HARD TIME (FOR TAXPAYERS)

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

'Tough-On-Crime' Hits the Bottom Line.

Larry Norris's job is to keep some of the toughest, most dangerous
criminals in Arkansas locked up. "Skittish" is not a word that applies
to the director of prisons.

So it was significant last May, when Norris told state legislators
that the situation he faces is "scary."

After 30 years of policies born out of promises to be "tough on
crime," Norris and other state officials are finding themselves in a
corner. They are surrounded on all sides by numbers - and the numbers
relating to prisons are menacing.

Consider:

. The Arkansas Board of Corrections now supervises more than 56,000
men and women serving time for criminal convictions.

. That means that one of every 47 Arkansas residents is either in
prison or on probation or parole.

. If this population were a city - say, one called Board of
Corrections - it would be the fifth-largest metropolis in Arkansas,
smaller only than Little Rock, North Little Rock, Fort Smith, and
Fayetteville.

. Yet, while real cities serve the state economy, this one is draining
its coffers.

. Taxpayers shell out $4,000 per year, on average, for every inmate,
probationer and parolee being supervised by the Board of Corrections.
That amount would just about cover a year's worth of tuition and fees
for a student at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

. Prisons are the most costly part of that equation. The price for
keeping a single prisoner behind bars averages more than $15,000 a
year - an amount that's almost half the salary of an average Arkansas
classroom teacher.

And those numbers don't even suggest the whole picture. They do not
include the roughly 700 juvenile offenders whom courts have ordered
into state supervision; nor do they include the hundreds of prisoners
awaiting trials in county and regional jails.

The numbers have pushed Arkansas's prison system to the point of
collapse.

County and regional jails are desperately overloaded. Even the newest
have run out of room.

As director of the state's prison system, Norris knows he can't
possibly keep up with the all the felons the courts are sending him.
As he recently told legislators, "We can't build our way out of this
problem."

Nor, it seems, can we ease our grip on it, even by releasing inmates
from prison. Arkansas's percentage of parolees is the highest in the
South. Probation and parole officers are staggering under caseloads
significantly larger than those carried by their counterparts in most
other states.

Moves to ease pressures on one part of the system often just
exacerbate the pressures bearing down on another. In May, the
legislature broadened the state's 15-year-old Emergency Powers Act,
allowing prisons to release non-violent inmates whenever the
populations outgrew space available. But substantial numbers of early
releases just enlarge the pool of parolees, creating difficulties for
managers in that system who are struggling to reduce parole officers'
caseloads.

What most needs to be reduced is the number of Arkansans being
sentenced to time in state prisons. Yet, even this year, as state
agency accountants were sweating over budgets that needed to be
slashed by $373 million, the number of Arkansans being sentenced to
prison increased by 50 a month.

'Salvation'

The call to get tough - and still tougher - on crime has backfired,
and nobody sees the results better than Norris. Taxpayers now face the
problem paying for the prisons their tough-on-crime laws have required
them to build.

The tough talk of the '80s and '90s has taken on a milder tone, now
that there's less money to back up the swagger. With households
confronting economic projections as dicey as those facing the state,
the rhetoric on how to deal with crime has taken a softer tone.

It is somewhat ironic that Norris, the administrator of Arkansas's
prisons, spent most of his time with the legislature this spring
talking up alternatives to incarceration.

Norris told anyone who would listen that Arkansas's rate of prison
growth could not be sustained; that punishment was not the best answer
to crime; and that miscreants needed programs to help them, not the
increasingly harsh prison sentences that lawmakers have been attaching
to laws.

"...We should incarcerate people because we are afraid of them," he
told the House and Senate Judiciary committees, "not simply because we
are mad at them."

Norris is nobody's softie. His call for a change of direction is more
like that of a scout out ahead of Custer's army as it approached the
Little Big Horn. What Norris can see that others may not is that the
numbers do not bode well.

David Guntharp, director of the Department of Community Correction,
the state's probation and parole agency, also sees an alarming
horizon. As heads of the two agencies controlled by the Board of
Corrections, he and Norris have spent years on the line between the
laws enacted by the legislature and the effects of those laws on prisons.

Norris's options are as limited as his space. If there is to be any
"salvation" for the overcrowding problem his department faces, he
recently told his board, it will come via Guntharp's department. More
people are going to have to be paroled - or not sentenced to prison in
the first place.

Guntharp chuckles, almost ruefully, at the reminder of the miracles
being expected of him. People are hoping that he can solve problems
that he's watched develop over his 30-year career.

Like Norris, Guntharp embodies a paradox. At the height of a career
spent working in prisons, he realizes that his success will be
measured by the numbers of offenders he can keep out of them.

Mandatory Sentences

Guntharp went to work for the Arkansas Department of Correction in
1973. Back then, Arkansas had only four prison units: the original
prison farm at Cummins, the 57-year-old complex at Tucker, and two
newer units that had been recently added at Pine Bluff and Benton.
Altogether, the system housed about 1,500 inmates.

But, though no one could have known it, that year would mark a change
of course in the direction of America's prisons.

A decade earlier, in 1964, Sen. Barry Goldwater had unexpectedly
struck a nerve with middle-class voters by addressing their fear of
crime. Five years later, Richard Nixon tapped that nerve again in his
successful campaign for president.

At the time, the number of prisoners in the U.S. was actually
declining. Most Americans viewed with distaste the Soviet Union's
gulag of prisons and the prison cells that South Africa was filling
with opponents of its apartheid system. American prisons were mainly
seen as places to confine only the most violent criminals.

That view began a historic shift in 1973, when New York's Gov. Nelson
Rockefeller staked his ambitions for higher office on the newly
popular issue of crime. The crime he chose to focus on was drugs.

In his State of the State speech that year, Rockefeller demanded that
every person convicted of selling illegal drugs should receive a
mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole. He argued that
even juveniles caught selling drugs should be sentenced to life.

A few months later, New York enacted the Rockefeller drug laws. The
laws were not all that the governor had sought, but they were severe
enough. The penalty for possessing four ounces of an illegal drug, or
for selling two ounces, was a mandatory prison term of 15 years to
life.

Other states, including Arkansas, followed New York's lead, and by the
early 1980's, when President Ronald Reagan launched the War on Drugs,
the number of prisons in Arkansas - and the number of state inmates -
had already doubled to roughly 3,000.

A Non-Violent Majority

Thirty years of being tough on crime - and the expenditure of billions
of dollars - had not made a dent in the problem of drugs. And at the
start of this year's legislative session, as they have every year
since the toughness began, the prisons were bulging again - with no
let-up or end in sight.

In this year's attempt to avert a crisis, Glover, along with Sens.
John Paul Capps and Jerry Bookout, sponsored legislation that will
allow the Department of Correction to make more frequent emergency
releases. The bill passed and could result in the release of up to 750
inmates - as soon as Guntharp's department can hire and train the new
parole officers who will be needed to supervise the new parolees.

Still, Glover acknowledges, "I don't think that will solve the
problem."

Citing estimates that Arkansas's prison population could reach 20,000
by 2010, he says, "I think what the legislature is going to have to
decide is that, if we keep the laws as they presently exist, then
we're going to have to come up with additional money - millions and
millions of dollars - to build additional prisons. There's just no
question about it."

The choice is that or, as he puts it, to "take a completely new look
at our criminal justice system."

Discretion Again

Quietly, away from the legislative spotlight, that "new look" has
already begun. Forced to accommodate the legislature's demands, a
desperate Board of Corrections, in cooperation with equally worried
judges and prosecutors, has instituted some profound changes in the
way non-violent offenders are handled.

They are drawing, they say, on authority that was granted in the fine
print when Guntharp's department was created. As a result, Guntharp is
spearheading some of the most dramatic changes initiated in the past
30 years. They include:

. Creation of a system of drug courts that will soon span the state,
allowing judges to regain some discretion over the fates of certain
non-violent offenders;

. Increased reliance on treatment, rather than punishment, as a tool,
particularly for drug offenders;

. Special provisions for the treatment and monitoring of sex
offenders;

. More use of alternative controls, such as electronic monitoring and
day reporting centers;

. The opening, at a cost of $6.5 million, of a new "technical offender
center" at Malvern, for persons whose only new crime was to violate
their paroles;

. Increased use of locally based services, to better help parolees
re-enter society.

No longer are paroled drug offenders who test positive for drugs
automatically returned to prison. They may be. But they also may be
diverted to the technical offender center or ordered to some type of
counseling, thus saving a cell with bars on it for someone who
committed a violent crime.

But even this, Guntharp realizes, will not get to the root of the
problem, which traces back to the state's criminal code. Unless the
legislature makes changes there, even the most ambitious - and costly
- - efforts to control growth will only be stopgaps.

Despite the efforts of Norris, Guntharp and Gov. Mike Huckabee in the
last legislative session, there were few signs at the Capitol that
lawmakers might be willing to re-examine some laws.

Citing the impossible demands being placed on the prison system, the
three state officials implored legislators to let well-behaved inmates
get out sooner, including those who'd been convicted of manufacturing
methamphetamine - a group that's required to serve 70 percent of its
sentence. The legislature refused.

But Guntharp has to hold out some hope.

"If we put these programs in place," he says, "then the legislature
may be more willing to look at those laws that are causing people to
go into prisons, and I think that, if they see us having success, they
may be willing to cut back on the length of sentences."

Glover, the veteran legislator, is more cautious. "I wouldn't have a
problem with looking at our drug laws," he says, "since probably as
high as 70 percent of those in our prison system today are there
because of either alcohol or drugs or both.

"And we probably do need to look at it and see if we could try to
rehabilitate those people. That would certainly save us a lot of money
in the long run, and keep people from becoming hardened prisoners from
being in jail."

But he doubts that the legislature as a whole is willing to relax the
hard-on-crime muscle that it has had flexed for the past 30 years.

"I don't anticipate it getting much more lenient," Glover says. He
says he still feels "very strongly with regard to law and order," and
that he's "not backing off that." And he believes that point of view
is widely shared among his cohorts.

But, unlike many of the legislators, who are newcomers to the Capitol,
Glover admits that his philosophy of prisons has been forced to
undergo some changes. "Simply put," he says, "I'm more inclined to
deal with reality."