From the Union Leader…

If you’re sentenced to do time in a New Hampshire prison, you might just luck out and wind up doing time in your living room. Truth in sentencing? That’s the law, but not always the practice.

New Hampshire Union Leader correspondent Russ Choma found out last week that two women sentenced earlier this year for the thefts of large sums of money were out on the street mere months after being locked up.

Fifty-one-year-old Terry Moulton of Plaistow, a former Hampstead Middle School lunch lady, was sentenced in February to 18 months in prison for stealing kids’ lunch money — $10,000 of it — over a year and a half. Fifty-eight-year-old Cheryl Crawford of Derry was sentenced in February to one to 10 years in state prison for stealing more than $250,000 from the Derry Economic Development Corporation. The Department of Corrections switched their sentences to house arrest last month.

The DOC has the power to release inmates to house arrest, which costs the state a lot less money. A prison inmate costs the state $31,000 a year. A prisoner under house arrest pays his own utility bills, feeds, clothes and houses himself, and even pays the state for the cost of the ankle bracelet and electronic monitoring. The state has 45 to 50 convicts in house arrest at any given time, according to the DOC.

People under house arrest “are still considered inmates in our records and our books, even though they’re out in the community,” Corrections spokesman Jeffrey Lyons said.

But they aren’t inmates at all. Because they aren’t “in.” They’re out. Their movements are monitored, and their behavior restricted, but they get to live at home and, as Lyons said, “they’re out in the community.”

Rockingham County Attorney Jim Reams said the house arrest “makes a mockery of truth-in-sentencing” laws. And he charged the state with releasing prisoners early to save money.

That certainly appears to be the case. House arrest has its place. But a criminal’s own house is no substitute for the big house. When a judge has sentenced a convict to prison, then prison is where that criminal should stay until the sentence is up or until everyone, including the judge and prosecutor, agrees that house arrest is appropriate.

Crawford was locked up again after the sentencing judge, John Lewis, objected to the early release. Moulton’s sentencing judge, Tina Nadeau, refused to object to her release even though the prosecutor in the case, Assistant Rockingham County Attorney Lisa Ricks, strongly opposed the release and urged Nadeau to object. Nadeau said judges should object only in “extraordinary circumstances.”

We think Nadeau is wrong about objections and should protest Moulton’s release. After all, Nadeau herself said of Moulton’s attempt to avoid detection by telling a girl’s parents that the girl was suffering from an eating disorder, “In all my years on the bench, it’s difficult to imagine a more depraved effort to conceal a crime.”

Legislators and the corrections commissioner need to examine the practice of releasing convicts to house arrest. Attorney Reams is right, in these cases the use of house arrest skirted the state’s truth in sentencing laws. That should not be allowed to happen again.