DRUG users. Wife beaters. Child killers. Guess what these criminals have in common?
They may be among the first New Yorkers to benefit from budget cuts, under hush-hush plans cooked up by the city’s Department of Probation.
In a secret meeting this month, Probation officials laid out for some 25 Brooklyn Supreme Court justices a road map for cutting the time many criminals must report to probation officers.
Judges typically sentence certain classes of felon to a few months in jail followed by five years’ probation, during which time the offender can be shipped to prison for any infraction.
A judge friend says he was told at the Brooklyn meeting that Probation would seek to cut short five-year probationary sentences to as little as one year, and three-year sentences to three months.
But after I spent a day nosing around the secret meeting, Commissioner of Probation Martin Horn called to insist that his people are merely “restructuring our caseloads.”
Horn insisted that “in no case will we recommend anyone [be put off probation] unless they’ve completed half their [probation] sentence.” And he said no one will be entirely released after three months – only that his agency is starting a 90-day “stabilization phase” for low-risk people.
Horn stressed that officials can only recommend that judges end probation early – not order it. But judges say official recommendations are treated as gospel.
One judge upset by what’s termed a Brooklyn “pilot project” is a liberal do-gooder type – he fears the threat of shorter probations will encourage his bench brethren to order longer prison sentences.
“The notion that for five years [a criminal] is living under the gun, with the threat of state prison if he falls off the straight and narrow, that provides some kind of control,” the judge said.
Who gets probation? Drug offenders, sure. Also, types such as Denise Solero of Brooklyn, who was sentenced to five years’ probation in 1998 for helping her boyfriend smother the life out of her child, Justina Morales.
Brooklyn prosecutor Lisa Smith told me about Rosa, a Brooklyn woman with four kids whose husband is charged with punching her in the face while drunk.
“I want to recommend he be put on three years’ probation and get alcohol treatment and batterers’ treatment,” said Smith. “Three years’ probation puts him obviously under the control of the courts for a period of time that looks to the future.
“A shorter time just isn’t enough.”
There must be safer places to save money.