Tough Choices on Prison Population (The Insider)
By Scott Mooneyham
September 4, 2009
RALEIGH — After all that get-tough-on-crime talk, it was a rather interesting turn of events.
North Carolina legislators narrowly approved a new law that promises to shave as much as two years off the prison terms of some violent felons.
Meanwhile, most lawmakers wouldn’t touch a bill designed to reform a habitual felons law that can send nonviolent, repeat offenders to prison for terms as long as a that of a rapist.
But for state prosecutors, the habitual felon law in North Carolina seems to be some kind of Holy Grail. Now that they’ve found it, no one wants it tarnished.
The state, though, has a little problem. The prison population is growing, and there doesn’t seem to be much political will to build new prisons.
That’s what happens when you have a prison population that rises at the same time crime rates drop, as they have for almost two decades.
Back in the early 1990s, crime rates had spike. North Carolinians and state lawmakers decided to get tough by building new prisons and creating a new sentencing law that sent violent felons to prison for longer terms.
The state’s Structured Sentencing Act also restored public confidence in the prison sentences handed out, requiring that those convicted serve all or most of their sentence.
In fact, a report released a couple of years ago indicated that felons sent to North Carolina prisons were serving, on average, 109 percent of their sentence.
Another get-tough-on-crime measure, the habitual felon law, required that anyone convicted for a fourth time of a fourth felony — even if each crime involved nothing but breaking into a car — be sentenced as if he or she were an armed robber or rapist.
State Rep. Phil Haire, a Jackson County Democrat, introduced legislation to change the law, dropping from consideration any violations of the two lowest levels of felonies. Most of his colleagues didn’t want anything to do with it.
Instead, they passed a bill changing the state’s sentencing grid, potentially cutting the sentence of some violent felons while increasing the terms of their supervised probation.
It’s good to be tough on crime, politically and otherwise. And the state’s Structured Sentencing Law, by about any measure, has been a success story. It’s help keep the worst criminals off the street.
Being dumb on crime is another matter.
Legislators obviously felt like they had to do something to slow down the growth in the state’s prison population to avoid the kind of lawsuit faced by California, where a federal appeals court has ordered the release of 57,000 prisoners because of overcrowding.
The prison population here has grown by 95 percent since 1992, rising from 21,000 to 41,000 during a period when the overall population has risen by about 40 percent.
It’s an unsustainable trend.
Making modest reforms to a law that causes nonviolent felons to spend 15 years or more in prison is better choice than carving off a couple of years for violent felons.
