MACKINAC ISLAND – Gov. Jennifer Granholm will unveil a plan Friday to cut Department of Corrections spending and move that money to other budget priorities. She is seeking to generate business support for the plan at the Detroit Regional Chamber Mackinac Policy Conference by making the surcharge on the Michigan Business Tax one of the targets for those additional funds.

But Republicans raised concerns Thursday that Granholm was planning to release inmates as a path to cost savings.

Administration officials would not confirm details Thursday, but reports indicated the plan would include many of the changes, including sentencing reforms and release of some non-violent offenders, that had been parts of earlier reform proposals.

“We’re asking the business community to work on the issues that we can agree on,” said Granholm press secretary Liz Boyd.

Sen. Alan Cropsey (R-DeWitt), chair of the Senate Appropriations Judiciary and Corrections Subcommittee, argued Michigan’s problem is not the number of inmates, but the cost to keep them. “How come our costs are so much higher per prisoner than surrounding states?” he said during a press conference on the MBT.

“If she’s letting people out … we want to see the specifics,” Cropsey said.

Boyd said the plan would not, as Cropsey and others indicated, mean more crime in the community. “She’s not interested in sacrificing public safety to save a buck,” Boyd said.

Much of the plan, she said, was being worked out as part of a project with the Council of State Governments, which is working with the Legislature and the governor to recommend both short-term and long-term strategies to reduce prison costs.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop (R-Rochester) said any plan to move criminals out of prisons will not necessarily cut costs. “That pressure would then be pushed over to other areas of state government and local government,” he said.

“I we’re going to make reforms, we want to make real reforms,” he said at the GOP press conference, adding at a later event those “real reforms” would have to include a look at compensation for Corrections employees, the largest element of the department’s budget.

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