Friday, January 30, 2009
Editorial: A budget correction for corrections?
Virginia has no money to keep offenders behind bars needlessly. Its budget woes should lead to more use of alternatives.
From the RoundTable blog
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Last week, Virginia's school superintendents went to Richmond to plead with lawmakers for protection from Gov. Tim Kaine's crippling budget cuts. This week, the local sheriffs showed up.
As one measure to reconcile an almost $3 billion state budget gap, Kaine proposes a 7 percent cut in funding for county sheriff's departments. If that comes to pass, sheriffs from around the state said at a news conference Monday, the effect will be to compromise public safety.
No Virginia lawmaker wants to be accused of that.
So, if anything good can come of Virginia's grim revenue picture, it might be that necessity will become the mother not of invention, but of common sense in dealing with lawbreakers.
For if lawmakers are to restore any of the money that Kaine proposes taking from sheriff's offices, they will have to cut spending somewhere else -- like on the state's lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key approach to corrections.
Republican state Sen. Ken Stolle, a former police officer, showed up at Monday's news conference to support the sheriffs' quest. And, the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star reports, Stolle suggested, "We have to re-examine how we do corrections."
He mentioned home monitoring and other programs to avoid jailing nonviolent offenders at low risk of repeating their crimes, and he observed: "One of the things we have to consider is if we're mad at the individual, or we're afraid of the individual. There's a lot of ways to punish people."
And a lot smarter ways to fight crime than the Virginia way: endlessly ratcheting up prison sentences to assuage voter fears.
Democrat Kaine already suggested that the General Assembly save money by releasing some of the state's nonviolent inmates a couple of months earlier than current law allows. Now Stolle, a member of the Senate's budget-writing Finance Committee and the State Crime Commission, is talking about diversion programs.
Virginians, ever slow to embrace change, might have it thrust upon them.
The sheriffs aren't fooling about what their financial pinch, left unaddressed, will mean in many localities.
Sheriff's departments are the principal local law enforcement agencies in Virginia's rural counties -- which is to say all but nine of the commonwealth's 95 counties. The cut in state support will mean 310 fewer deputies, the Virginia Sheriffs Association estimates, at a time when calls for their services can be expected to increase.
It's a truism that crime goes up in a bad economy. And in this bad economy, deputies are busier than usual serving eviction notices. This is no time to thin their ranks.
