The report, completed by the Vera Institute of Justice and profiled by Stateline.org this morning, shows that spending on New Mexico’s prisons was up by less than 1 percent from last year to this year. While technically true — the Legislature increased by $1 million the amount of state money for corrections this past session — the report doesn’t present the larger picture. And that’s that dollars earmarked for incarcerating offenders in New Mexico has dropped over the past two state budget cycles.

Here’s why: In a special legislative session last year New Mexico state lawmakers cut the corrections’ budget by $11.4 million in the middle of the fiscal 2010 budget year. That means the corrections’ department ended the year with a much smaller budget than it started with. That’s why the Vera Institute of Justice found a slight increase when comparing this year’s corrections spending in New Mexico to last year’s. In effect, the $1 million added by New Mexico state lawmakers amounted to a small increase, but only when one leaves out last year’s mid-year cut of more than $11 million.

Last year 16 states raised their cigarette taxes, and another four are looking at upping the levy on cigarettes so far this year, reports Stateline.org.

States average a $1.34 cigarette tax per pack, according to the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids.

If New Mexico’s tax rises to $1.61 per pack as called for in the legislation, the state would have 18th highest cigarette tax in the nation among states, provided that no other state raises it rate beyond that level, according a fact sheet provided by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

As for New Mexico’s neighbors, they’re taxing cigarettes at vastly different rates. Arizona currently taxes cigarettes at $2 a pack, while Texas’ levy is $1.41. Colorado, meanwhile, taxes cigarettes at 84 cents while Utah charges 69.5 cents, according to the chart.

The cigarette tax and other “sin taxes” are “a popular method of raising revenue for states, usually because they affect a smaller segment of the population than sales, income or business taxes,” Stateline notes.

The news service goes on to list those states that raised tobacco taxes last year: Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vermont and Wisconsin, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers.

Last week the New Mexico Legislature failed to craft a budget for next year because of disagreements between legislative leaders. But the Legislature did approve what Democratic legislative leaders called an “essential bill” to shore up this year’s budget.

That bill would sweep $130 million in state money from more than 1,500 stalled brick-and-mortar projects around the state to beef up the state’s reserves.

The clawed-back money will provide a much-needed cushion for New Mexico if the state must draw down on  nearly depleted reserves to make it to June 30 financially intact.

As with many other states, the bad economy is battering New Mexico’s tax revenues. The New Mexico Legislature’s budget arm, the Legislative Finance Committee, has projected that state revenues are coming in below expectations, a notion contested by Richardson’s budget team.

But both sides agreed that New Mexico needs the extra money in the reserves in case the state has to turn to its reserves to get through this fiscal year, which ends June 30.

Meanwhile, lawmakers will return to Santa Fe on Wednesday to take a second stab at crafting a budget proposal for next year, which could be a bigger financial challenge than this year.

The sheer size of the challenge confronting New Mexico lawmakers is the bad news. The good news is that New Mexico is not alone. A recent survey shows that the fiscal year that begins in July will be “the most difficult to date,” according to a survey of 45 states released at the winter meeting of the National Governors Association, Stateline.org reports.

I included an item yesterday predicting that University of California Regents would raise student fees by 32 percent. Well, they did. And the New York Times followed that news with a profile of the diminishing state of campuses around the University of California system, including its crown jewel, Berkeley. Anyone who knows Berkeley’s history, and the prominent roles it has played over the years in math and sciences as well as cultural studies,  will find it a much-chastened institution.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry refused Thursday to stop the execution of a man convicted of murder for his role in the 1996 shooting death of a Houston convenience store clerk despite a rare recommendation to commute a death sentence, the Austin American-Statesman reports.

From the media world, the Journal Inquirer of Manchester, Conn., has sued The Hartford Courant, the state’s largest paper, charging that it plagiarized The Journal Inquirer’s work in articles published last summer, a time when The Courant was also, in a subsequent admission, lifting material from several other northern Connecticut newspapers, reports the New York Times. Can I just say: Whoa!!!!

According to FishbowlNY, the Associated Press finally divulges how many staffers it laid off this week — 90. That includes our own talented, smart and extraordinarily experienced Deborah Baker, who covered the Capitol in Santa Fe for close to 20 years. Frankly, I’m still in shock, which is why I haven’t written anything up to this point. Nothing I write will do justice to the injustice of this crappy situation. So let me just say that I’ll miss Deborah for her wonderful way with words; her wry, irreverent sense of humor; her institutional knowledge; her toughness; her compelling stories about West Virginia — where she lived once upon a time; her unflappability; and her wonderful singing voice. Deborah, other reporters and I will miss your expertise and reporting and writing skills. But, more than that, we’ll miss you.

We’re only days away from a special session of the New Mexico Legislature. And Priority 1 is the yawning budgetary shortfall that seems to be growing by the week. A few weeks back, the shortfall between the state’s revenues and its expenses was estimated at $433 million. Now some state lawmakers who’ve participated in preliminary budget negotiations with Gov. Bill Richardson’s negotiating team are throwing around the number $700 million as the gap between revenues and expenses for the year that ends July 1. The special legislative session is not going to be pretty, nor is it going to be fun. Let’s just hope it doesn’t turn into a bloodbath. New Hampshire could serve as today’s cautionary tale. State workers there are bracing for layoffs after they rejected a new contract agreement that would have cut $25 million, according to the Concord Monitor. The agreement was cobbled together by union negotiators and Gov. John Lynch.

Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s major fight appears not to be of the budgetary kind. He’s fighting accusations that he is most secretive governor to lead Texas in years. The latest ammunition fueling that accusation is Perry’s refusal to release documents he reviewed in the hours before the Cameron Todd Willingham execution. The Dallas Morning News writes that his refusal is the latest example of Perry’s willingness to fight over records kept by his office. Perry has faced increasing pressure in recent weeks to turn over the records he reviewed in the Willingham case. Perry refused in 2004 to stop Willingham’s execution for the deaths of his children. They died in a house fire that a local fire inspector said was a case of arson perpetuated by Willingham. But an arson expert who had reviewed the case warned prior to Willingham’s execution that the investigation of the fire was flawed, casting doubt on his guilt.

On to the tech beat: a few years back, Internet traffic was distributed among tens of thousands of networks. “Now, instead of traffic being distributed among tens of thousands of networks, only 150 networks control some 50% of all online traffic,” a post in ReadWriteWeb today explains. RWW quotes from a study just completed by Arbor Networks, which has just completed a two-year study of 256 exabytes of Internet traffic data, the largest study of global traffic since the start of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990′s. Google, in fact, accounts for 6 percent of all traffic, according to the study.

Here’s an excerpt from the RWW post:

According to Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor Networks, this shift represents the Internet’s move into a second phase where it’s no longer “all about contacting websites.” Rather, “over the past two years larger organizations have been buying up the smaller websites and by July 2009, 30 per cent of the internet was owned by a few large sites.” The acquisitions, the result of billions of dollars spent by large companies snapping up smaller ones, has created a new Internet core of “hyper giants,” a coin termed by the report.

The world is shifting beneath our feet, people.

Today in politics, apparently the White House has declared war on Fox News. I missed that development, but New York Magazine has an essay on maybe why that’s not the best idea.

Meanwhile, newspapers, like state governments, are in a world of hurt. Finances are tight enough at the New York Times that the news organization is looking everywhere to save money. Case in point: the memo that went out Monday informing staffers on the paper’s metro desk — reporters, editors, photographers, etc., who cover the city, nearby suburbs and New Jersey — that the paper would no longer pay for subscriptions to competing news publications. Journalists often keep up with the competition by reading the competition. For example, if a Times reporter wants to keep up with what’s going on in Newark, New Jersey’s biggest city and constant font of great news stories, he or she likely would subscribe to to the Newark Star-Ledger. Except now, the subscription will come out of the reporter’s pocket, not the paper’s.

Speaking of the Star-Ledger, that paper, esteemed for its day-to-day, hard-nosed coverage of corruption, among other things, is about to suffer through another round of buyouts. And if that doesn’t net the cost savings the company hopes for, there likely will be a round of layoffs. The paper already suffered through 150 buyouts last year.

Finally, here’s a post with no reference to politics or hard-time economics. Enjoy it, take pleasure in it. It’s an essay by Dennis Overbye, the wonderful New York Times science writer who tackles all manner of oddities and marvels in the worlds of physics and cosmology. Today he writes humorously about a theory posited by two scientists that they say might explain the rough going the Hadron Collider has had of late. It’s a startling theory, one that you might expect to read in science fiction/fantasy novel. But these scientists are for real, meaning they’re not quacks. They’re respected in their fields. To put the theory in perspective, Overbye  invokes the craziness that scientific theories sometimes traffic in by quoting Niels Bohr, one of the gods of 20th century science.

Here’s an excerpt:

As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague:“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

That made me laugh out loud, given the interesting history of quantum mechanics.

I knew the state wasn’t alone in cutting what it spends on state prisons, but here comes proof of that: a new survey paid for by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Twenty three states trimmed spending on what they spend to house prisoners for the budget year that began in July, according to the survey which was conducted by the New York-based research organization, the Vera Institute of Justice.

Only 33 states responded to the survey, but it says something that 23 of those states trimmed spending in this area.

New Mexico had trimmed its corrections expenditures by 4 percent, the survey says.

Other states, like Georgia, Idaho, Kansas and Nebraska, cut much more per capita than New Mexico did.

It just proves that cutting prison costs is a national trend, as this Stateline.org story explains.