JAIL ALTERNATIVE

# Smart Sentences Get Boost

PUTTING nonviolent offenders into smarter, low-cost, rehabilitative
probation - instead of locking them in crime-breeding steel cells at
enormous taxpayer expense - makes good sense.

Many West Virginia counties are pursuing this goal by creating "day
reporting centers" where lesser defendants must check in regularly while
holding jobs and supporting their families. They will receive guidance
designed to prevent them from slipping back into crime.

The trend began because rising jail costs are demolishing county budgets.
Some of the increase stemmed from an increase in the daily price of locking
people in cages. The newer regional jails are more expensive to run than
the former county jails. But judges also are sentencing more people to jail.

The day centers got some help this week in the form of $50,000 each for
eight counties - a total of $400,000. Kanawha, Logan, Mason, McDowell,
Monongalia, Ohio, Putnam and Wyoming will receive grants from state lawsuit
settlement funds.

In the past decade, state lawsuits have netted nearly $300 million. After
outside lawyers take large shares, the rest is administered by Attorney
General Darrell McGraw, partly for controversial ads bearing his name. Last
year, a bill by House Speaker Bob Kiss and others sought to put settlement
funds into the state treasury, for appropriation by the Legislature. It
passed the House, but died in the Senate.

The day center money is from a $10 million settlement by Purdue Pharma Inc.
The drug company paid to end a suit over how the company sold the
painkiller OxyContin, a highly addictive drug that is often abused. Outside
lawyers got $3.3 million. Chief Deputy Attorney General Fran Hughes
announced that $400,000 of the rest would go to day centers.

"We chose the day reporting centers because many people are there because
of drug offenses," she said. "With this money, we hope they can get the
treatment they need to overcome their addiction."

Aside from the debate over who should handle state lawsuit settlement
funds, it's great that support is flowing into the new centers that will
enable nonviolent offenders to remain productive citizens.