Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
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Editor's note: This second installment of a five-part series that has been sponsored by the North Dakota Newspaper Association and the "Grand Fork Herald" explores trends trends from the tough-on-crime 1990s and trace how policy leaders have changed their thinking at the local and national levels from then until now. Additional installments of this series are available to readers on the "Transcript" website at www.transcriptpublishing.com In early 1995, North Dakota parole officer David...
Pat Bohn has spent a long time working in corrections- long enough to climb from a rank-and-file parole and probation officer in the 1990s to a job heading North Dakota's entire parole and probation operation today. He's seen a lot of things change. Chief among them is a philosophical shift in how North Dakota treats its criminals. Gone are the highly punitive, tough-on-crime ideas of the 1990s. Now, state leaders – from the Legislature to the front offices at the State Penitentiary – have com...
This fourth installment is a kind of "the problem we face today" piece. As we pivot away from tracing the history of our prison/parole/probation capacity issues, we're going to look at the nature of crime in North Dakota today – especially drug/behavioral health issues – and explore gaps in resources that might cause the problem. Sources continue to state that a big burden on the criminal justice system is a profound lack of resources for drug addicts and the mentally ill, especially in rur...
Editor's Note: This is the "what are we going to do about it" piece. It follows up on a lot of recent legislation, like the Justice Reinvestment bills, and ask both if they're doing enough and if anything more needs to be done. This will put a bow on the series. Every year, Attorney General Wayne Stehnehjem's office releases a report on crime data from around the state. Running dozens of pages, it's a mountain of information, with spreadsheets of murders, kidnappings and arsons, indexed to...
Editor's note: This five-part series, sponsored by the North Dakota Newspaper Association and the Grand Forks Herald, aims to answer questions at the difficult intersection between budget crunches, criminal justice and the well-being of North Dakota's communities. This first article offers a brief overview of the overcrowding problems in North Dakota's prisons and its parole system. As rising prison populations stress the state's corrections system, how will state leaders address what some say...
