LEGISLATORS RETHINK SENTENCING LAWS

Prison Population Continues To Rise By About 1,000 Each Year

RALEIGH -North Carolina's ever-rising prison population has state lawmakers
looking at a number of proposals designed to slow the trend, among them
changes to a law that is notorious on the street.

For a four-time felon, the state's habitual felon law can mean the
difference between a prison stay of a few months or many years.

Prosecutors say the law is a savior, and credit it for helping deter crime.
They recount stories of criminals, already convicted of three felonies,
begging that it not be applied to them.

In association with the state's Structured Sentencing Act adopted in 1994,
the habitual felon law has resulted in much longer prison stays for many of
the inmates in North Carolina's prison system.

There are now more than 3,000 inmates sentenced as habitual felons in the
state's prisons, or almost 10 percent of the total population.

They are part of a prison population rising by roughly 5 percent a year.
Last week, the total number of inmates stood at 33,913.

Critics of the habitual felon law say that is reason enough for state
lawmakers to reconsider it. If not, the state could soon face the same kind
of prison overcrowding that once led to lawsuits and federal court injunctions.

"We are headed right back to where we were in the 1980s," said Locke
Clifford, a member of the N.C. Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission.

Clifford told a House committee last week that North Carolina is taking in
roughly 21,000 new inmates and releasing 20,000 each year.

To keep up with that pace, the state will have to spend $90 million to
build a new 1,000-bed prison each year and spend more than $30 million a
year to run it.

The upward trend and its fiscal implications haven't been lost on
lawmakers. This year, a series of bills has been introduced that would trim
three to six months off many of the prison sentences under the Structured
Sentencing program.

Those proposals, though, haven't run into the kind of opposition faced by a
bill from Rep. Phil Haire, D-Jackson, to change the habitual felon law.

The law now allows district attorneys to prosecute anyone already convicted
of three felonies as a habitual felon. Once a defendant is convicted using
the law, a judge must sentence the person as a Class C felon -- at least
six-and-a-half years -- even if the underlying crime is for something as
petty as a forged check.

Haire's bill would give judges more discretion.

Under Haire's proposal, judges could still sentence habitual felons as
Class C felons, giving them as much as 14 years in prison. But they also
could choose instead to upgrade the penalties by only three steps.

"We are sentencing a lot of people to prison for relative minor crimes,"
said Sherwood Lapping, a Moore County defense attorney.

Forsyth County District Attorney Tom Keith, whose office leads the state in
sending habitual felons to prison, rejects the idea that prosecutors are
using the law willy-nilly.

Keith also credits the law as a key factor in declining violent crime rates
over the last decade.

"They can save jail beds here," he said, "but at what cost to society?"