Considering The Alternatives

By Richard Lacayo

Jim Guerra sells cars today in Dallas. He used to sell cocaine in Miami. In 1984, after being robbed and even kidnaped by competitors, he decided it was time for a career change. He gave up drugs -- and the drug trade -- and headed out to Texas for a new law-abiding life. The old life caught up with him anyway. In December 1985 federal agents arrested him on charges connected to his Florida coke dealing. After pleading guilty last spring, Guerra faced 15 years in prison.

He never went. These days Guerra, 32, is putting in time instead of doing it, by logging 400 hours over 2 1/2 years as a fund raiser and volunteer for Arts for People, a nonprofit group that provides artists and entertainers for the critically ill at Dallas-area hospitals and institutions. His sentence, which also includes a $15,000 fine, means that a prison system full to bursting need not make room for one more. He sees a benefit to the community too. "I just love the job," he says. "I'll probably continue it after the sentence is up."

The work may be admirable, but is a stint of public service the just deserts of crime? Many people would say no, but they may not be the same ones who must contend with the bedlam of American prisons. In recent years, a get- tough trend toward longer sentences and more of them has had a predictable consequence. Even as crime rates generally declined during the first half of the 1980s, inmate numbers tracked wild ballistics of their own, increasing by nearly 60%. The nation's prison population now stands at a record 529,000, a total that grows by 1,000 each week; new cells are not being built in matching numbers. While virtually everyone convicted is a candidate for prison, many experts believe perhaps half the inmate population need not be incarcerated at all.

The dismal result is evident almost everywhere. Throughout the country, convicts have been crammed into existing facilities until their numbers have pressed against the outer limits of constitutional tolerance. Currently in 38 states the courts have stepped in to insist on, at the 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.

So "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 and a brief, bracing taste of prison.

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.

It 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?

Most such misgivings will remain unsettled while officials try out the range of possibilities before them. In September, suburban Nassau County, near New York City, began testing one of the most talked about new approaches, electronic house arrest. Probationers selected for the program are required to be housebound when not at work. To make sure they comply, each wears a kind of futuristic ball and chain: a 4-oz. radio transmitter that is attached to the ankle with tamperproof plastic straps. The device broadcasts a signal to a receiver hooked up to the wearer's home phone, which in turn relays it to a computer at the probation department. If the wearer strays more than 100 ft., the computer spits out a note for the probation officer.

"They can't leave home without us," quips Donald Richberg, coordinator of the program. Following an initial outlay of $100,000, the project has cost the county only about $10 a day per probationer. The anklets have been tried in at least eight states since New Mexico introduced electronic monitoring in 1983. The cost accounting looks favorable, but technical gremlins have been showing up too, resulting in reports of false disappearances or failures to report real ones.

Until the high-tech methods are perfected, more conventional alternatives remain the most popular. About 30 states have funded "intensive probation supervision," in which participants are typically required to work, keep a curfew, pay victims restitution and, if necessary, receive alcohol or drug counseling. Instead of the usual caseload -- the nationwide average is 150 -- a probation officer in such experiments oversees just 25 people. Even with the added staff expense, the programs still cost less than incarceration.

The experience of Ron Rusich, 29, a house painter in Mobile, was typical. In 1984 he received a 15-year sentence for burglary. But an intensive probation scheme used in his state since 1982 eventually sent him back outside, and back to work, under strict supervision. A 10 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew was enforced during the first three months after release by at least one surprise visit each week from the corrections officer. There were three other weekly meetings, with restrictions eased as his time in the program increased. Living at home, as he was required to do for 2 1/2 years, Rusich cost the state $8.72 a day, less than a third the expense of keeping him in prison. The experience was a "lifesaver," says Rusich, who is now on parole.

Alabama and a number of other states also have a similar but more restrictive option: the work-release center, a sort of halfway house where offenders must live out their sentences. The system allows them to work, often at jobs found by the local government, but maintains more of the trappings of confinement, such as dormitory life and security checks. In Indiana, where there are ten such centers, offenders do prison time first, with the hope of work release as a carrot for good behavior. That method lets the state consider, through observation and psychological testing, which inmates are likely to succeed in the program. "We want to see how they'll perform," says Vaughn Overstreet of the department of corrections.

A few localities have resorted to the most low-tech deterrent of all: shame. Sarasota County, Fla., is trying the "scarlet letter" approach, by requiring motorists convicted of drunk driving to paste bumper stickers on their cars announcing the fact. In Lincoln County, Ore., a few felons have even been given a choice between prison and publishing written apologies, accompanied by their photographs, in local newspapers. Roger Smith, 29, paid $294.12 to announce his contrition in two papers after a guilty plea growing out of a theft charge. A published apology "takes the anonymity out of crime," insists Ulys Stapleton, Lincoln County district attorney. "People can't blend back into the woodwork."

Do alternatives work? That depends on what they are asked to accomplish. If the goal is cost efficiency, the answer is a qualified yes. They often seem cheap enough, but there are concerns that they may actually add to the bill for corrections because judges will use them as a halfway measure to keep a rein on people who would otherwise go free in plea bargains. James K. Stewart, director of a Justice Department research institute, contends that the cost to society of crimes committed by those not imprisoned must be factored in as well. For certain offenders, Stewart concludes, "prison can be a real, real cheap alternative."

If the goal is a society with fewer criminals, then firm judgments are even harder to draw. Criminology is a dispiriting science. Its practitioners commonly caution that no criminal sanction, no matter how strict, no matter how lenient, seems to have much impact on the crime rate. But prison does at least keep criminals off the street. Home confinement cannot guarantee that security. Some data, tentative and incomplete, do suggest, however, that felons placed on intensive probation are less likely to commit crimes again than those placed on traditional probation or sent to prison. Joan Petersilia, a Rand Corp. researcher, says the recidivism rate of such offenders is impressively low, "usually less than 20%." And many keep their jobs, she adds. "That's the real glimmer of hope -- that in the long run these people will become functioning members of the community."

The benefits of alternatives will remain mostly theoretical unless more judges can be persuaded to use them. That may require changes in some mechanisms of government. For instance, fines are a crucial part of many alternative sentencing packages. But they frequently go unpaid. Courts and prosecutors are not good at collecting them, says Michael Tonry of the nonprofit Castine Research Corp., which specializes in law-enforcement issues. He proposes that banks and credit companies be deputized to fetch delinquent fines, with a percentage of the take as their payment. "To make fines work as a sentencing alternative," he says, "they must be both equitable, based on a person's ability to pay, and collectible."

One essential for getting courts to consider alternative sentencing, says University of Chicago Law Professor Norval Morris, is to develop a publicly understood "exchange rate" between prison time and other forms of punishment, a table of penalties that judges can use for guidance on how to sentence offenders. "We should be able to say that for this crime by this ; criminal, either x months in prison, or a $50,000 fine plus home detention for a year plus x number of hours of community service," Morris contends.

A similar table is already in use in Minnesota, where alternative sentencing has become well established since the 1978 passage of a law that limits new sentences to ensure that prison capacity is not exceeded by the total number of inmates. The crime rate has not increased, supporters boast. Other states remain far more hesitant. Still, the present pressures may yet bring a day when the correctional possibilities will be so varied and so widely used that prison will seem the "alternative" form of punishment.

With reporting by Anne Constable/Washington and Don Winbush/Mobile