RALEIGH – The first thing we do, let’s thrill all the lawyers.
By which I mean all the lawyers associated with North Carolina’s justice system, including judges and prosecutors. And by which I mean that the first thing state government should do is appropriate the money required to operate the system effectively – the courts, the prisons, the probation and parole functions. It should be the number-one priority of state budget writers in Raleigh. It isn’t.
Law enforcement is the primary responsibility of any government, really the core function from which responsibilities for any other programs and service should be understood to flow. Government is a means of coordinating and restraining the use of force in human affairs. It properly engages in activities other than law enforcement only if they advance the end of respecting individual rights, enforcing contracts, and preserving order and safety.
For example, the right to vote is a civil right, not a natural right. It is created by human beings in the context of forming a government, rather than preexisting the government in the way that the rights to life, liberty, and property do. Thus when government performs services to ensure that an electoral process is fair, free, open, just, and informed – services that to my way of thinking include funding K-12 schools, for example – it does so in order that the government may more successfully complete its fundamental mission of adjudicating legal disputes, deterring or punishing crime, and heading off the social pathologies that lead to disorderly or criminal conduct.
The state’s involvement in highways has a similar justification. Ideally, the roads we travel ought to operate as part of profit-seeking businesses such as other forms of transportation did in the past or do today. But because of the ease by which people historically escaped their legal responsibility to pay tolls – including the widespread use of “shunpikes” to avoid toll booths – government came to own and operate most roads so as to enforce the implicit contract between traveler and provider via taxes on motor fuels and vehicles. (Fortunately, today there are many innovative technologies that will allow drivers to pay more directly for the mileage they rack up, and for private firms to be in the highway business.)
Before policymakers can enhance the government’s core function of law and order, however, it must in a position to carry out that function. Right now, North Carolina’s justice system is woefully inadequate. The courts are clogged, the technology badly dated, the personnel overworked and undervalued. We are heading towards another crisis in prison capacity (in part because of a failure to set better priorities regarding non-violent offenses such as drug use).
Officials with the state’s major cities, represented by the N.C. Metropolitan Coalition, are seeking commitments from state legislators for a serious effort to redress funding for the justice system in 2006. Naturally, politicians are mouthing all the right words in this election year. House Speaker Jim Black said he was “fully on board” with dedicating more resources to the state’s core function, but then added oddly that if Republicans and some Democrats prevailed in their quest to reduce the state’s gas tax, there would be less money available. Less money for the courts? I thought the current rhetorical strategy was for defenders of the current tax rate to claim it was being properly spent on transportation.
In any event, count me in on this one effort to increase state funding. That doesn’t mean we need to increase taxes. I’ve got a few ideas about where to get the necessary funds.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.