Nickel and Dimed 

Mecklenburg County's criminal justice system is so under-funded, understaffed and chaotic that some defendants who commit minor or nonviolent crimes are lingering in our county jail for months — and in some cases, perhaps even a year — before their trials. That in turn is running up the county taxpayers' bill for unnecessary incarceration at the county jail, which was built to hold pre-trial inmates for short periods.At least that's what Dr. Paul Friday, a criminal justice professor at UNC-Charlotte, believes. The court computer system is so antiquated that he had a hard time determining exactly what happened in about 17 percent of the cases he studied. They just seem to come to a halt with no resolution or further entries.

In other cases, some defendants who don't bond out before their trials are serving more jail time than they might have actually earned if found guilty of the crime they were charged with in the first place.

"These are people who would probably get probation if they plead guilty, but they wind up serving time in jail," said Friday.

Among those are people who can't afford bond and those who are ineligible for release because of the county's tough eligibility requirements and near-inability to monitor those it does release.

These problems and many others are among those Friday described in an eye-opening 80-page report he recently produced for Mecklenburg County at a cost of $41,000. When compared to similar sized locales across the country, Mecklenburg's court system not only lags far behind in resources, but has failed to adopt modern practices that have become fairly standard in other places that reduce jail time, save money and speed up trials.

According to American Bar Association standards, 100 percent of misdemeanor cases should be "disposed" or adjudicated within 90 days. In Mecklenburg County, only 31 percent of those awaiting trail in the jail have had their cases disposed within 90 days. ABA standards say 90 percent of felony cases should be dealt with within 120 days, but here, only 33 percent of the defendants awaiting trail at the jail have had their cases addressed by then. Though ABA standards dictate that all felony cases should be disposed within a year, in Mecklenburg County, only 83 percent are.

Meanwhile, the report found, cases are continued or postponed at least two times while an overworked and understaffed system attempts to deal with a barrage of cases.

According to bar association standards, the trial schedule should be accelerated for defendants who are stuck in jail because they were denied bond, chose not to take it or can't afford to bond out. Here again, Mecklenburg's court system lags behind the rest of the country. Friday found that some preference is given to incarcerated offenders before the probable cause hearing and the grand jury indictment, but after that, there's no system in place to speed case processing for those in jail versus those who bond out.

Here's how Mecklenburg County stacks up to similar sized areas in court system staffing:

¨ This county has 51 prosecutors, while Portland has 86 and Austin, 76. Our county lags even further behind in support staff, with Mecklenburg at 38, Portland at 132 and Austin at 108. Our system employs only four judicial assistants, while Portland's court system has 38 and Austin's system, 36.

¨ Charlotte had around twice the number of violent crimes as the two other comparable cities during the 2003-2004 reporting period. Charlotte had 7,194; Portland had 4,436; and Austin, 3,153.

¨ While Charlotte disposes of only 37 percent of its felony and misdemeanor cases within 90 to 120 days, Austin disposes of 100 percent during that time period and Portland disposes of 61 percent of its felonies and 83 percent of its misdemeanors.

Part of the problem, says North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys Director Margaret Dorer, is that in most states, counties fund their own court systems. In North Carolina, where the state has that responsibility, court-funding decisions don't necessarily take into account the amount of crime in a county or the number of people who live there. Who gets more resources, including much needed district attorneys or court support staff, is largely political, and with more rural legislators than urban ones in the legislature, it's hard for Mecklenburg to get additional funding for anything, no matter how badly it's needed.

Mecklenburg needs an additional 25 district attorneys and more staff to make it comparable to other similar sized metropolitan areas around the country, said Dorer,

"If I say to legislators, 'We are going to ask for 75 new district attorneys and 25 need to go to Mecklenburg,' they'll shut the door in your face," Dorer stated.

In recent years, the county has taken over some of the state's responsibility, funding 15 additional district attorneys. But the city and the county have traditionally been reluctant to do too much more for the court system financially, because they fear that state legislators will essentially take that to mean that Mecklenburg is willing to fund its own system and doesn't need any more funding from the state. So taxpayers here would end up paying twice to fund a court system that's as financially inefficient as this one.

Ultimately, it appears that fixing the problems that will save taxpayers money in the long run could take a big investment up front, because more than just additional staff is needed.

Before Mecklenburg can catch up with other similar sized cities, the entire system will have to be overhauled, Friday's report suggests. And before that can happen, it will have to be modernized. More low-risk offenders could be released before their trial dates if an effective screening program were put in place. Pretrial Services could help the system become more efficient by adding this screening to the one it already does when a defendant is arrested, except for one problem.

Currently, the report says, pretrial release offenders are "basically unsupervised" and the active caseload is around 2,500. Offenders report in by using an automated telephone entry system, which the report describes as "hardly fool-proof." Modernizing the court system will first mean overhauling the county's pretrial supervision system, among others. If the county invested in improved monitoring tools that have become standard elsewhere, like electronic monitoring, drug testing and home confinement, and further invested in the staff required to utilize them, it could reduce the number of offenses that make a defendant ineligible for pretrial release.

Of course, the report doesn't delve into how much all of this would cost, which in the end is the big question.

Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com.