The "law and order" movement gave advocates of cracking down on criminals, major and minor, satisfaction that justice was being done. Sentences grew longer and judges had less leeway in punishing those convicted. Doing time, by golly, meant people would learn their lessons. That was the mantra of many a get-tough politician in both political parties.
Satisfaction, however, came at a tremendous cost. The tab for keeping someone in prison in North Carolina varies depending upon who's doing the figuring, but it's somewhere around $30,000 a year.
Providing that law and order also meant building a lot more prisons, a decidedly mixed blessing. The prisons provided jobs in communities that needed them. Yet repeat offenders crowded those prisons, people who presumably didn't learn their lessons. Maintaining the prisons, just keeping the lights on, saddled the state with long-term expense.
Hard time was hard on the state's purse, and criminals in prison for serious crimes, people who clearly deserved to be there, were in a revolving door pattern. Others, non-violent offenders, took up space and saw their own hopes of rehabilitation diminish with the stigma of a long prison sentence.
A different approach
Now, a bipartisan group working in an effort called the Justice Reinvestment project has some promising ideas that it says could save the state hundreds of millions of dollars and cut the need for more prison beds in the future.
The ideas include allowing judges to put those who violate their probation orders in jail for a few days, which might get their attention and set them straight rather than having them return for a longer stay in prison.
And those who are convicted of any felony would have nine months of supervision after their release, something that doesn't now apply to those serving time for low-level felonies. That oversight might keep some from immediately falling back into bad behavior.
Another idea the group is putting forward would let those convicted of misdemeanors who are sentenced to more than 90 days serve their time in county jails instead of state prison.
And, prisoners convicted of drug offenses would have more help with treatment options to try to prevent them from sliding into the habits that put them behind bars in the first place. Absent treatment, and it has been inconsistent, those inmates cycle in and out in an almost never-ending pattern.
Tough stuff, too
The recommendations from the group aren't just about rehabilitation. Someone could fall under the category of habitual felon, at risk for a harsher sentence, if convicted twice of breaking and entering, instead of the four convictions that now are part of state law, and those who break the rules while behind bars would get more prison time.
Over time, the budget-busting need for a virtually endless supply of new prisons has taught the state about the consequences of law-and-order rhetoric. It costs more, and it doesn't seem to have created some kind of welcome sea change in crime rates or the tendency of criminals to repeat their offenses.
Change is needed, at the very least to see if more of a focus on supervising people outside of prison and offering non-violent offenders a better chance of putting their lives back together will work better than what's being done now. Otherwise, a prison is little more that a warehouse of wasted lives.
Make no mistake: Those who commit serious crimes need to be confined, and some of them need to be confined for a very long time.
Those who do physical harm to others and remain a threat to law-abiding citizens need to go to jail. The debate within, and outside of, the criminal justice system about how to deliver punishment and how to prevent one-time criminals from becoming two-timers or three-timers is not about whether everybody should be locked up or let go.
It is, rather, about public safety and yes, about plugging the drain on public resources that the current system has encouraged.
