The Justice Reinvestment Act: An Overview

The Governor signed the Justice Reinvestment Act (S.L. 2011-192 (H 642)) into law last week. It makes substantial changes to the law of sentencing and corrections in North Carolina—easily the most sweeping changes to Structured Sentencing since its passage in 1994. I’m working on a detailed bulletin on how our sentencing laws will operate after Justice Reinvestment, but I wanted through this post to give a brief summary of some of the major changes. Here’s what the law does (with almost everything effective December 1, 2011): Lessens the distinction between community and intermediate punishment. The law retains the community/intermediate/active (“C/I/A”) framework on the sentencing grids but redefines what community and intermediate punishment mean. Under the new law, a community punishment will be one that includes supervised or unsupervised probation and any condition of probation except drug treatment court or special probation. The only requirement for a punishment to be intermediate under the new law is that it include supervised probation; no longer will the court be required to impose one of the six intermediate conditions (special probation, residential program, house arrest with electronic monitoring, intensive supervision, day reporting center, or drug treatment court) to make a sentence intermediate. Expands the authority delegated to probation officers, including authority to impose brief stints in jail. Through delegated authority, probation officers will be empowered to impose new conditions of probation in both community and intermediate cases, including brief stints of jail confinement. The jail confinement condition is limited to 2- or 3-day periods that [...]