Today’s post shares a revised chart for determining the proper place of confinement for a criminal conviction. The chart is available here.
The updated chart is a simplified version of the one I posted last year (here). It is more user-friendly, I think. It also includes a new column, Probation Revocation, to reflect my thinking (shared here) that the proper place of confinement for a revoked probationer is generally the place of confinement identified in the original judgment suspending sentence. In fact, the chart includes the old place of confinement rules for misdemeanors and impaired drivers largely to explain why a revoked probationer (whose original sentence might have been imposed several years ago) might wind up committed to a different custodian than a person sentenced today for the same offense.
In my view, the place of confinement determination is a judgment-by-judgment exercise. That is, the court should determine the proper place of confinement for each individual sentence without regard to the other sentences the defendant is facing. For example, no statute allows a misdemeanor to be sentenced to prison solely because the defendant is also serving time for a felony. (G.S. 15-6.2 endorses the notion of the misdemeanor running concurrently with the felony in prison, but it does not authorize a change to the place of confinement itself.) When a defendant is subject to consecutive sentences with different places of confinement, he or she will be transferred to the new place of confinement when the initial sentence is complete.