A UNC School of Government Blog
Jamie Markham 
Many parts of the Justice Reinvestment Act, including most of the changes related to “front-end” sentencing, were made effective for offenses occurring on or after December 1, 2011. It takes some time for those offense-date based changes to show up in court for sentencing, but it’s starting to happen. Especially on the early end of … Read more
Some criminal defendants just want to serve their time. There a variety of reasons for that. Sometimes they are facing active time for another conviction and hope the new sentence can be served concurrently. Sometimes it’s a money issue. And some defendants simply find life under community supervision to be difficult. Probation can be hard, … Read more
It’s been a while since I wrote anything about satellite-based monitoring (SBM) of sex offenders. A recent case from the court of appeals provides a nice opportunity for an update. The case, State v. Sprouse, dealt with (among other issues) the heavily-litigated question of what constitutes an “aggravated offense” for purposes of the SBM law. … Read more
With new legislation placing more inmates in the county jail—and with budgets continuing to be tight—I’ve been getting a lot of questions about jail fees. I’ve written about them in the past (see this post), but so much has changed since then that it’s time for another look. General Statute 7A-313 describes two types of … Read more
The North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission recently posted online the new felony sentencing grid effective for offenses committed on or after December 1, 2011. The chart is available here. There are no changes to the front of the grid (the ranges of permissible minimum sentences), but the numbers on the back are increased … Read more
It’s December 1, and a lot of new laws (the News & Observer counts 35) come into effect today. Among them is the Justice Reinvestment Act—or at least portions of it. To help with the transition, I’ve created a Justice Reinvestment resource page that includes links to “cheat sheets” summarizing the law (including relevant effective … Read more
Last year, the Onion (my favorite news satire outfit) ran an article headlined “Nation Shudders at Large Block of Uninterrupted Text.” It’s a pretty funny take on modern society’s overreliance on things like bullet points and YouTube to process information. The headline made me think of G.S. 90-96. As most readers know, G.S. 90-96 allows … Read more
I wrote recently about how the Justice Reinvestment Act changes North Carolina’s existing habitual felon law (you can read that post here). This post examines a new recidivist offender statute created by the act: the status offense of habitual breaking and entering. Under the new law, set out in G.S. 14-7.25 through -7.31, a person … Read more
As part of the Justice Reinvestment project, analysts from the Council of State Governments (CSG) looked at how the habitual felon law is used in North Carolina. In general, the analysts recognized the law as a valuable tool for prosecutors (its use was on the rise between 2005 and 2009), but they also cited some … Read more
As I mentioned in a prior post, the Justice Reinvestment Act (S.L. 2011-192) creates a new set of “community and intermediate probation conditions” that can be ordered in any Structured Sentencing probation case. One of the new community and intermediate conditions, available for defendants on probation for offenses committed on or after December 1, 2011, … Read more