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.