CELL CONFUSION

Building Alone Can't End Overcrowding

If you own stock in a billion-dollar industry, it hardly matters how
smoothly the machinery runs if what tumbles off the assembly line isn't
worth what it cost to produce it.

So what is North Carolina to do about its prisons? Crime may or may not
pay; but imprisonment manifestly is not paying its way in any currency you
can name - money, deterrence, retribution or rehabilitation.

North Carolina's great claim to fame has been, in recent years, that it
wasn't doing as badly as most other states in misusing its prison space.
That is, North Carolina used more of its cells to isolate felons than other
states did.

That isn't good enough, unless we've overlooked some gem in the news that
the state will complete three prisons now under construction, build three
more and still come up short at the end of a decade.

The remedy is painfully simple. No: It's simple, and painful. We must do
better, go further, be more innovative.

A few lawmakers are reluctantly coming to the realization that the state
cannot build its way out of the situation. In addition to building new
prisons, the General Assembly must reduce the numbers of things it
classifies as felonies. It must revisit structured sentencing. It must
recognize the supposed quick-fix notions - "enhanced" penalties, "three
strikes" laws and the like - as diversions from the real issue.

You name it, and North Carolina has created a record to be studied. It has
locked 'em up and thrown away the key as well as any state and better than
most. That backfired. It defied sound constitutional arguments, and that
backfired. For a time, it operated under a voluntary prison population cap
to keep the courts from taking over the system. It took discretion away
from judges. That backfired. Once, in a fit of tough-on-crime legislating,
it even did away with the cocaine misdemeanor - and hastily and stealthily
reinstated it when the prison population exploded. It tried reducing the
space available to each inmate and calling that "creating more cell space."
It has paid too little attention to the mentally ill and to juvenile
offenders, and continues to pay through the nose for consequences it could
have helped prevent.

Reasonable people can disagree on particular innovations. But it is
irrational to map a future of more and more construction that we know will
not get the job done in the absence of a dispassionate overhaul of the laws
we use to cram people into prison.

We have tried either/or, and it failed. It's time for the stockholders in
North Carolina's prisons system to get serious about both/and - building,
and devising a realistic plan to restore the prisons to their first and
highest use: isolating dangerous people from the public.