About every second person entering New Hampshire's state prisons has already served time, a troubling fact for policymakers trying to help people lead productive post-prison lives and control ballooning corrections costs.

If nothing changes, the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy projects that by 2018, the average daily prison population will be 23 percent higher than today's pool of 2,615 inmates, and the system will need to add at least 600 beds.

That's not acceptable, state officials say, particularly on the heels of the 14 percent spike seen in the population at state prisons since 2000, when there were 2,291 inmates. Corrections spending rose by 76 percent — from $59.2 million to $104 million — in that time.

On Monday, Lynch, legislative leaders, Supreme Court Justice John Broderick, Attorney General Michael Delaney and Corrections Commissioner William Wrenn announced a partnership, which will see the Pew Center and U.S. Department of Justice provide between $300,000 and $700,000 for the council to carry out research and make policy recommendations.

"To make New Hampshire safer and to reduce correction costs," Lynch said in a statement, "we need to do more to ensure that released offenders become productive and contributing members of our state, and not commit new crimes."

Currently faced with a daunting deficit, Gov. John Lynch and the Legislature agreed last session to a budget that cut spending for the Department of Corrections, accomplished largely by closing the Lakes Regional Correctional Facility in Laconia and reinvesting some of the savings into the creation of a statewide Division of Community Corrections.

The division will help with inmates' re-entry into society and make staff available to ensure re-entry plans are followed, Assistant Corrections Commissioner William G. McGonagle said. Re-entry planning encompasses where inmates plan to live, what they'll do for work, who they can depend on among family and friends for support, medical needs and substance abuse treatment.

"In some cases we're trying to build in our own capacity for substance abuse or substance use disorders right at the district office level rather than depend on a provider network, which makes a lot of locations very stressed," he said.

The state's recidivism rate is 44 percent, and state officials say they hope their new partnership, with the Council of State Governments Justice Center and the Public Safety Performance Project of the Pew Center on the States, will give them the information needed to ensure inmates don't return. The recidivism rate accounts for parole violators and convicts who reoffend within three years of their release.

Of the 44 percent who are re-entering the state system, about half end come back within eight months, McGonagle said.

The Council of State Governments Justice Center has launched similar undertakings in nine other states. The efforts have combined to avert hundreds of millions of dollars in corrections spending, according to Lynch's office.

New Hampshire has created a Justice Reinvestment Leadership Team, composed of department heads, legislative leaders and top court system officials, to guide the work of the center, which also will work with county attorneys, public defenders, police and others.

Adam Gelb, director of Pew's Public Safety Performance Project, said a proposed package of reforms should be available by early next year.

McGonagle said the nonprofit Council of State Governments Justice Center will examine the composition of the state's inmates, who are housed at the state prison for men in Concord, the women's facility in Goffstown, the Northern New Hampshire Correctional Facility in Berlin and three halfway houses.

"They'll look at population trends as well as prison trends, and they'll look at what are the circumstances and what are the factors that may have led to either a violation of probation or a violation of parole," he said. "I don't believe they have the capacity to look too deeply at the county jail system, but it may have to be a subsequent focus."

McGonagle said he didn't want to prejudge the project's findings, but explained his agency is already aware of some of what's needed: better re-entry planning for inmates upon release.

Dennis Delay, deputy director at the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy, said sentencing policies are contributing to the increase in prison population, a point made in a March report by the center.

The report said there was a 560 percent spike in the state prison population between 1982 and 2007 despite the state's resident population, number of people living in poverty and the number of violent crimes not increasing as fast as the number of inmates.

"These policies include more severe penalties for violent and non-violent criminal offenses, longer sentences for offenders, and increasingly harsh penalties for recidivism," according to the report. "In addition, there is no consistent, statewide use of alternative sentencing or release support programs, and state operated mental health treatment infrastructure has been reduced."

Chief Justice Broderick said in a statement that the "status quo is not the solution."

According to Pew, one in 88 adults in New Hampshire is under correctional control, up from the 1 in 184 from 1982, accounting for 6.8 percent of general fund spending in fiscal year 2008. It costs the state about $90 a day to house a prisoner, while it costs just $2.04 for someone to be on probation or parole, according to Corrections.

Lawmakers said the new initiative couldn't come at a better time. House Speaker Terie Norelli, D-Portsmouth, said the "costs of recidivism create too much stress on our budget and drain resources from other vital programs."

Senate President Sylvia Larsen, D-Concord, said she's interested in learning the composition of the prison population, "including the numbers of men and women who have mental health and substance abuse needs who may be better served and monitored outside the criminal justice system."