Does Hendricks County Coddle Criminals?

One of the reasons you can sleep soundly at night is that you and your neighbors are being protected by a network of top-quality law enforcement agencies and a judicial system tasked with punishing those who break the law and deterring others from doing the same.

But you’ll hear a lot of criticism and complaints from uninformed residents about how our county’s officials and employees go about their important jobs. (We’ll ignore the fact most of the complainers would be among the fastest to call 911 if they saw someone lurking outside their home.)

Scott Flood is a weekly contributor in his Active Citizenship column. Flood is a former Plainfield School Board member who has long been active in civic education.

As with so many complaints and myths about local government, it’s rooted in a lack of understanding about what really happens and why things are done that way.  I’m neither a legal nor law enforcement expert, but I know a lot of both and they’ve always been happy to answer my questions. I’ll focus on two of the biggest areas of complaints: the value of plea bargains and why criminals don’t serve their full sentences.

When that person did that bad thing in your community, it upset you, and you were so happy when they were charged with a long list of crimes that carry long sentences. You couldn’t wait to see this person hauled into a packed courtroom in front of a jury who will convict them and a judge who will make sure they never come back to the county. Well, that’s how it happens on TV’s “Law & Order.” Indiana counties don’t quite operate that way.

Most of your neighbors (probably you, too) want to see criminals convicted, then receive the longest sentence possible. So when you read that the bad person had received a plea bargain from the prosecutor, you were furious! They only have to say they’re guilty of a couple of those things when they did all of them? That’s unfair.

Maybe so, but it reflects the realities of county government and what taxpayers think it’s worth. One of the biggest is the cost of conducting trials – especially jury trials. As a school board member, I was a party to litigation many times. While civil litigation and criminal prosecution are different, I knew that the work involved in simply preparing for a single trial – not the cost of the trial itself – was normally in the $50,000 to $75,000 range. If the prosecutor can get criminal defendants to confirm their guilt in return for a smaller sentence, taxpayers don’t have to fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax increases for more manpower and all the trial costs.

The bad people know they’re guilty and are going to be off the street for a while. Who wants to keep having that judge and attorneys treating you badly in front of everyone? Getting out in one year beats waiting the whole three you were expecting.

And that “getting out” part is the second misunderstanding. Folks don’t understand why the judge doesn’t just say, “You’re going to serve X number of years,” and that’s that. Instead, when the bad people are convicted, they get a sentence like “4 to 8 years.” Why would anyone let them out early?

I think we can all agree we wouldn’t want to spend even a night in jail, not to mention a state penitentiary. Because correctional facilities are full of people with poor decision-making skills and untreated mental health challenges, they can be extremely dangerous places. Between drugs and gangs, it’s hard to steer clear of the fights or other activities that mean more charges and a longer sentence. That’s why the courts give most inmates a great incentive to behave. For every day you spend not getting in more trouble, we’ll knock a day off your sentence. Instead of not getting out until your kid is in high school, you can go home while they’re still in grade school. The more inmates pursuing incentives, the fewer problems for the corrections staff. That reduces costs and taxes, too.

These two examples are a great demonstration of why every taxpayer should know the truth instead of lazily repeating those old myths. The next time you hear someone bash a plea-bargain or complain about a bad person’s sentence, you can explain to them how things really work, because now you know. The better we understand local government, the better our local government becomes.