The Department of Corrections defended its fiscal year 2016 appropriation requests Tuesday during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Public Safety and the Judiciary budget hearing.
The department is requesting appropriations that would be nearly 18 percent more than what they were given for the current fiscal year.
Director of Communications Terri Watkins said the agency wants to eventually get back to levels of funding it saw six or seven years ago.
“Everybody has been critical of anybody going back to 2008, saying that that was just a really good year and there were a lot of agencies getting a lot of money, but if you’ll see we’re even below the 2007 figures and just slightly above 2006,” Watkins said.
The Department of Corrections requested $555,398,593 in appropriations for FY2016. In FY2015 they were given $470,900,943.
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