As Virginia Changes Direction, Debate Over State Funding of Prosecutors Grows

After spending $12 million on the Diversion First program, which includes a drug court, a veterans court and other specialty dockets steering low-level offenders with chronic problems away from jail, Fairfax County, Virginia says it is being punished for the effort by a state funding formula that has been geared toward rewarding local prosecutors for seeking harsher felony sentences instead of leniency, reports the Washington Post. While the state Compensation Board — which allocates funds to attorneys — has historically based its decisions on the number of “sentencing events” an office has per year, awarding more money for the more offenders convicted in circuit court, what isn’t rewarded are the hours of work that prosecutors put in every week for diversion efforts, criminal justice reform advocates say. The thousands of misdemeanor cases that some local prosecutors also handle every year — something they are not required by the state to do — are also not calculated into the state formula.

Advocacy groups say the system effectively rewards a tough-on-crime approach that is out of step with the wave of criminal justice overhauls that have emerged across the country. The county Commonwealth’s Attorney, Steve T. Descano, says his office lacks the resources to hire attorneys to properly handle all of his office’s cases and, as a result, stopped prosecuting cases involving allegations of non-felony assault, larceny and other low-level crimes. While the county — which already funds most of the commonwealth’s attorney’s budget — recently approved an additional $3.7 million, enough for Descano to nearly double his staff to 82 attorneys and support personnel, critics worry that amount isn’t likely to be enough to fund the 98 additional positions Descano says he needs and argue that the state should be doing more to shoulder the burden.