The Legislature's Joint Judiciary Committee will be pushing for an interim study to find out why the prison population is growing while the crime rate has declined overall.
The study entails bringing in national corrections experts, a move some lawmakers and district judges resist, said Sen. John Schiffer, R-Kaycee, who is leading the support for an outside look.
"Not everybody is in favor of someone from the outside telling us what to do," Schiffer said. But the judiciary committee, he said, will set the policy for the state.
The Department of Corrections has been and will be gathering data for the study. That information was not available several years ago, when Schiffer first looked at the prison population issue. During the interim, the Department of Corrections can absorb growth in the prison population without building any new prison beds, said Director Bob Lampert.
That will be only for the short term and will require the state to invest more in alternatives, such as placements in the adult community correction centers at Casper, Gillette and Cheyenne, and more use of boot camp for young offenders, he said.
It also is possible to use split sentencing so that offenders can bypass prison entirely and serve their sentences in local jails and be released from there on parole.
The Corrections Department earlier requested $11.5 million in the new budget for the 2005-2016 fiscal year to expand the medium security prison for men at Torrington to add 144 beds. Lampert later asked the governor to disapprove the request in favor of the study.
In December, Wyoming had the lowest rate in the nation of inmates who are returned to prison. Of the 24 percent of repeaters, most return to prison for violation of conditions of their release rather than for a new crime.
The only reason prison numbers grow is that more people are coming in the front door than are are leaving out the back door, Lampert said in an interview last week. The cause is that either longer sentences are being imposed or fewer people are being paroled.
