From time to time--last week, for example--policymakers gather to complain that too many people are in state prisons and that it's going to break the taxpayers.
Seldom mentioned is that what we really need is for fewer people to commit crimes. That would help the prison-crowding situation quite a bit.
It's that kind of talk by me that recently caused a source close to Gov. Asa Hutchinson to say it was ironic that I was to the right of the governor on criminal-justice issues.
That's not so. It's perhaps libelous. To Asa.
I simply find it curious: We sit around and talk about how to deal with the woeful fact that so many people are entering our prisons that the cell walls are strained at the seams. And we hardly ever mention in that context that one thing that might help would be robbing less, burglarizing less, killing less, raping less and generally behaving better.
But I understand. The crowding is now. The crimes have been done. The courts have meted out the punishment.
You can't prevent what's been done already.
Trying to have better schools and a stronger economy with more opportunities, and trying to break a cycle of dependency on alcohol and drugs--those are ongoing issues we at least talk about all the time.
Meanwhile, what happens to us prison-wise is that we go in tiresome cycles.
Most recently the prison crowding got so bad that we liberalized parole. We let more people out early, so many, in fact, that we couldn't monitor them very well, which was kind of all right because we didn't have room to put them back in jail, anyway. They were going to get out normally soon enough. We were just speeding the calendar a wee bit.
So chances were that the people burglarizing your home were on parole and mostly harmless in that they simply needed money for drugs or alcohol--since we weren't paying any attention to treatment and rehabilitation after we let so many of them out of prison.
But then Darrell Dennis kept violating parole commitments until he got charged with capital murder in central Little Rock on a night he'd promised faithfully to his parole people that he would report to a detainment center.
It was obvious some of these bad guys knew that the state didn't want them back in jail and didn't have the resources to monitor them. So they gamed the system.
The public outrage in the Dennis matter caused us to hire new parole officers and adopt a new policy to return to jail any parolee charged with--merely charged with--a felony.
State Sen. David Sanders of Little Rock, who was out ahead of this issue, had previously passed a bill saying any parolee arrested on a charge of a violent or sex crime would be subjected to a quick revocation hearing for return to prison. But the state Correction Board, perhaps angling for a new prison, went further to take back any parolee charged with any felony.
And now--guess what?--the prison population is way up. And we're saying we can't go on this way.
The most obvious immediate solution was to spend a few million dollars from the General Improvement Fund and build a new prison. But Hutchinson wanted to cut taxes instead of build a new prison.
So he embraced new re-entry centers to try to reduce recidivism. And he stressed, as Mike Beebe and others had before, drug courts and counseling and treatment instead of regular incarceration for simple drug offenses. And he got legislative authority to contract with a jail in east Texas to take some of our folks on a contract basis.
And the numbers are like the creek--high and rising.
The best ideas I've heard, absent building a robust economy and world-class schools and breaking the cycle of poverty and cultural deprivation, are to differentiate and spread the prison population.
Sanders and the governor and others like the idea of counties forming cooperatives to build regional jails that would contract with the state to serve as lower-cost and medium-security housing for state prisoners who didn't need to be packed in next to the really big guys.
And the Arkansas Public Policy Panel recommended last week that we get the mentally ill people, a few thousand of them, out of the state prison and into detainment and treatment facilities that would serve them better and cost less--according to the study--than standard state imprisonment.
Both are fine if not new ideas, although, you know, they don't change--but merely rearrange--the prison population.
So we'll need to keep working on trying to have a better state. There's that.
John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 06/23/2015