MAKING PRISON SPACE

Legislators Shouldn't Fear Using System They Wisely Set Up

Former N.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Burley Mitchell got folks'
attention the other day when he suggested decriminalizing illegal
drug use because the war on drugs had been a "total failure" that has
filled costly prisons and increased demand for more cells.

Mr. Mitchell, a former Wake County district attorney before he became
an appellate judge, said the state could save large sums of money if
police didn't have to catch drug dealers and if taxpayers didn't have
to pay for new prisons and room and board while they're locked up.
Decriminalization would also mean freeing up considerable space in
the state's prisons -- including cells now occupied by robbers and
killers who commit their crimes while involved in the drug trade.
Most North Carolinians, we'd wager, are not in a mood to do away with
penalties for the illegal drug trade. But Mr. Mitchell's remarks,
informed by a long career of dealing with drug offenders and their
costly impact on society, ought to prompt state policymakers to
ponder whether filling prisons with inmates sentenced to long terms
for drug offenses is the best use of scarce resources. The fact is
taxpayers spend a lot more money keeping an offender in prison than
providing a college education for lawful citizens. The state doesn't
have enough cell space for every inmate the criminal justice system
sends to jail or prison. By 2008, the state will gain another 3,000
prison beds, but the state already has nearly 37,000 inmates in
prisons and local jails. At the current rate of crowding, the state
may be 6,500 beds short by 2014, when there will be more than 45,300
inmates. There's a rational solution, and it doesn't involve
decriminalizing anything. It does involve political backbone,
however. It would require the General Assembly to pay closer
attention to the recommendations of the N.C. Sentencing and Policy
Advisory Commission, which the legislature set up in the 1990s to
monitor prison space and criminal sentences. That commission came
about when the legislature adopted the Structured Sentencing Act,
which required that inmates serve the full length of sentences rather
than be released after serving only a fraction because of prison
crowding. The Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission was empowered
to monitor crowding and to recommend sentence adjustments to help
reserve costly prison space for the worst offenders.

The commission has recommended trimming certain sentences, but
legislators have been wary to do so. They don't want to appear to be
soft on crime, and thus have been fearful of making good use of a
logical, fact-based system they set up to address just this kind of
situation. Estimates are the state could save more than 4,600 prison
beds if it adopted commission recommendations.

Unless legislators give more attention to recommendations for
trimming certain sentences, taxpayers should brace themselves for
more prison-building -- and more state debt to erect prisons and more
taxes to operate them.