SENTENCING CHANGES 'DIRELY NEEDED' BUT TOO COSTLY

Many Pushing Reforms To Reduce Overcrowding Tout Long-Term Savings

MONTGOMERY - It's no mystery what Alabama could do to improve its
criminal justice system, nor the reason the state can't do so now.

The keys - more supervision, sentencing law changes, more community
corrections options, transition and treatment centers for
drug-addicted inmates - all require one thing Alabama doesn't have:
money.

Alabama's current sentencing structure, as well as its most
"one-size-fits-all" punishment options - probation or prison - are
largely blamed for the state's chronic prison overcrowding.

The state is releasing thousands of prisoners, mostly drug and
property offenders, through an expanded Board of Pardons and Paroles.
The board's December docket, which is the first month a newly created
second, three-member panel is meeting, includes more than 1,200 names.

The Times reviewed 90 percent of the records for the eligible
parolees, examining their charges, sentences and several other
factors. More than 950 of the 1,138 eligible for parole are defendants
who committed nonviolent offenses, as classified by the board and
Legislature.

Under the current system, people convicted of multiple felonies are
usually sentenced to time in Alabama's prison system. While prison
drug treatment programs are available, most have long waiting lists.

Those who want sentencing and other reforms - groups that include Gov.
Bob Riley, Pardons and Paroles, attorneys, judges and others - say
having a variety of sentencing options besides prison is crucial to
helping reduce the state's inmate population and preventing current
parolees from continuing their criminal careers.

One of the more promising options is the creation of transition
centers, which would primarily serve people with substance abuse
convictions. Drug offenses, and the various property crimes committed
to feed addictions, account for the majority of inmates who are
eligible for parole under the expanded parole docket.

Pardons and Paroles plans to open several such centers around the
state, using mainly institutions the state Mental Health Department
closed this year in a cost-cutting move. The largest likely would be
located at the closed campus of the Lurleen B. Wallace Developmental
Center in Decatur, but it also would be the most expensive to operate.

Pardons and Paroles received a $2 million conditional appropriation in
the 2003-04 budget - money that has to be released by the governor but
probably won't be because of the state's overwhelming financial problems.

"It's direly needed," said Cynthia Dillard, assistant executive
director of the Board of Pardons and Paroles. "I don't see the money
being available.

"It would be a money savings in the long run," she
said.

Riley said in an interview Friday that his office would continue to
work with groups to try to provide more treatment options for
offenders once the inmate population has been lowered.

Riley said the state should have more options such as halfway houses
and treatment centers, "especially for the juveniles who are being
incarcerated into a prison system when, literally, what we should be
doing is putting them into a treatment facility so that we can alter
that recidivism rate."

The Alabama Sentencing Commission, a body of lawyers, judges,
prosecutors and others from the criminal justice field, will meet next
month to decide which laws it thinks the Legislature should enact to
help prisons and sentencing laws.

Lynda Flynt, the commission's executive director, said several changes
could help. Among the options: Raise the amount of marijuana that
makes its possession a felony, and re-examine the state's habitual
offender law, which mandates a defendant get increasingly stiffer
minimum sentences with each new felony committed.

Building more prisons won't help, she said. "From other states'
experience," she said, "they fill them up."

Michael Blain, a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Justice Policy
Institute, recently presented legislators with a plan to reduce the
number of inmates at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka,
one of the prisons under court order to reduce overcrowding.

He said many of the women have been sentenced for having "dirty urine"
tests, often while on parole for marijuana charges.

Blain said those women should be placed in treatment programs, but the
state doesn't spend enough money on such programs.

The effort has to be pervasive - "treatment on the inside, treatment
on the outside" - Blain said. "You can't just drop a person off and
expect them to be OK."

Rosa Davis, the state's chief assistant attorney general and a member
of the Sentencing Commission, said for the criminal justice system to
be effective, more tiers than just prison are needed. She called for
varying levels of supervision, transition centers and "a prison that
looks, walks and talks like a prison."

Davis said although many Alabama prisoners probably could benefit from
treatment options, some simply need to be in prison.

"There's some really bad people in the world," Davis said. Still, "I
don't think there's enough of those people in Alabama to have the
incarceration rate we have."

At the end of October, the state had 27,643 prisoners in a system
designed for 12,378.

One statute getting serious attention is Alabama's habitual offender
law. Passed in the late 1970s and amended in 2000, the law provides
escalating penalties for felony convictions.

Part of the problem, Flynt said, is that the law doesn't take into
consideration the severity of the previous convictions. That leaves
the system clogged with petty thieves and low-level drug offenders,
who account for 44 percent of the state's entire prison population,
according to a Sentencing Commission report released last spring.

The commission is studying how other states handle habitual offenders,
in some states called "three strikes" laws.

Davis said Alabamians need to consider whether some thieves and drug
offenders could be punished or rehabilitated in other ways besides
going to prison for long terms. Locking up petty thieves will ensure
they don't break the law again back home, she said, but "how much is
that worth to society?"

Davis said she doesn't know the answer to many of these questions, but
she's been reading the same headlines about Alabama's prisons for decades.

"It's not just Alabama," she said. "Every state is dealing with these
same issues."