Rep. David Segal, D-Providence, talks with Joee Lindbeck of the attorney general’s staff yesterday before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Segal’s bill that would limit judges’ ability to sentence probation violators.

The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

PROVIDENCE — Lawmakers yesterday began what promises to be a long and complicated conversation on how to ease the strain on the state prison system.

General Assembly leaders and the governor have drawn attention to the urgency of the problem. Bills have trickled in. Yesterday, the first concrete proposal to be aired for public input — a bill that would hamper judges’ ability to impose long prison sentences on probation violators — drew vociferous protest from the attorney general’s office.

“It just doesn’t make any sense at all,” Deputy Attorney General Gerald J. Coyne said in an interview yesterday. Coyne said the measure would remove a powerful deterrent that keeps convicted criminals from offending again.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Charles J. Levesque, D-Portsmouth, is not moving forward for the moment — the Senate Judiciary Committee held it for further study — but lawmakers have begun chipping away at one of the major policy issues of this year’s legislative session.

The Assembly enacted a budget of $162 million for the Department of Corrections this year, based on an inmate population of 3,370. With the census hovering around 3,800, the department has asked for more money to pay for its current-year operations, and the governor’s budget recommended $199 million for the department for next year.

On the House side, lawmakers have held hearings on the possibility of providing treatment to prisoners with substance-abuse issues — an estimated 70 percent of inmates currently at the Adult Correctional Institutions.

House Speaker William J. Murphy hasn’t yet filed his own proposal aimed at decreasing incarceration for nonviolent offenses. But Murphy says he plans to focus on home confinement, and rewriting the law to encourage judges to use that option more widely.

For people whose substance-abuse issues keep landing them back at the ACI, Murphy believes home confinement, combined with drug treatment, would be more effective and cheaper. The average per-inmate cost of keeping someone at the ACI is $39,000 a year. Drug treatment programs’ annual cost ranges from $3,000 to $20,000, and people rarely stay enrolled in the more costly programs for an entire year.

Murphy, an attorney who operates a private practice in criminal law, also suggested rewriting the law to provide for convicted criminals to pay the cost of their own treatment and home-confinement monitoring, if they are able to do so because they are out of prison and therefore able to hold a job.

Murphy says Levesque’s probation-violation proposal is worth looking at, but he isn’t taking a position on it just yet.

The proposal’s supporters say the law, as currently written, deprives people of their due-process rights because they are being sent back to prison, in some cases for years, without the right to a jury trial or any trial at all.

When someone is accused of violating the terms of his probation — however trivial or serious the violation may be — the person goes before a judge in a violation hearing. The judge decides whether the person is guilty of the probation violation, and has discretion to impose all or part of the person’s original sentence for the offense for which he was on probation.

For instance, if someone is convicted of assault and is sentenced to five years, with one to serve, current law allows for him to be sent back to prison for up to five years, even if the probation violation occurs the day before his probation was scheduled to end. Levesque’s bill aims to prevent judges from sentencing people beyond the date their probation would have ended.

The law “should take into account the debt that someone has paid by serving probation time,” said Nick Horton, a policy researcher for the Rhode Island Family Life Center, which assists released inmates and their families.

The standard of proof for a guilty finding at a violation hearing is not as rigorous as the standard of proof required at a trial. Actions that constitute probation violations range from missing a meeting or a curfew to committing a new crime.

Coyne said minor technical violations rarely result in lengthy incarceration. But state Rep. David Segal, the measure’s sponsor in the House, said it doesn’t matter what the violation is. “These are probation violations, not things that you should effectively be in prison for,” he said.

The attorney general’s office takes the position that the person was convicted at trial of, or pleaded to, the original offense, and the full sentence for that offense may be imposed at any time. “The standard is not, did you commit a new crime?” Coyne said. “It’s, did you fail to keep the peace?”

A recent report on policy options for the state prison system found that 3,553 people are admitted to the ACI each year on probation violation charges. About 53 percent of people admitted to the prison system are admitted because of probation or parole violations or because they failed to appear for a court hearing while awaiting trial.

The report, from the Washington-based JFA Institute, says Rhode Island could shrink the ACI population by 500 inmates by “reducing the probation and parole revocation rates by 25 percent.”

But Coyne said the Levesque-Segal bill would have “virtually no impact” on overcrowding because it would lead the attorney general’s office to start front-loading sentences with longer prison terms. The office prefers the current system, which, Coyne says, “puts the burden on the individual” for good behavior.

egudrais@projo.com