INCREASE IN INMATES FORCING N.C. INTO HARD DECISIONS

More Cells, Cut Sentences Considered

RALEIGH - The early 1990s, before the state went on a prison-building
spree, was "a great time for the criminals," according to Forsyth County
District Attorney Tom Keith.

Lawsuits threatened to force a federal takeover of North Carolina's prison
system, so officials put a cap on the state prison population. When the
population neared the limit, officials released inmates well before their
full time was served.

"The jails were so overcrowded that the average criminal only served about
a month for each year of his or her sentence," Keith said.

And now officials say that the population has again outgrown the system's
capacity. Even after the state agreed last year to build and lease three
new prisons with 1,000 beds each, officials project that the inmate
population will again outgrow the capacity of state prisons by 2005.

As the state pursues "structured sentencing" that aims to keep the worst
offenders behind bars the longest, inmate stays are lengthening and prisons
are becoming more concentrated with habitual or violent criminals.

Projections from the N.C. Sentencing Commission show that this year the
state expects to have a prison population of 33,188 but room for just
32,087 inmates. By the end of the decade, the state expects to have more
than 40,000 prisoners, but space for less than 35,000.

"Their place is full," said Keith. "We want to raise the alarm now. Here it
comes again, folks. Here come the prison caps again. Here come the early
'90s. . I don't want to have everyone's (prison) time cut by 25 percent.
"We're going to have to build more prisons - or manage our prisons more
efficiently." As they view charts that show projections for the inmate
population surpassing prison capacity this year, next year, and again in
2005 and beyond, state officials say that the system is not in crisis, as
Keith might suggest. But they also warn that the steady growth in the
number of prisoners and duration of their stays is a looming reality.

"This is not a surprise," said Susan Katzenelson, the Sentencing
Commission's executive director. "What nobody factored in was how fast the
population of the state would grow."

State officials agreed last year to use innovative financing to put three
new close-custody prisons for 1,000 inmates each in Anson, Scotland and
Alexander counties. Together, the three prisons will cost $224 million and
have operating costs of $17 million per prison per year -or more than $50
million altogether - once they come on line in 2004 and briefly allow the
state to catch up with the projected population.

To limit up-front costs, state officials agreed to pay for the new prisons
through a lease-purchase arrangement. The prison's builders will finance
the construction, and the state will lease the structures for 20 years
before it owns the buildings. But the state will operate the prisons.

"It defers the cost," said Correction Secretary Theodis Beck. "But in the
end, you can't do this without having some attendant (operating) costs. It
was probably the only option we had in a tight budget year."

Beck and prison officials are trying to make sure that even in the midst of
a recession and an ongoing budget crisis, elected officials are aware that
crime remains a growth industry. "We have to make sure we keep these
numbers in front of the administration, in front of the General Assembly,"
Beck said. "They know that some decisions are going to have to be made. "As
history has proven, even when we weren't building, the inmates kept coming.
We're sort of at a moment of truth here, not only in North Carolina but
across the country," he said. As the system approaches its capacity, Beck
said, officials could also reconsider options they have tried before:
leasing jail space from counties, sending inmates to prisons in other
states or resorting to private prisons.

Legislators who monitor the prison system are aware of the numbers. But
they say they're looking for alternatives to prison construction, including
changes in the sentencing grids that determine the length of inmates'
sentences. "We are in a position in North Carolina where we are drifting
toward red ink," said Sen. Frank Ballance, D-Warren, the Senate's deputy
president pro tem.

"Where do you get the money? This year we closed some substance-abuse
treatment centers. That's a disgrace. We ought to be about turning these
lives around."

It will be hard to find money for new prisons, Ballance said, "unless we
cut money for education. Now is that a good tradeoff?" Legislators asked
the Sentencing Commission to come up with recommendations for changes that
could limit the number of cells needed. "What we asked them to do is look
at ways we could maximize our current facilities while protecting the
public. We've got to protect the public, but we can't just keep on building
and building prisons," Ballance said.

The Sentencing Commission has already made some recommendations - including
a proposal to relax sentencing requirements for habitual felons that
district attorneys like Keith strenuously oppose.

Katzenelson said that ultimately, it will be up to legislators to decide
which measures to adopt. "If the state wants to build all of these beds,
that's the legislature's decision," she said. "It's not build or don't
build beds. It's 'Can we save building some of the beds?'" Since the
attempt to reserve prison space for hardened criminals began when
structured sentencing took effect in 1994, officials have seen a more
hardened criminal begin to dominate the ranks of state prisons.

"It's shifted to the higher security levels," said Katzenelson. "They have
people coming in at higher security levels . which of course are the
single-cell, more expensive beds." Beck said that the number of
minimum-security inmates who can be devoted to work release or other labor
contracts is shrinking. So the state has closed old, minimum-security
prisons in Alexander, Guilford, Rockingha, Stokes, Watauga and Yadkin
counties in Northwest North Carolina, as well as a medium-security prison
in Iredell.

Beck said that it just doesn't work to put long-term inmates in
minimum-custody prisons that in many cases were designed for inmate road crews.

"We have started to shut down these small, minimum custody units because
they were such high-cost units," he said. "Those prisons are not the type
of facility we need to serve current needs. At the time they were designed,
maybe 40 years ago, they met the needs and served that purpose well."

For Keith, though, the change isn't happening fast enough. The state has 76
prisons spread across rural locations as remnants of Depression-era road
crews. Rural legislators continue to view prisons as economic development
that bring construction and decent-paying guard jobs. Officials freely
admit that, while the spread-out system makes it easier to move inmates
closer to their families or to put distance between an inmate and his
victim, the dispersed system drives up costs. The state's average cost to
house an inmate is $65.29 a day, or $23,830 a year.

Keith points out that the state ranks second in the South in jail beds per
person, and that it spends more than the national average on prisons as a
portion of its criminal-justice spending. With so many prisons, "There are
no economies of scale," he said. "This policy must change. The state must
build larger and more centralized prisons."

Beck says that in California and other states that have built large
prisons, "Those are not the easiest places to operate. What you're running
is a small city, 24/7."

And if the Sentencing Commission's projections are right, by the time the
2010 census is conducted, those cities would have a combined population of
more than 40,000 residents.