Editorials of The Times

States that set out a decade ago to trim prison costs have learned that success lies in a few areas — rolling back draconian sentencing that drove up prison populations in the first place, and remaking parole and probation systems, which have, in numerous cases, sent as many or even more people to jail for rule violations as the courts do for new crimes.

Significant progress has been made on both fronts. Yet New York, a national leader in reducing its prison population, could do much more to reform its parole and probation systems.

These systems were established across in the United States in the 19th century. The premise was that steering people who commit minor offenses to probation, rather than prison, and shortening prison sentences with parole in exchange for good conduct further the goal of rehabilitation. But that notion fell out of favor after the country embraced mass incarceration in the late 20th century, driving up the prison population from about 200,000 at the start of the 1970s to a peak of 1.6 million at the end of the 2000s.

The woefully underfunded parole system fell in line with the jail-first agenda. Parole officers, who were buried under massive caseloads, sent parolees back inside for technical violations, like failing drug tests, missing curfew or socializing with friends they had been forbidden to see. With nearly 5 million people in the nation under supervision — more than twice the number housed in prisons and jails — the parole and probation systems have become what corrections researchers now describe as a significant driver of recidivism.

Even law-and-order states have grasped the need to refashion so-called hair-trigger community supervision systems that reflexively and unnecessarily send people to prison for minor infractions that have no bearing on public safety. Some have hired additional case workers to make their systems more effective, have given newly released inmates better access to drug treatment or mental health care, or have developed community sanctions that send only the most troubled or repeat-prone offenders back to prison.

A recent analysis by the reform-focused Council of State Governments Justice Center found that states like Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas have seen dramatic reductions over the past decade in recidivism connected to probation or parole.

Then there is New York. The state, which has closed more than a dozen prisons over the past decade alone, is a national standout when it comes to sentencing reform. But a new study from Columbia University’s Justice Lab calls on state lawmakers to do significantly more to address the problems with the community supervision system, which come at a considerable cost to the local jails where most of the people locked up for state parole violations are held.

At a time when the number of people being detained in New York City jails is shrinking, state parole violators represent the only subgroup of offenders that is growing. Between 2014 and 2018, for example, the percentage of people held on technical violations of parole increased 15 percent, even as the overall jail population declined 21 percent.

A November snapshot count of city inmates found 1,460 people in New York City’s jails for state parole violations. If this were a stand-alone group, the report’s authors note, it would be larger than the population of any jail in the state, with the exception of New York City’s sprawling Rikers Island complex. Among other things, this population is an obstacle to the city’s goal of closing that historically troubled complex altogether.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has called on the state Legislature to make changes that would help those in custody for parole violations, such as abolishing money bail for people accused of misdemeanors, eliminating state supervision fees for people on parole and reviewing how child support is calculated for people incarcerated for more than six months.

But the Columbia study calls on the Legislature to do a lot more. It recommends that the state adopt several common-sense reforms, most of which have shown promise in other states. These include: adopting a system of graduated sanctions and rewards, instead of automatically dumping people into jail for minor infractions; capping jail terms for minor parole violations; requiring a judicial hearing before parole officers can jail people accused of technical violations; shortening parole terms for people who stay out of trouble for specified periods of time; and using the savings reaped from cutting the prison population to expand education, substance abuse and housing opportunities for parolees, who need considerably more help than they’re getting to forge stable lives in their communities.

These proposals would be a heavy lift in the conservative New York Senate. But they make good policy and economic sense, and would bring the state to the forefront of the parole reform movement.

Still, President Donald Trump persuaded Congress to increase spending for the program to $14 billion, from $10 billion, in the 2018 budget, claiming in his national security strategy that plans to push the system “will include the ability to defeat missile threats prior to launch."

Trump is overselling the program, an interlocking network of interceptors, radars, sensors and kill vehicles. He has boasted that the system is 97 percent effective in preventing limited-scale attacks; the truth is more like 50 percent. So its defense against North Korean weapons is hardly a sure thing.

The program’s failings were on display as recently as last month, when, during a test off the Hawaiian coast, an interceptor missile launched from a test site in Kauai failed to hit its target, an incoming dummy missile. That was the second failure in three tests of the interceptor, the SM-3, which is intended to be a mainstay of U.S. regional missile defense systems being deployed in Romania, Poland and Japan to guard against medium-range missiles. The Pentagon has not disclosed what went wrong.

The problem isn’t just the latest test, though. Since 1999, the program at the heart of the multilayered missile defense system, the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system, designed to protect the United States by tracking and destroying intercontinental ballistic missiles from a non-superpower adversary, has failed eight of 18 tests.

A 2016 Pentagon report faulted the system as demonstrating “a limited capability to defend the U.S. homeland from small numbers” of medium- and long-range missiles “launched from North Korea or Iran.” Experts say the tests are not conducted under realistic conditions, and the test record has not shown sufficient improvement.

Meanwhile, in November, North Korea fired an intercontinental ballistic missile that flew higher and longer than previous launches — with a potential range of 8,000 miles — thus increasing the risk that it could soon hit the U.S. mainland.

Analysts attribute many of the problems with the system to the George W. Bush administration’s decision to accelerate it, rushing components into the field prematurely, without proper engineering and testing. Today, the pressures to show success are intensifying as the North Korean threat becomes more acute and Trump and Congress, desperate to be seen as protecting the American public, throw more money at the program.

But like the Reagan-era Star Wars initiative, it will never provide a foolproof, comprehensive shield against a nuclear adversary. There are real questions about whether the program is sustainable, especially if its managers cannot produce better results. A new Pentagon study of the program is expected shortly.

Missile defense needs to be part of the U.S. strategy, but it alone will not save the country from a North Korean nuclear attack. Is Trump, who threatened to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea, aware of this? He would make a serious error if faith in missile defense led him to take military action against North Korea on the ground that the system could save the United States from retaliation.

The president would be better off making sure that major powers keep enforcing tough sanctions on North Korea, that South Korea and Japan are prepared for any military action, that North Korea’s avenues for exporting nuclear technology are blocked and that America is ready to test any opening to engage North Korea in negotiations.