Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 5, 1993 TAG: 9303050369
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
ROANOKE'S JAMPACKED JAIL
THE COST of America's fondness for putting people in prison is no theoretical abstraction. Roanokers, for example, may soon be forking over $5 more each year for their local auto-license decals, and 3 more cents per pack of cigarettes - for the specific purpose of expanding the city jail and juvenile detention home.By City Manager Bob Herbert's reckoning, those tax increases would bring in an additional $630,000 annually - enough to cover the debt retirement of the $6.3-million local share of a $13.8-million bond issue for the two projects.
As is the case in many other Virginia localities, Roanoke's jail is overflowing, in part because it holds many inmates that a similarly overcrowded state prison system once would have taken. The facility routinely houses more than double the 216 inmates for which it was designed and built not many years ago.
Jails aren't supposed to be luxury hotels. Neither should they be crammed to double their intended capacity.
First, such serious overcrowding creates a volatile mix among a population whose criminality varies widely in gravity; many awaiting trials, don't forget, have not been convicted of any crimes. Second, such overcrowding strains the ability of jail staff to perform their jobs safely.
When the talk turns to tax increases, the favorite (or the least objectionable, anyway) always seems to be the cigarette tax. It was less than a year ago, for example, that Roanoke raised its local tax from 10 cents to 14 cents per pack. But old-hat as the cigarette tax may be, there's good reason for turning to it: If it causes people to smoke less, so much the better.
The fee for the auto decal has stood at $15 for nearly 20 years. The biggest sources of local revenue are taxes - real estate, personal property, sales - that, because they're imposed as a percentage of value, generally rise with inflation. The auto decal, however, is a flat fee per vehicle: Even if raised to $20, it still would be less than half the 1973 fee in dollars adjusted for inflation.
Governments one day will come to their senses and realize that the ultimate and most cost-effective solution isn't bigger prisons and jails, but fewer people sentenced to them. In this regard, greater access to treatment programs for drug offenders and alcoholics, to remedial education and job training for the unemployed, and to alternative sentencing for nonviolent criminals, would help. Even better, of course, would be preventing crime in the first place.
With roughly 300 offenders in community-diversion programs, Roanoke is making use of alternative punishments. If the state helped more, as it should, a considerably stronger commitment could be made to efforts to prevent crime and reduce recidivism. Meantime, the city must deal with the problem of the moment: the jampacked jail.
Memo: Correction ***CORRECTION***