Word: prisoners
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...least, more acceptable levels of overcrowding. In Guerra's new home state of Texas, a federal judge earlier this month gave officials until March 31 to improve inmates' living conditions or risk fines of up to $800,000 a day. The despairing Texas solution has been to close its prison doors briefly whenever it reaches the court-mandated limit. At least Guerra did not go scot-free...
...alternatives" to incarceration, which once inspired social workers and prison reformers, have become the new best hope of many beleaguered judges -- and jailers too. In courts across the nation, people convicted of nonviolent crimes, from drunken driving and mail fraud to car theft and burglary, are being told in effect to go to their rooms. Judges are sentencing them to confinement at home or in dormitory halfway houses, with permission to go to and from work but often no more -- not even a stop on the way home for milk. The sentences may also include stiff fines, community service...
Some supporters of alternative schemes look to the day when prison cells will be reserved exclusively for career criminals and the violent, with extramural penalties held out for the wayward of every other variety. "We're all against crime," says Herbert Hoelter, director of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, a nonprofit group that designed Guerra's package of penalties and persuaded the judge in his case to accept them. "But we need to convince people that there are other ways to get justice...
Anyway, who can afford to keep all offenders behind bars? Depending on the prison, it can cost from $7,000 to more than $30,000 to keep a criminal in a cell for a year. Most alternative programs, their backers argue, allow lawbreakers to live at home, saving tax dollars while keeping families intact and off welfare. Since the detainees can get or keep jobs, part of their salaries can be paid out as fines or as compensation to victims. And alternatives give judges a sentencing option halfway between locking up offenders and turning them loose...
...remains to be seen, however, whether the new programs will have much appeal for a crime-wary public and law-enforcement establishment. That prison time can be harrowing is to some minds its first merit. The living-room sofa is by comparison a painless instrument of remorse. "Until the alternatives are seen by the public as tough, there won't be support for them," says Thomas Reppetto of the Citizens Crime Commission in New York City. The problem is even plainer when the offenders are well heeled. Will justice be served if crooked stock traders are confined to their penthouses...