“Every year, it’s the same exercise except this year they’re going to the state and the state is saying ‘We don’t have the money to pay you,’” said Bristol County Treasurer Kevin Finnerty, who predicts the department could run out of cash within weeks.   Sheriff Thomas Hodgson’s office has not paid inmate health care bills or prison utility bills since January so the office can pay its personnel. He estimates the department needs an extra $5.4 million through the end of June. If not, the sheriff said he’ll turn to the National Guard to take over in Bristol County …

More than a budget deficit is keeping the state from helping out, Hodgson said. The sheriff thinks the lack of supplemental funding is payback because he fought against a proposal backed by Gov. Deval Patrick to shift sheriff departments into part of the state government. Hodgson said he has written to Patrick four times since November to warn that if county-run sheriff’s offices aren’t given better funding that services will need to be cut. The governor has not responded, he said.  Hodgson is planning to write again, telling Patrick that he wants to meet with the National Guard to create a contingency plan, he said. “I don’t know how much more clear I can be.”

Finnerty predicts the sheriff’s office will run out of money by May 7, or perhaps a week later, using conservative revenue estimates. The department owes $1.4 million for inmate health care since November, according to the sheriff.   “They don’t have the money to pay those bills and also pay people to watch the inmates,” Finnerty said.

“There’s this long New Hampshire tradition of tough on crime, but there’s a huge New Hampshire tradition of being pretty darn stingy,” says Chris Keating, executive director of New Hampshire’s public defender program.   But being tough on crime can be expensive, and Keating says in New Hampshire, the tradition of stinginess is starting to win out. The insider term is “decriminalization.”

New Hampshire’s state Legislature is considering measures that would take away the threat of jail time for some offenses, and in the U.S., the government only has to pay for a defense lawyer when poor defendants face incarceration. So taking away the threat of jail saves money, and Keating believes New Hampshire is trying to distinguish between people society is mad at and people society is afraid of … “I think they want to move these people and cases through the system because they realize they’ve got finite resources and these cases are just bogging them down.”

William Wren, the commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Corrections, says tough budget prospects are forcing him to look at closing a whole prison and laying off 97 positions. For that reason, Wren wants fewer people sent to prison, and he is asking lawmakers to examine which crimes really deserve time behind bars.   “I’ll give you a good example — our theft statutes, the threshold dollar amount for going from a misdemeanor to a felony crime is $500. That was set 31 years ago. What $500 was 31 years ago is a lot different from what it would equate to today,” he says.

These kinds of conversations are happening across the country.

Chief public defender for Massachusetts, Bill Leahy, says cuts have to come from somewhere.  “We’ve got a 3 1/2 billion-dollar deficiency in Massachusetts this year, all kinds of worthy programs are being cut, and we’re continuing to waste money on prosecuting crimes that are criminal only by statute,” Leahy says …

“I think it’s a major shift,” says David Carroll, the director of research for the National Legal Aid and Defender Association. “We’ve had a hangover on the tough-on-crime movement and realize that to keep going down that path we’re only escalating costs at ever greater rates.”

The Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling that the law is unconstitutional will result in the release of a dozen juvenile offenders whom state officials had kept incarcerated after their 18th birthday.  One of those was among a group of young offenders who had challenged the law. The high court wrote that the law fails to define dangerousness, gives “unbridled discretion” to the Department of Youth Services, and violates the due-process rights of offenders.  “The language contains no indication of the nature and degree of dangerousness that would justify continued commitment and offers the department no guidance on how to make such a determination,” wrote Justice Judith Cowin.

Berkshire District Attorney David F. Capeless, president of the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association, said the ruling means “some dangerous young people, those who the DYS have determined continue to pose a real danger to the community despite being under DYS supervision . . . are going to be at large” …

In yesterday’s decision, Cowin wrote that the court warned the Legislature in 2004 that it had “grave concerns” about the constitutionality of the statute because of its failure to adequately define dangerousness, and “invited it to correct the deficiencies.” However, the Legislature did not change the law.

Yesterday’s ruling does not apply to juvenile offenders who, because of the severity of their crimes, were sentenced to state custody until age 21, nor to juveniles who were tried as adults and sentenced to prison terms.

Aware of the economic crisis facing government at every level — federal, state and local — Bristol County Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson is calling for legislation that will allow the Department of Corrections and all Sheriffs to adopt the $5-a-day cost of care fee that enjoyed such success while it was in effect from 2002 to 2004 in Bristol County … Sheriff Hodgson is suggesting a daily custodial care fee of $5, and a $5 fee for sick call visits, dental visits, a prescription eyeglasses fee and a $3 co-pay for prescription drugs.

Sheriff Hodgson gave an interview to a local TV station where he expanded on his plans.

About two weeks short of his one-year anniversary as commissioner of the Department of Correction, Harold W. Clarke said last week that he hopes Governor Deval Patrick reintroduces legislation to reform “mandatory minimum” sentences, which Clarke said have led to a surge in inmates, many with no history of violence.  “We’ve been really concerned with mandatory sentencing laws,” Clarke, 57, said at the department’s headquarters here. “We don’t want people backed up in prison that are not posing a risk to the community at large.”

On Nov. 3, the state’s 18 prisons held 11,380 inmates, putting them at 44 percent above capacity, Clarke said. The number is projected to grow by 5 to 7 percent next year, which would put the population at between 11,949 and 12,176.  The prison population declined steadily from 10,990 in 1999 to 9,825 in 2005, but it has surged since then, according to department statistics. The totals include convicted offenders, people awaiting trial, and individuals committed involuntarily – even though they have finished their sentences – because they still pose a danger, such as some sex offenders.

With crime rates remaining relatively stable, Clarke said, the main reason for the surge is mandatory-minimum sentences passed by Massachusetts since the 1980s. Many of the laws were approved as part of a harsh nationwide crackdown on drug offenses, but a growing number of judges, defense lawyers, prison administrators, and advocates for prisoners say they often do more harm than good.  As of Sept. 22, about 1,917 inmates were serving a mandatory minimum sentence for a drug offense, said Diane Wiffin, a prison system spokeswoman. Those inmates are ineligible for parole and are forbidden from participating in work-release programs or halfway houses that could ease overcrowding …

In the meantime, Clarke is moving forward with a plan to double-bunk some inmates at a maximum-security prison. As early as year’s end, he said, he plans to move 400 inmates from maximum-security MCI-Cedar Junction at Walpole to Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley.  Each of the 400 inmates would share a cell with another prisoner at Souza-Baranowski, which has 1,028 inmates. Cedar Junction would become a medium-security prison that takes in new inmates until they are classified, a role currently played by MCI-Concord. And Old Colony Correctional Center, a medium- and minimum-security prison in Bridgewater, would mostly house inmates with diagnoses of mental illness.

“There are some inmates out there who are going to make a choice whether to accept a roommate or kill their roommate,” he said. “That’s not an exaggeration …We don’t have many options – one, releasing offenders, and two, building more capacity – and I’m not sure that either of those are now palatable,” he said.

More details in the article at the Boston Globe.

There were more than 6,000 unclassified sex offenders statewide five years ago, but Wessner’s murder prompted dramatic action at the state and local levels to better track sex offenders, including the 302 registered Level 2 and Level 3 sex offenders on the Cape today. The state classifies sex offenders on a scale of 1 to 3, with Level 3 convicts considered at highest risk to commit another sexual assault.  There are now 2,000 unregistered sex offenders in Massachusetts, a 65 percent drop in five years …

Wessner’s murder put a spotlight on public safety officials’ inability to track down and classify the more than 6,000 sex offenders present in the state at the time. Before the murder exposed the state’s deficiencies in tracking sex offenders, the biggest problem was the sheer number of convicts ignoring the law that required them to register their address, said Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe.  “As people were released from prison, they were expected to comply voluntarily,” O’Keefe said. “But these were the people violating the laws in the first place, so what would give us any hope to believe they would voluntarily obey the notification provision?”

To help remedy the problem, O’Keefe and Barnstable County Sheriff James Cummings used $275,000 in state money in 2004 to start a sex offender management pilot program. Under the program, sex offenders in prison are classified as Level 1, Level 2 or Level 3 convicts before leaving prison, O’Keefe said. Although it remains the convicts’ responsibility to notify local police officials if they move to a new town, O’Keefe said it gives law enforcement officials a head start when convicts leave prison already classified and registered.  Earlier this month, Gov. Deval Patrick announced $1 billion in emergency budget cuts, including $80,000 trimmed from Barnstable County’s sex offender management program. The figure represents half of the program’s funding.  Officers have been making more than 100 visits a year to the reported homes and work places of registered sex offenders to make sure they actually live and work there, Cummings said. “We will only be able to do about half of that now,” he said.

The full article at the Cape Cod Times contains a great deal more operational data.

The document can be accessed from the Basic Stats list at the top right sidebar.

Massachusetts, one of the first states to employ it in 2006, now has about 700 people fitted with electronic bracelets that send signals via satellite to computer servers if they go places they shouldn’t — so-called “exclusion zones.” The Massachusetts law, which allows judges to impose electronic monitoring as a condition of a restraining order, has become a model for states such as Illinois and Oklahoma. The Oklahoma Senate voted 47-0 in April to enlist GPS technology to protect victims of domestic violence. The Illinois House of Representatives unanimously passed similar surveillance legislation last month.

Saving money is one of the main attractions.

GPS is a cost-effective alternative to prison, said Paul Lucci, deputy commissioner of the Massachusetts Probation Service, pointing to a chart taped to his office wall showing a state-wide surge in use of GPS — mostly to track sex offenders but also for others. “These people probably should be in jail but the cost of incarceration can be as much as $30,000 or $40,000 a year. The GPS costs about $3,400 a year,” he said. “I think it’s good on both sides. It is a device to protect the public. Although we can’t guarantee anyone’s safety, it provides an extra level of supervision on somebody. On the other side, for a defense attorney, it is in lieu of incarceration,” said Lucci.

However, while wearing a GPS bracelet clearly serves as a deterrent, there seems to be little longterm change in behavior.

North Carolina’s eastern Pitt County, a rural tobacco-growing region of 138,690 people, adopted the technology in late 2005 to relieve overcrowded jails by freeing more accused batterers on bond and tracking them with GPS before they go to trial. It was expanded last year to four more counties. In a measure of success, police dispatchers receive fewer calls involving the same person when an offender wears a GPS bracelet. Pitt County’s recidivism rate for domestic violence fell from 36 percent in 2004 to 14 percent this year, said Sgt. John Guard of local sheriff’s domestic violence unit. But once batterers finish the program and go off GPS, the rate shot back up to around 40 percent, he added.

There are other concerns.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael Linfield warned a Harvard Law School panel in February that GPS may offer only a “high tech illusion of safety” that fails to do more to protect women than traditional restraining orders, according to the law school’s newspaper, The Record … “It’s more than just slapping a GPS on a guy. You have to really have an intelligent coordinated approach to it and then it really can save lives,” said Diane Rosenfeld, a professor at Harvard Law School who helped draft the Massachusetts law.

Other uses for GPS, such as pre-trial monitoring, are also increasingly being used.  Hamilton County OH, for example, just ordered 200 more units specifically “to help jail overcrowding”.    This will push the number of units in Cincinnati to more than 600.  Charlotte NC just agreed to increase its monitoring budget by half a million this year to deal with an increase in crime.