Recent Legislatures in Texas have diverted some funding from state lockups to community-based supervision and diversions. Reallocating funding in this way continues to better protect the public safety and reduce crime, as a recent report details.

During debates on taxes and spending, rural lawmakers begged to keep job-rich prisons operating.

The deal, crammed into an obscure Senate budget bill shortly before 11 p.m. Tuesday, adds another $13.5 million to the state's $10 billion, two-year budget, including $2 million each for the Corrections, Public Health and Human Services, and Commerce departments.

State officials have a deep bag of tricks to "solve" budget gaps but they often keep budgets far from being balanced. This consistent habit of kicking the can down the road has put states in their current fiscal catastrophe. Below are some of the gimmicks on which lawmakers rely, and examples of how states have used them.

Decades of providing free access to court public records would end under Gov. Jerry Brown's proposed state budget.

House lawmakers approved a $22.7 billion spending plan on Wednesday that attempts to balance the rising costs of health care with the needs of state agencies still reeling from Great Recession budget cuts.

Since 2005, the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as Cal Fire, has paid the nonprofit California District Attorneys Association to house a special fund for training seminars and high-tech investigatory equipment. The fund collected $3.6 million overall and is being dissolved this month at the nonprofit's request.

State workers and educators will receive a 1 percent pay raise next year under a nearly $5.9 billion budget proposal that's heading to the House for consideration later this week.

STATE UPDATES: Florida, Louisiana, & Maine

Was the slow recovery of the U.S. economy from the trough of the Great Recession anticipated? 

Recent Legislatures in Texas have diverted some funding from state lockups to community-based supervision and diversions. Reallocating funding in this way continues to better protect the public safety and reduce crime, as a recent report details.

Was the slow recovery of the U.S. economy from the trough of the Great Recession anticipated? 

After decades of experience managing offenders and analyzing data, practitioners and researchers have identified key factors that can help predict the likelihood of an individual returning to crime, violence or drug use. When developed and used correctly, these risk/needs assessment tools can help criminal justice officials appropriately classify offenders and target interventions to reduce recidivism, improve public safety and cut costs.

Most states are facing budget crises as they plan FY 2013 and beyond. With fewer dollars available, state criminal justice agencies are challenged to increase public safety while coping with smaller budgets. This report distills lessons from 14 states that passed research-driven sentencing and corrections reform in 2011 and is based on interviews with stakeholders and experts, and the experience of technical assistance staff at the Vera Institute of Justice. It is intended to serve as a guide to policy makers and others interested in pursuing evidence-based justice reform in their jurisdiction.

Researchers found that the total taxpayer cost of prisons in the 40 states that participated in this study was 13.9 percent higher than the cost reflected in those states' combined corrections budgets. The total price to taxpayers was $39 billion, $5.4 billion more than the $33.6 billion reflected in corrections budgets alone.

The sixth-annual Tennessee Pork Report is chock-full yet again, of waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement of taxpayer money by state and local government officials. Despite a changing political landscape in Tennessee, wasteful government spending has not disappeared.

Prisons are supremely important, but they are also a supremely expensive government program, and thus prison systems must be held to the highest standards of accountability.

State policy makers across the country are putting research into action by passing legislation that requires their courts and corrections agencies to use evidence-based practices. over the past few years, a number of states have passed comprehensive corrections reform packages that require the use of risk/needs assessment and are projected to save taxpayers millions of dollars.

Georgia should continue to push the reforms that have made this one of the best managed states in the nation, but innovation is the best opportunity for true reform. Tax, regulatory and tort reform will create the right conditions for innovation in the private sector while the state pursues innovation in the areas of criminal justice, education and heath care.

despite constraints that are both political and self-imposed, we believe that it is quite possible to reduce unnecessary and wasteful spending throughout the New Mexico budget. In order to provide a guide for policymakers, the Rio Grande Foundation has compiled a list of specific budget reduction ideas.

The overcrowding of prisons and the breakdown of the parole and probation system has become a serious problem in America. Criminals released early from prison-in order to relieve overcrowding-are often poorly supervised and free to commit new crimes once they are back on the streets.

In corrections, there is a strong public interest in producing the greatest reduction in crime-particularly the most serious crimes-for every dollar spent. Conversely, the criminal justice system should cost-ef ectively maximize positive outcomes such as victim restitution, victim satisfaction, and the employment of of enders as productive citizens.

With limited corrections resources, how can Texas best protect public safety and reform offenders with every dollar spent? One answer lies in the more ef ective use of risk assessment for the more than half a million adults on probation or parole in Texas.

There are many solutions consistent with the principles of limited government, fiscal responsibility, and public safety that have proven successful in empirical research and in practice on a limited basis, iincluding geriatric parole, expanding problem-solving courts, and creating clear criteria so that existing community-based residential corrections beds are used for diverting appropriate offenders from prison rather than as an add-on for offenders who can be safely supervised on basic probation. Also, spreading the use of evidence-based practices, such as graduated sanctions in probation, can increase compliance and thereby reduce probation revocations. This paper includes a list of such recommendations to further improve corrections in Nebraska, address the state’s estimated $968 million budget shortfall, and ensure that public safety is not compromised.

To address prison overcrowding, lawmakers should consider a new  program called "Conditional Post-Conviction Release Bonding." This ALEC concept would allow for the early release of legislatively defined participants from prison-primarily non-violent and juvenile offenders-but require that they post a bond. The bond would be revoked if they did not meet all the requirements of the program.