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 No Excuse for Prison Crisis
by Tom Campbell
February 25, 2010
No Excuse for Prison Crisis
The numbers tell the tale. North Carolina will have a shortage of 3,500 prison beds by June 30 of this year and will lack more than 8,000 beds by 2019 if present trends continue. The data reveals both a short and long term crisis.
The short term crisis is real but there is no way our state will magically produce an additional 3,500 prison beds by the end of this fiscal year even if we did not have the current state budget deficits. More problematic is the unlikely prospect of building enough capacity to match the projected need in nine years, especially since our State Treasurer has said the state should not borrow more money. Short term solutions will focus on a combination of new prison beds, accelerated paroles for current prisoners, redefining which crimes truly warrant incarceration and further restructuring of sentencing guidelines.
There is no crime wave fueling the current prison crisis; in fact statistics indicate a decrease in most crime categories. And we are not locking up a disproportionate percentage of our residents. Legislators were recently told we have the second lowest percentage of population behind bars in the southeastern U.S. Thirty states rank higher than North Carolina and the percentage of incarcerations is growing at about the same rate as overall population growth, roughly two percent per year.
The longer term solution requires common sense, simple math, astute leadership and smart budgeting. The Census Bureau gives us a pretty accurate reading of population growth each year. Using third grade multiplication one can factor the number of people we are gaining in population each year by the two percent annual increase in prison population and quickly determine how many prison beds we need to add each year. That’s plain old North Carolina common sense. Astute leaders, knowing that demand, should be able to prioritize and allocate budgets to meet those needs.
Let’s not stop there. This same approach could be applied to most all public infrastructure needs. For instance, if we know how many children should occupy a public school classroom and extrapolate from census data the ages of public school students we can, using third grade division, get a good grasp on how many new classrooms we need to build each year. The census data will even tell us where the growth is located and where we should be constructing new classrooms. Using this same common sense approach North Carolina could develop similar formulas to determine where to build roads, where water and sewer systems will need to be built or expanded as well as where and how to provide for any number of other facilities or services provided by government.
These illustrations may be a bit simplistic but the conclusions are accurate. There just isn’t a good excuse for getting into a crisis mode over infrastructure needs. North Carolina could resolve many of the problems we currently experience if our leaders would apply common sense and better budgeting. The failure of leadership is our biggest crisis.
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