Two say treatment would have been better option than cell walls

By Steve Kanigher (contact), Alex Richards (contact)

Sunday, Aug. 31, 2008 | 2 a.m.

With her youthful face and mellow disposition, 22-year-old Corrie Pallone doesn’t come across like someone who should be in prison.

But there she was, her long thick hair covering her shoulders, sitting at a table inside a cinder block visitors room wearing a state-issued uniform. An armed guard stood outside the door.

Pallone is not one of the many felons who say, “I didn’t do it.”

To the contrary, she apologized for getting hooked on methamphetamine and involved in an auto theft ring.

“It was a big mistake in my life,” Pallone said.

Her biggest regrets have to do with her toddler daughter. “I feel so guilty for doing this to her,” Pallone saidsaid. “I want to do good for her.”

Pallone, sentenced to 16 to 48 months behind bars after pleading guilty to burglary and possession of stolen vehicles, is an example of a nonviolent offender who Clark County Deputy Public Defender Brigid Hoffman thinks should have been put on probation with intensive supervision or sent to a short-term minimum security boot camp.

“What are we accomplishing by locking up someone like that for up to 48 months?” Hoffman said.

A high-school dropout whose one prior offense was a misdemeanor petty larceny, Pallone said she would have benefitted from a program that offers drug treatment and job training skills.

“I had a drug problem, I really did, so a more structured program would have helped,” she said. “I go to Narcotics Anonymous here, but it’s more group stuff. I would take one-on-one counseling more seriously because it would be addressed to me personally. Just give me a chance.”

Pallone didn’t get that chance. After more than five months at the county jail in downtown Las Vegas, she was transferred to the Florence McClure Women’s Correctional Center in North Las Vegas.

The public defender’s office says the prison system has many nonviolent Nevada inmates like Pallone who would have benefitted from alternative sentencing, particularly addiction treatment.

Terrance Thomas, a 34-year-old father of three and former janitor, for example, is in prison, for the fourth time since 1993, on bad check and drug charges.

Thomas pleaded guilty March 6 to possession of crack cocaine, but was given a suspended sentence of 19 to 48 months and placed on probation with the conditions he attend counseling and do community service.

Two days before he was to meet with his probation officer on March 18 and make plans to enroll in a drug-treatment center, he was arrested by a Metro Police officer for jaywalking. The officer found a bag of marijuana on Thomas, which led authorities to revoke his probation.

“I did what I did so I’m no angel, but I deserve a chance to get treatment,” he said. “I want to get my act together. I’m not a violent offender. I don’t go off robbing people. I’m not a mass murderer or a child pornographer.”

Though he has smoked marijuana since he was 14 and became a repeat drug offender, Thomas has never been in any treatment program since he began drifting in and out of the penal system 15 years ago, he said.

In hindsight, Thomas said, he wished he had been able to make that appointment with his probation officer and enroll in a treatment program.

“I would have taken it more seriously because I didn’t want to come back here,” he said. “But they just put me on a back burner and I took it like that. I didn’t know that getting caught with marijuana was going to send me back to prison.”

The public defender’s office’s other examples include:

• A 21-year-old Mexican man who came to this country illegally with his family as a teen. Sexually abused as a child, he began drinking alcohol at age 11 and turned to cocaine and methamphetamine as a teen. He voluntarily entered a drug-treatment program and did well for awhile, but relapsed and this year was arrested for auto theft and burglary.

A first-time offender who had worked as a house painter, the defendant was sentenced to one to three years in prison.

“After he is out of prison he will most likely be sent back to Mexico,” Deputy Public Defender Amy Johnson said. “He had mitigating circumstances because of the sexual abuse, the fact that he tried to get help before the relapse and because it’s a nonviolent crime and a first-time offense. His wife is from here and his kids were born here. But now his family is gone. It’s shattered. He has lost any chance of having a united family in the United States.”

“If it were up to me, I would have ordered him into a drug-treatment program. We’re just paying for his prison time before we deport him.”

• A 42-year-old U.S. citizen, originally from Mexico, who worked in construction. He had no record until he was arrested in 2005 on arson charges after an apartment blaze that started after his shirt and later his bed caught on fire. Having been under the influence of both methamphetamine and alcohol, he was hospitalized for mental health issues, charged with first-degree arson and later granted probation.

Chief Deputy Public Defender Jason Frierson said the defendant received mental health counseling and was drug-free for two years before a 2007 arrest for possession of a meth pipe.

That arrest resulted in additional probation conditions, but his probation was revoked late last year after he admitted to his probation officer that he again had used drugs. He wound up sentenced to 12 to 32 months behind bars.