WIS News 10 - Columbia, South Carolina | State agencies dealing with more budget cuts

State agencies dealing with more budget cuts

By Jody Barr - email

COLUMBIA, SC (WIS) - Just one day after state agencies learned they're losing four percent of their funding, we're starting to see how those budget cuts will affect the people of South Carolina.

Friday the budget and control board voted to cut funding to all state agencies by four percent. South Carolina lost $100 million in revenues in the last fiscal year. The cuts save the state more than $200 million.

Some of those cuts could impact public safety and the way juvenile offenders are rehabilitated.

"They come into our system and they become climatized to being a convict, then we're going to have them the rest of their life," said Department of Juvenile Justice Director Bill Byars. "We're often times the last shot."

Byars just lost $4 million in state funding in Thursday's budget cuts. DJJ handles 23,000 juvenile cases each year from arrest through release.

"If they're put on probation, we've got them," said Byars. "If they decide to commit them, we've got them, if they turn around and eventually parole them, we have them. We're just in their life."
    
That costs taxpayers millions each year. Byars says his agency turned away from locking juveniles away in cells and turned to assigning officers to supervise them even after they leave the department. Byars says because of that, the state's juvenile crime rate fell 20 percent in the last six years.
     
The agency even funded community programs and summer camps, but just can't afford it.

"You bring them all together in an urban, rundown, understaffed, violent prison, you put them all in there together and when they go back home, they can spread that cancer everywhere," said Byars.
    
That's why Byars hopes he can sustain his agency's successes.

"I am afraid that it can go the other way, there's no doubt that it can go the other way, it was the other way," continued Byars. "As those other things fall apart, or go away, then yes, there's a very good likelihood that juvenile crime will go back up."

Byars said he can suffer the $4 million loss without any layoffs. Agency directors have until September 18 to present their budget requests to the governor.

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