RALEIGH – For months, the top story in the state capital has been North Carolina’s multi-billion-dollar budget deficit for the coming fiscal year and what Gov. Beverly Perdue and the new Republican legislature will do to close it. While disputes about taxes, business subsidies, and education has dominated the headlines, the emergence of a broad consensus in another area of the budget – public safety – has drawn a lot less attention.
Fortunately, Associated Press correspondent Gary Robertson filed a story this week had helped rectify the imbalance. He wrote up a draft report from a bipartisan group, the Judicial Reinvestment project, that calls for major reforms of North Carolina’s criminal-justice and corrections programs – reforms that would divert some nonviolent offenders from the state’s overburdened prison systems and, as a result, save taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year.
The recommendations include operational changes in probation and parole programs, greater use of treatment rather than criminal penalties to respond to incidents of low-level drug possession, and smarter use of mental-health dollars within the criminal-justice system.
The cause of criminal-justice reform is truly a bipartisan, cross-ideological one. Judicial Reinvestment is a project of the Council of State Governments and funded by the likes of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Open Society Institute, both left-leaning grantmakers. But many of these reforms first had successful trial runs in states with Republican governors and legislatures such as Texas, where the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation played a crucial role in crafting the state’s successful initiatives.
Like TPPF, the John Locke Foundation has long advocated correction reforms that would reserve scarce and expensive prison capacity for truly violent criminals who present a clear danger to the lives, liberty, and property of their fellow citizens, while using carefully designed treatment, probation, and parole programs to keep other offenders out of trouble.
I believe these reforms to be not only just and economical but also, fundamentally, conservative. I am a signatory of the Right on Crime coalition and have written on these issues a number of times in the past. The American Legislative Exchange Council, a free-market group serving state legislators across the country, has just dedicated the February issue of its Inside ALEC newsletter to describing the reform agenda in great depth.
Here in North Carolina, Republican Rep. David Guice is a strong advocate of the Judicial Reinvestment proposal. “We want to improve our criminal justice system and protect the public, and we recognize that our system can accomplish that goal in less costly fashion,” said Guice, a former probation officer from Transylvania County.
Gov. Beverly Perdue is also a supporter. The budget plan she proposed earlier this week includes $12.4 million in savings in FY 2011-12 and $27.4 million in FY 2012-13 from the implementation of the Judicial Reinvestment reforms. So does the John Locke Foundation’s alternative budget plan, which was written primarily by JLF fiscal analyst Joe Coletti and released yesterday.
As it happens, in her budget plan Perdue also included another longstanding JLF agenda item: consolidating North Carolina’s unwieldy assortment of public-safety agencies and departments. Her proposed new Department of Public Safety would encompass the programs of the previous departments of Crime Control, Juvenile Justice, and Correction, saving millions of dollars a year in lower administrative cost and better coordination of programs. That’s a great idea.
Ensuring the safety of the public is the first responsibility of any government, and deserves the highest priority in any budget deliberation. Not every program that cites public safety as its goal is an effective use of taxpayer dollars, however, particularly when the program is poorly targeted, poorly managed, or imbedded in a system that offers both offenders and employees the wrong incentives.
Never let it be said that the nature of modern politics precludes cooperation and consensus. The Judicial Reinvestment strategy has the support of a Democratic governor, Republican legislators, the religious right, the religious left, and many conservative and liberal researchers and activists. Time to proceed.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.