After a year spent crunching numbers and gathering input from an array of stakeholders, a national nonprofit organization is on the verge of rolling out a robust legislative package to guide North Carolina’s criminal justice system for decades, officials said.
Robert Coombs, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit Council of State Governments, which has collaborated with senior state officials and elected leaders to strengthen the criminal sentencing system and rein in corrections spending, said state lawmakers could have the package of new policy options in hand by late January.
“Usually when we roll out these policy proposals, states are eager to vet them and make sure it’s a right fit for them and get them passed,” he said last week.
Gov. Bev Perdue announced in April the state would be participating in the Justice Reinvestment initiative, a program offered by the Council of State Governments, to identify fresh strategies for managing North Carolina’s growing prison population amid a difficult economic climate.
The legislative package rolling out next year will be a product of that initiative, and it is expected to produce legislation that helps curb corrections spending so North Carolina can reinvest that money into programs that enhance public safety, officials said.
The package comes as the state holds back on funding new construction projects, despite models showing further increases in the prison population. By 2019, the N.C. Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission, a consortium of criminal justice experts and lawmakers, predicts North Carolina will hold more than 50,800 inmates, a jump of more than 15 percent over 2010.
By fiscal year’s end in 2009, the N.C. Department of Correction spent 1.46 billion managing the prison and corrections system, an increase from $868 million in 1998, according to state reports.
Chief Deputy Secretary Jennie Lancaster at the correction department said sentencing reforms enacted in 1994 gave the state an accurate model to predict long-term population trends and enhance its planning capabilities. Called the Structured Sentencing Act, the reforms overhauled the entire justice system by lengthening prison terms for repeat violent offenders.
But structured sentencing abolished parole for most offenses committed after 1994, meaning inmates are currently required to serve their full sentences.
“Before structured sentencing, we had a pressure valve: parole,” said Michael Bell, correctional administrator at Pender Correctional Institution in Burgaw. “If we were taking hundreds of inmates a year in the front door and we had a finite amount of bed space, we’d open up the back door.”
In addition to an increasing prison population, losing that pressure valve means inmates are staying longer and thus growing older behind bars, raising the cost of medical care. According to figures provided by Pamela Walker, director of external affairs for the correction department, the prisons medical budget climbed from $41.5 million in 1990 to nearly $245 million in 2010, an increase of nearly 500 percent.
Concerns about prison medical expenses have partially abated as the state prepares to open an inmate hospital at Central Prison in Raleigh. Lancaster said the hospital should come online in 2012, and will provide a level of chemo treatment, dermatology and radiology, among other things. Serious medical problems, such as surgeries requiring an intensive care unit, will still be outsourced to private institutions, though.
Among the suggestions expected from the Justice Reinvestment program is a proposal that North Carolina do a better job of diverting low-risk offenders who have substance addictions or other problems that require treatment into community-type punishments like probation that can provide the care they need.
Nicole Sullivan, a research and planning manager at the correction department, said these low-risk offenders often cycle in and out of prison, sometimes twice a year, but their sentences are too short to provide a meaningful measure of therapy and treatment. And they are usually released without supervision, she said.
Officials hope to divert those low-risk offenders to community-type punishments to create prison room for the violent, habitual criminals.
After the Council of State Governments puts its policy recommendations before lawmakers, legislation is likely to go before the General Assembly for a vote, Walker said.
“Whether that happens during the next legislative session, which begins in January, I can’t predict,” she added.
Rep. Paul Stam, a Republican from Wake County and the incoming House majority leader, said he hopes the recommendations lead to bipartisan legislation that speeds the pace at which criminal cases move through the court system and clamps down on probation violators.
He said that if criminals know their cases are going to idle in court for months, or probation violators are not sent to jail, then they are more likely to offend again.
With the anemic economic recovery, officials have called this upcoming legislative session a prime opportunity to scout out new cost savings as lawmakers concern themselves with balancing next year’s state budget.
“When you spoke of treating offenders with anything other than harsh, archaic penalties, you were beaten with a heavy political stick and labeled soft on crime and you can count on that knocking you out of the legislative ballpark,” said Rep. Alice Bordsen, a Democrat from Alamance County who co-chairs the Justice Reinvestment Commission. “We haven’t been able to have these discussions until now.”
By Brian Freskos
Brian.Freskos@StarNewsOnline.com
Published: Sunday, December 26, 2010 at 3:30 a.m.
Brian Freskos: 343-2327
On Twitter: @BrianFreskos
