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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.