HARD TIME: QUIET COMMISSION SEEKS SMART PRISON REFORM.

Overall, the crime rate is falling, but North Carolina will need 8,500 more
prison beds by the end of the decade, and the cost will be around $200
million. Per year. And that's for a prison that would be operating at
capacity from day one.

What does this tell us?

It tells us, for one thing, that structured sentencing has succeeded - if
you define "success" as sending more people to prison for longer terms, and
don't mind the sticker price.

Structured sentencing surely needs revisiting, but repealing it wouldn't
set everything right because a big part of this crowding problem is that
convicts do their time, go home to their old haunts and their old ways, and
end up back in prison.

The central fact is that, crime rates notwithstanding, people are going
into prison faster than people are coming out; hence, a prison system so
packed that it will be at risk of a federal takeover unless the state acts
to relieve crowding.

Fortunately, there's more than one way to provide that kind of relief, and
most of the right people have signed on to the idea.

Leaders of all three branches of government and both major political
parties have agreed to involve the state in Justice Reinvestment, whose
researchers would burrow through a mountain of data, find the points at
which the criminal justice system is log-jammed, weak, inefficient or
working at cross-purposes, and make fact-based recommendations to the
legislature.

Two points deserve special emphasis.

First, no one can guarantee that this will eliminate the need for that new
prison. But if North Carolina can keep prison-building every couple of
decades from becoming a way of life, that will be well worth the effort.

Second, Justice Reinvestment is not disembodied theory. It works. It has
worked - in Texas, for instance, where the data pointed to a need for
expanded drug courts and treatment programs for substance abusers, and
limits on probation officers' case loads. At least for now, Texas has
evaded a capital outlay of half a billion dollars.

All parties to the project have agreed to tone down the ugly soft-on-crime
invective that so often sabotages serious efforts to find practical
solutions. In that, we wish them the best of luck. The most important
thing, though, is to get this research going, because every tick of the
clock takes us closer to a day of reckoning. In that sense, those of us
whose tax dollars run the prison system are "doing time," too.