The "NC criminal justice policy cycle" is repeating | Hour 1

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all of the links, become a patron, go to thepeakclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. And as we always do on Tuesdays at twelve o'clock at high noon, as it were, well it was because it's like five minutes ago. Here's Andrew Dunn. He is the contributing columnist over at the Charlotte Observer, but also more importantly, he is the publisher of the long Leaf Politics newsletter, website, podcast and all of that. Hello Andrew, how are you, sir? I am doing well. How about yourself? I am doing well as well. So okay. My caveat here is always I don't make election predictions, mainly because I'm terrible at doing so, so I just I quit doing it. You, on the other hand, we've discussed this. You wade into these waters. Nay, you dive into these waters, and you thereby expose yourself to accusations of false predictions, making it wrong, and nobody ever remembers if you get it right. That's been my experience. Yeah. Yeah, So there's really it's like lose lose win kind of a situation or for you. So let's start with the piece that you've got posted at long leafpol dot com long Leaf Politics headlined could Democrats really flip the North Carolina House? And you say that Republican donors are apparently getting nervous about Democrats flipping the house. So I have to first ask, uh, why do you say this? This is literally the first I have heard of this fear. Is this a real fear? I think it is real, as I'm hearing it from several different sources, and it seems to be backed up at least a little bit by a new piece from WUNC that came out last week. Apparently both sides, the Republicans and the Democrats side, are are telling their donors that the houses in play this year now to further caveat things. They of course have all the incentive to play up that sort of drama because fear raises money, and you know, Hope raises money as well, so the Democrats are saying, you know, just give us five dollars and we can flip the house, and Republican sun raisers are then able to say, give us five dollars or the Democrats are the house right, so that they're always incentivized to playoff drama a little bit. However, I do think there is an outside chance that it could come true, and I'm sure we'll get into that here in a second. Yeah, well, just one just to piggyback on what you just said. I heard a long time ago from a campaign guy who was like a Republican campaign guy who's like, yeah, I mean there's. A fine line that you walk there. You want to you want to let people, you know, be kind of afraid but not too afraid. They think all is lost, and it doesn't sound. Like point yeah, and I get I'm I'm on Roy Cooper's email list and somehow I got at it, and about every single email is saying, oh, this is a neck and neck race. You know, we're we're at risk of being outspent. And I'm like, what planet are you guys living on? But I guess it's working for him. So you heard it here first, folks, a first hand account politicians will lie to get you to give them money. That's a yes. I am shocked. I am shocked, And. There's not really a ten thousand match if you ever get an email that says. That that's true true. I did notice ap Dylon sent out a tweet I think yesterday where Cooper is now using James Carville the Raging Cajun in his fundraising e blasts, and I feel like, you know, this would be a really good opportunity for some North Carolina political Press Corps reporters to ask Cooper whether he agrees with the Raging Cajun's advice for Democrats if they win back control of the legislature to pack the US Supreme Court and to add Puerto Rico and d C as states. I'm curious, do you think anybody will ask Roy Cooper if he if he agrees with it? No? I mean the media only plays guilt by association for Republicans. Right, Yeah. I call it the defend or disavow game, and they only play it with Republicans and it's really frustrating. But well, I do look forward to the first like seventeen questions about hockey being tossed at Roy Cooper is. The crucial issue. Yes, that's so. Any thoughts on that whole quote unquote scandal, I. Mean, it's it's it'll be forgotten by election day, but you know, I do get you know, there's the comparisons to cal Cunningham and the barbecue Gate incident from gosh, that's been a long time ago, six years ago now, yeah. Yeah, so it's the same sort of thing. I mean, that wasn't the reason that Cunningham lost. It was the later scandals. So I think you can probably put this in the same sort of bucket, like a manufactured summertime have some fun types of deal. Yeah, definitely manufactured. Let's all right, So let's get to some of the details here as to whether or not Democrats would actually pick up what they would need twelve seats in order to flip control of the North Carolina House. You think that's possible. That's right, twelve seats. It is conceivably possible. So basically, and I rely heavily on the Civitas Partisan Index that the John Locke Foundation puts out. I mean that is kind of that is the gold standard in getting the lay of the land General Assembly races in North Carolina, and going by that, you've got five seats that are are Dean's toss ups, and Republicans actually hold most of those toss up seats right now. And then you've got another, call it fifteen to twenty seats on the far end that are lean Republicans. And so you know, in a true blue wave year, you could expect as many as half of the lean Republicans to go, you know, to. Flip from red to blue. However, and if that were, if everything were to break right in that case, you know, the Democrats sweep the toss ups and get half of the lean Republicans, you could conceivably have a flipped House. However, that does require a lot of things to go right. And the thing that you know, just the wrong numbers ignore is candidate quality. And you know, especially among the toss ups, Republicans have really strong incumbents. You know, people like Tricia Cossam here in Charlotte, people like Mike sheetzelt Up in Waite County, Jonathan Almond and Caveri's County who have really gotten a strong following, who are well liked, well known in their districts, and so they're going to be insulated somewhat from the national trends because of that. However, there are a good number of lean Republican district ulsters who are Republicans who should be worried right now because if they're not out there actively campaigning, it's they've gotten used to not running a vigorous campaign because their district is just enough in their favor. They're the ones that who should really be worried. Yeah, a couple of as you call them, generic Republicans, and that's the last thing you want to be in a blue wave year. People can read more at the in the newsletter loongleafpol dot com, where they can also read this story about Arena's Law, named after Arena Zarutska, and what you call the familiar North Carolina prison capacity problem. So you talk about the North Carolina criminal justice policy cycle. So what is this policy cycle? Yeah, and it's funny people don't necessarily recognize it because it plays out over the course of decades, but it's happened again and again in North Carolina history, where the General Assembly will pass a law that's meant to keep dangerous people, you know, in jail, or in prison, and then pretty soon after that, everyone starts warning that the jails and prisons are getting overcrowded and they don't have enough staff. And then then comes the pressure to soften the law or to come up with loopholes in order to push people out of prison or jail. And that last part is exactly where we seem to be right now with Arena's Law, which was passed last year. Yeah, we're already seeing it. I've got a press release here from the Mecklenburg County Sheriff Gary not my fault McFadden, who is you know, saying, Oh, We're going to have to reopen Jail North because of all the overcrowd And I've been saying this for a while now, which is like, how do you see the population growth that North Carolina has seen over the last you know, thirty years. And the last new jail that we built in Mecklimberg County was like twenty five years ago. I was here for it. I remember when that went up, and it's like, we haven't added any new jail space of anything. We took a bunch of jail beds offline up at Jail North, and so how do you justify this massive population growth without providing more jail facilities, because it just doesn't make any sense unless you believe somehow that criminals are not also moving to Charlotte. Like that doesn't make any sense. It doesn't. It makes zero sense. And mekex Slimberg County is actually kind of unique in that way. I mean, Waite County is building a big new jail. I think Cleveland County has a new jail, and Gaston County has been increasing capacity for whatever reason, though it seems like in Mecklenburg County does not seem to feel the need to do Likewise, No. They yeah, they cut the budget. What I don't know, was it six years ago or so? They closed Jail North and they don't fund it. It's it is not a priority, a top priority for Mecklimber County commissioners. Just look at their budget. It's it is like lesser funded than parks and rec right, So they just they don't prioritize it. All right, So this cycle starts where you're like, oh, we're going to crack down. You go through some of the history of this, which I found pretty fascinating, going back to Governor Jim Hunt. Then Jim Martin comes in, and then of course things get dialed back, some of the same arguments get made. Then there comes nineteen ninety two the structured sentencing as well. Again and again you say, the criminal justice debate is dominated by the same managerial problem, how to make the prison population fit the available space. And you argue that's backwards. It's exactly backwards. And we've done that for the l fifty years. Is that we've let our jail in prison capacity decide what sort of justice we're going to deliver in North Carolina, where it should be the other way around. And it's played out again and again and again. You know, your early eighties, you had the Fair Sentencing Act that was supposed to crack down and make sure that bad guys were in prison, and then almost immediately, within just two to three years after that law was passed, the General Assembly was coming up with actually a prison population cap. They capped the total number of people that could be in prison at any one time, and so the jails were having to, you know, do a one in, one out policy where every time somebody got sent to prison, they had to go find another person to let out, which is just an atrocious way to deliver justice in my opinion. But it you know, we don't have that cap anymore, but the kind of those same mechanisms still exists. You know, by and large we operate under the nineteen nineties structured sentencing law is kind of still the overarching principle, and it's very technocratic. You know, they have computer modeling where if you adjust one law, then you need to go adjust another law so that you're balancing the right number of people in prison. And to me, it doesn't make any sense. I mean, what you should do is that is decide, you know, what are the punishments that we should have for breaking certain laws. You know, what types of people can we you know, should be behind bars, and then figure out based on all that how much prison capacity that we have. But for whatever reason, North Carolina has never done it that way. Yeah, no, just I mean that sounds rational, so therefore probably will never happen. But yeah, if you take a list of all of the crimes list, you know, the number of crimes is a percentage of the population, you know, factor that in, say, okay, this is then how much space we're going to need, and then build the jails based on those numbers versus you know, writing the criminal code in order to juice the sentence stats in order to not overcrowd. It's completely backwards. So it's a really good piece. And thanks for doing the historical look back on this. I found that fascinating. I appreciate it, and Andrew. As always, we appreciate your time. Keep up the good work, sir, I appreciate it. You know, stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life, and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video started in nineteen ninety seven and Mint Hill, North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in a week or two. Memorial videos for your love ones, videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or just your family stories all told through images. That's what your photos and videos are. They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit Creative video dot Com. Thanks again to Andrew Dunn. I'm going to go over some of the high points here in his piece about this prison capacity problem cycle that we keep going through. He says this has been going on for like fifty years. North Carolina has mostly said its criminal justice policy backwards. Right. He talked about Jim Hunt and the Fair Sentencing Act. This was in the nineteen eighties. When Hunt did this, the ink was barely dry before the alarm bells started going off about prison overcrowding. By the mid nineteen eighties, a federal lo lawsuit threatened to take over control of the state prison system. Once again, I feel they need to point out that this is all under Democrat control. Okay, Democrat governor, Democrat, House, Democrat Senate. Right, these are the guys that were all in charge, Guys like Roy Cooper, one of the leaders in the Senate at the time. So this is what they were doing. Nineteen eighty seven, the General Assembly enacts a formal prison population cap as part of the settlement of that litigation. Okay, so they passed the crackdown, Get Tough on Crime bill, and then a couple of years later they pass a cap on the prison population as part of the settlement because they did not build enough jails for their get Tough on crime new laws. Right the Fair Sentencing Act. Roy Cooper again running for Senate as governor right oversaw much of the same sorts of criminal justice policies. So thinking, I don't know, maybe people should be aware of this history. Right in eighty seven, they put the cap in place. The governor at the time, a Republican, Jim Martin, reported that inmates were serving just thirty percent of their sentences on average, and he called for a four hundred ninety million dollar bond in order to build ninety five hundred new prison cells, because that's what you would need to do if you've got a prison population. These are people that have. Been convicted, right, convicted, and they're serving thirty percent of their sentences, and so Martin's like, well, we obviously need more more bedspace. So for half billion dollars we can add like ninety five hundred new cells. And in the Democrat controlled legislature it went precisely nowhere. Nowhere. Democrats did not say, this is not necessarily a new phenomenon on the left, the not wanting to build jails, right, it's not really a new thing. Get this. This is a quote in Andrew Dunn's piece from the then Democratic Party leader Lawrence Davis, who told reporters, quote, tell me if this sounds familiar, building more prison cells may help the overcrowding problem in the short run, but it does not do anything for the conditions that lead to overcrowding. Well, what would be those conditions? What conditions would lead to overcrowding? Lack of jail space obviously, so when you build more jail space then you would have, ye, no more overcrowding. But what are the conditions that lead to the overcrowding. Lawrence Davis, I suspect would throw would say, it's not about you know, throwing money at the problems. We just need more services. We need to you know, reach these people younger, and we need more like maybe violence interruptor programs. We need as a community to step forward and you know, give these people jobs and whatever. Like there's always some other thing rather than the punishment, right, And then in ninety two came these structured sentencing matrix. I do have some messages here, do do do do? Let's go over to the text line. Mark says, we need to build companies and jails where they work and live with no privileges. They work, they eat and sleep, rinse and repeat. So sort of like what is it the Philadelphia Sports where they have the jail in the stadium. It's kind of like that, except you have it at like companies or something. Eight oh three number says, I see the problem with the prison space issue is that prisons are entirely too comfortable for prisoners. Bring back the chain gang. Nine A zero number says, bring back the chain gang. I don't think we're going to be doing that, Chuck says to Carlos Brown Junior does not need to be any more competent. He only needs to be well rested, very very awake, and conscious when sentencing is carried out to end his existence. Hopefully. The first five shots are a little off center, and they have Okay, so I'm not going to read the rest of that Chuck. That's so. Today De Carlos Brown Junior was in federal court and because he is crazy, he began screaming and yelling at the judge and at the lawyers and talking about man made material and his body and all this other stuff, which is as expected. They're going to, you know, send him off to some institution where they're they're going to treat him. They're going to jack them up with a bunch of drugs, get his schizophrenia under control, and then once he is of clear mind, sound mind, then they will be able to try him. Because here's the thing. You have to be able to participate in your own defense as a defendant, right otherwise you're going to end up in a mistrial or the verdict gets overturned on appeal. And I am not interested in wasting that kind of money. I don't like the idea that you have to, you know, make sure somebody knows what they did was wrong or something, or knows what they did and you know, has a you know, perfect mental clarity and all of that. I mean, who among us really has that? But but no, like that's these are the laws. And so you can complain about the laws. But unless you're going to change those laws, then you have to operate within those laws. And if somebody cannot participate in their own defense because they are insane, then the laws says. You got to get them to a point of sanity if you can. And so that's what's going to happen with the Carlos Brown Junior, Mark says, if you have smarter criminal, they won't get caught. You won't need the jail space. Oh that's interesting. So we need to better educate the criminals so they don't get caught, and that would reduce the crunch on the jail space. I like it. That's that's the kind of outside the box thinking really that I expect from the audience here. Really that is. And then seven oh four says, I remember when I was a kid, they did away with inmates doing roadwork. They said it was cruel and unusual punishment, but it was fine for my father to do that work up until the day he retired. Well, yes, that's voluntary versus involuntary. Yeah, cruel. I don't know a how cruel and unusual. It wasn't actually unusual. It was quite usual as a matter of fact, right all right? In nineteen ninety two. The Generalists then passes a thing called structured sentencing, and as you heard Andrew Dunne earlier in the hour, he said, this is basically the framework under which we still operate. It created a detailed matrix for determining what a punishment would be based on, sorry, what a punishment would be based on the severity of the crime and the offender's passed criminal history. Right, So you would look down, you look at this chart. It's like a big, like a like a tic tac toe board kind of chart, and you're looking at it. It's like, okay, severity of the crime, it's this kind of a felony, how many you know, past convictions and you go this way, go up, go right, and okay, here's your sentence, right, structured sentencing. And why would you do that? Why did the General Assembly do that? Because you had judges that were cutting everybody loose. It's like Roy Cooper on every bench throughout the state, just letting everybody loose. So they're like, okay, let's take some of this control away from these judges because they're crazy and so and they're you know, jeopardizing public safety again. Nineteen ninety two, this was the crack cocaine epidemic. This was the member Hillary Clinton was out there talking about super predators and stuff. Or maybe that was Joe Biden. I forget no, I think it was Hillary Clinton. So even Democrats were doing this tough on crime stick at the time. And then of course, right comes the jail over crowding problem. Oh my gosh, we have all these people, we passed these laws. We're going to make it more difficult for these criminals to walk the streets. I mean, yay for civil society, but boo, jail over crowding. We got to find a way to let them out. And then comes twenty eleven. The Justice Reinvestment Act dealt primarily with prison capacity. The main provisions included preventing judges from revoking probation or parole for technical violations and pushed people convicted of misdemeanors to serve their sentence in county jails rather than prison in order to free up the prisons space. Again and again, North Carolina's criminal justice debate has been dominated by the same managerial problem done rights. How to make the prison population fit the available space. And that is backwards, That is absolutely backwards. Find out how many crimes are committed, find out how many people commit those crimes on average in a year, find out how long those sentences last on average, and then you build the bed space to house that population based on the data. You should look at the data first to inform your decision about the bed space, not have bedspace numbers, and then write laws and let people out early in order to keep the jails from being overcrowded and the prison prisons from being overcrowded. He says, figure out how much jail and prison space we need and then build that right, And that's the problem. Now, the cycle, as he describes it, we are already back around to the final part of the cycle before it resets. The final part of the cycle is how do we find a way to let people out? Right? Here's the story from Julia Coyn at the Charlotte Observer. The federal government soon could be footing the bill to help fix jammed jails caused by North Carolina lawmakers and Arena's law. See it's the North Carolina lawmaker's fault that the jail population Mecklenburg jail population is too large for the current capacity, because you know, the state lawmakers. They went past Arena's law that said you can't just release everybody all willy nilly, right, you have to actually hold them. You got to give them actual bail and bond amounts. Right, And so it's the lawmaker's fault, right. No, no, no, it's not the local county commissioner's fault for not building more jails to accommodate population explosion. No, no, no, it's the state lawmaker's fault for trying to keep violent criminals in jail on bail. From the Charlotte Observer, again, this is to Andrew Dunn's point, we are in the third stage of the cycle of this criminal justice policy cycle, where the state cracks down with some you know, tough on crime or tough on crime legislation. Stage two, people complain about the overcrowded jails. Stage three, let's find a way to let people out. Okay, that's been the cycle for the last fifty years in North Carolina, and we're still not building any jails now in North Carolin or in Mecklenburg County. We actually have an extra facility, and there are a lot of people that have been clamoring for jail North which used to be the juvenile detention facility. They wanted that reopened, and Gary McFadden, the sheriff. Not my fault, McFadden, because nothing is ever his fault. Oh there was another jail death by the way, also not his fault. Anyway, the sheriff has said like, oh, I wanted to be reopened. We were running it, but we had to close it. We didn't have the money, we didn't have staffing and all of this. But now because of those dastardly Republicans up in Raleigh that were outraged at the murder of Arena Zarutzka on the Charlotte light rail line by De Carlos Brown Junior, they then started tightening up the pre trial release policies and started saying the laws are now like if these are new classifications for various crimes, like you don't just get to do a cashless bail, You can't just walk out. You can't be in and out of intake quicker than it takes the cop to fill out the paperwork for your arrest. Basically. Okay, So last month, sheriff, not my fault. McFadden said that the law had caused Charlotte's jail to creep over capacity and to fix the mess, which worsened conditions inside the main Mecklimberg County Detention center. McFadden announced on May nineteenth that he was reopening an old jail known as Jail North. How do you do that? Though? With what money? McFadden's announcement came just after the county passed its budget, which did not include funds for an additional jail. An internal email obtained by The Charlotte Observer last week suggests that the funding could come from housing federal inmates. Yes, federal inmates. The federal government pays local jails to house their federal inmates. We don't do that. Do you know why? Because not my fault. McFadden kicked them all out. Yeah, so he is reversing his own powers. Yep, he's going to Okay, maybe maybe you know, mistakes were made, I mean, not by him, obviously, probably somebody else is to blame for that decision. John Baker, federal public defender for the Western District of North Carolina, emailed lawyers who work and accept court appointed clients in the region's federal district courts in late May, confirming that men detained and awaiting state and federal court hearings will be housed at Jail North once it reopens. Jail North previously had seventy two beds for teenagers, but Baker wrote in his email that up to three hundred and fifty federal detainees would eventually be held there. He heralded the development as a vast improvement over our current detention situation. Now, I wonder what McFadden is going to tell all of those neighborhood activists who turned out at that public meeting a few months ago. Remember we covered it on the program, and they were like, we need to reopen Jail North for the juveniles to be close to home so mom and dad or just mom can come and you know, see their babies and all of this. They need the support services, they need to be close to home and all of that. But now he's going to turn it into a federal detainee warehouse because it pays one hundred and sixty dollars per inmate per day. So kudos to the sheriff for fixing the problem he created. This would bring in twenty million dollars, according to the Observer's math on that. In a phone interview, US attorney. Russ Ferguson said he and McFadden started talking about bringing the federal dollars back home to Charlotte months ago. The sheriff got his team together and got it together, got it put together really quickly. Me the US Marshals and the sheriff all have a shared goal of putting federal inmates there either later this summer or early this fall. McFadden's office was less it's been transparent this week about the plan, but that's probably not his fault either. The lack of transparency not his fault. His public information officers three times told the Observer there was no agreement to house federal inmates in place, and declined to make the sheriff available for an interview. After the newspaper said that it would be reporting on the email. The internal email, as well as Russ Ferguson's comments, McFadden acknowledged the possibility of a partnership with the federal government in a statement late Friday afternoon, not mentioned in this article. Why the overcrowding is occurring, I mean they blame Arena's law, right. They say it's a mess that was created by North Carolina lawmakers with Arena's law. No, the root cause is a failure by the sheriff's office and the county commission to fund a new jail. That's the problem. We have a facility. If there's overcrowding in the Mecklinberg County jail. You can reopen Jail North if you dedicate revenue for it. Dedicate dedicate funds for it. That's on the county commission, and that's on the sheriff or the shriff to make that pitch, to make that part of the budget proposal, to argue for it, to use his bully pulpit to call for more money, to put pressure on his fellow Democrat county commissioners. And I suspect that's why it won't happen. Why it hasn't happened. Right, he doesn't want to cross the county commissioners because they control his budget, so he won't do it. And part of the reason why suicidal empathy, this kid glove treatment, right, and a decarceration philosophy that has just completely warped the Democrat party. It's just decarceration. You have a judge in Mecklimberg County that was a decarceration advocate, so tell me how do you think that works out? All right? That'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.