If legislators cut tens of millions of dollars out of public-safety spending, they’d better do so intelligently.
On the corrections side of the public-safety budget, that means spending what state money will remain after the $2.4 billion budget shortfall is closed on the most dangerous criminals while punishing others more creatively.
The Justice Reinvestment project, a bipartisan, national endeavor already conducted in 12 other states, has just issued its recommendations for North Carolina. We can save millions of dollars and make our streets safer, the researchers determined.
North Carolina’s growing population also has a growing prison population, and we’re running out of space to put the people who get sentenced to both long and short terms. In just a few years, we could be right back where we were before a massive prison-building program began in the mid-1980s. That is, with a prison population bumped up against federal limits.
The project’s ideas, if implemented, would eliminate the need to fill 7,300 beds by 2017, saving $365 million between now and then, $72 million of that alone in fiscal 2013, the second year of the biennium for which legislators are now preparing a budget.
In some cases, the project is calling for tougher responses to criminals. If a probationer misses an appointment or tests positive for drugs, he’d get an immediate short stay in jail, as a warning. But some offenders would get alternative sentences or options to stay out of prison. North Carolina is far too harsh in its sentencing of drug offenders, a counterproductive way to spend scarce tax dollars. It makes much more sense, and costs less, to treat a drug offender for a few months than to lock him up for several years.
There are good ideas in the new report, and the good news is that there is support for the ideas on both sides of the political aisle.
North Carolinians don’t want to spend their scarce revenues on convicts when they could be saving schools. Gov. Bev Perdue and the legislative leadership have indicated a willingness to work together on these ideas.
Some of our prison sentences are too harsh, others too lax and some of our sentencing and imprisonment policies are either out-of-date or counterproductive. Let’s hope that the two political sides learn from this report and get to work making our streets safer and our prisons less expensive.
By Journal Editorial Staff
Published: March 01, 2011
