the program would represent significant savings to taxpayers when compared with the annual cost (now more than $39,000 a year) of keeping them at the ACI.

The proposal also required General Assembly approval and a change in a law expanding the pool of eligible inmates to those within a year of release. The existing law limited eligibility in such programs to those within six months of release.

Within days of Wall’s announcement, the president of the Rhode Island Brotherhood of Correctional Officers assailed the idea.

“Without proper security and supervision, the safety of our family, friends and neighbors could be put at risk,” declared Richard Ferruccio. “We caution the General Assembly … to withhold their support for this proposal.”

Says Wall: “The leadership of the brotherhood mounted a strong opposition campaign complete with [highway] billboards and an advertising campaign.”

The proposal died, says Wall, when the General Assembly refused to amend the law that would expand the eligibility of potential participants to those within one year of release.

In 2005, the union took issue with the women’s transitional center, after Wall made several changes to the program.

Forced out of its Exeter house by high rent, Wall says, the program, run by a nonprofit agency, set up shop in a wing of the women’s prison at the ACI. As part of their training toward returning to society, the participants were encouraged to open bank accounts and to shop at local stores, under supervision. The program also made allowances, for a time, to allow the women to have visits with their children at the Warwick Mall rather than force the children to come into the prison, where they could come in contact with other inmates.

The brotherhood took the matter of supervision at the transitional center to a labor arbitrator, arguing that its contract entitled brotherhood members to perform all supervisory functions at any correctional facility. The union won its arbitration.

The decision “drove up the cost significantly because of the pay scale of the brotherhood staff,” says Wall. “Consequently the program was no longer viable at that point and we closed it.”

Ferruccio says Wall didn’t close the women’s transitional center because of costs. He closed it, Ferruccio says, because of media revelations that the women were having “unauthorized” visits at the Warwick Mall — unbeknownst to mall security or Warwick police.

“The program was flawed and had a number of security lapses,” Ferruccio says.

Says Wall: Having to fill positions at the transitional housing center with union members drove the cost up an additional $100,000, a cost the department couldn’t afford so it closed the program last March — two months after a television report about the visitations at the mall.

Ferruccio says the brotherhood doesn’t oppose community confinement programs because of fear of losing union jobs — “It’s about safety and security.”

“If you think the brotherhood supports taking inmates and selling them off to the low bidder and putting them into a community, no, we’re not going to support that” — even if the majority of other states do, he said.

“We’ve already seen the track record of a failed program here,” he said, referring again to the women’s transitional unit.

Since the arbitration decision, Rhode Island has not attempted to implement halfway houses.

Meanwhile Connecticut is opening up as many new ones as money allows.

Since Lantz took office in March 2003, the number of halfway-house beds in Connecticut has almost doubled, from 673 to 1,200.

“We didn’t have an issue with the union contract,” she says. “The law requires that all halfway houses are run by nonprofits. The unions themselves cannot fight it. They can’t say this is against the law.”

The ACI is experiencing another surge in population with the census hovering around 3,768. It reached an all-time daily high last July 30 of 3,811. Some contributing factors for the increase, prison officials say, is that judges are assigning less home-confinement and holding more domestic-violence offenders without bail. The spike, prison officials say, prompted them to ask for another $12.7 million in this year’s budget, on top of the enacted $162 million, which they say was based on an average inmate population of 3,370.

Carcieri spokesman Jeff Neal says the governor hasn’t yet decided how he will reduce the ACI inmate population by 500.

He is discussing “various options,” Neal said.

tmooney@projo.com