Act and execution

Is simple burglary a violent or at least serious crime warranting imprisonment? Or is it usually a mere facilitating step in the real issue-a drug habit?

Does it thus call more appropriately for an alternative to incarceration, for something probationary and rehabilitative, perhaps entailing counseling and the wearing of an electronic monitoring device?

Should we free a prison bed for someone worse-someone really violent-and save the taxpayers money?

Let’s get out of the abstract. Let’s get to a real question.

Let’s say your home gets burglarized. Let’s say you are cleaning up the ransacking and assessing the loss and absorbing the violation. Let’s say the policeman tells you the authorities have a pretty good idea who did it.

There’s a guy in the area known to be a burglar in need of drug money whom the prison people have on probation and under supposed monitoring. But they don’t have an actual monitoring device on him because they don’t have enough money to buy nearly as many devices as they have perpetrators they’re keeping out of prison.

Would you prefer that this known burglar had been in jail rather than in your home? Would you consider the infiltration of your home a serious and/or violent act?

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It is a big story-this one about the chronic felony detainee and parole absconder who is charged with murdering an 18-year-old whose body was found in an inner-city Little Rock street on the night of May 10.

So people have been fast in responding to it.

Former state Sen. Jim Luker of Wynne called Tuesday to say he didn’t want to appear defensive, but that no one should fault Act 570 of 2011.

That was Gov. Mike Beebe’s plan to curb spiraling prison costs, for which Luker was lead sponsor.

The point of Act 570 was to amend the state Criminal Code to increase the threshold for automatic incarceration. It expanded the probationary and parole system to provide a different and less expensive system for handling lesser and “nonviolent” offenders.

A key element of Act 570 provided expanded discretion to courts and the parole system to provide alternatives to imprisonment.

Luker’s point was that the problem wasn’t the act, but presumably the execution, primarily in the use of discretion.

Burglary was not made a nonincarcerating offense by his bill, Luker said. Courts and the parole people were doing that under discretionary authority, he said.

He said it was appropriate, if tragically late, that we apparently are now determined to get to the root of this problem.

But he said the assessment needed to be thorough and independent and to extend beyond the parole system. Otherwise we’ll get only finger-pointing, which actually has already started, he said.

Let’s find out, Luker said, why a man with numerous pending felony charges-parole-system failings aside-hadn’t been brought to trial on at least one of the fresh charges. Let’s examine the prosecutors and courts.

So I asked Prosecuting Attorney Larry Jegley about that.

He didn’t blame caseload, which would have been easy enough and valid enough. He said he’d already directed his staff to get him a report on how his office had dealt with this man, Darrell Dennis.

He said he’d let me know when his staff lets him know.

State Sen. David Sanders, an early critic of details of Act 570 if not necessarily the broad concept, says we need statutory reform. He predicts the fiscal session in January will be formally extended to take up bills on that.

But we cannot escape the underlying fact, he says, that existing statutory provisions and prison policies would have been perfectly adequate in Dennis’ case if they had been followed.

Sanders surmises that the new anti-incarceration emphasis, even if it might work otherwise, has so stressed the parole system that the system has been rendered dysfunctional.

There are ugly suggestions that the state prison and parole people are mostly interested in showing good numbers-a reduced prison population, reduced costs and persons on parole who do not become recidivists.

Surely the focus is on reality, not agency public relations.

This state needs Act 570 or something like it, both for budgetary and humane reasons.

But it needs a law either more tightly written, or less expansively applied, or more competently executed, or more adequately funded. Or all of that.

This parole debacle could put a rare but permanent stain on Beebe’s otherwise bravura governorship.

His emphasis is typically budgetary. That was the case here. He was looking to stop spiraling prison costs.

But now he needs to turn his administration’s valedictory emphasis to competence and public safety, even if he loses some financial savings.

Right now I’d rather cut Little Rock’s crime rate than state taxes.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.