Susan Lefevre, a 53-year-old San Diego housewife, was arrested last week on a fugitive warrant from Michigan.

She escaped from Michigan authorities/ grasp after serving just a year of a 15-20-year prison sentence on a drug conviction.

Lefevre admits to the crime, but said she was duped by prosecutors, who she says told her a guilty plea would get her probation only.

When she realized she would be in a cell for perhaps 20 years, she hopped a fence and disappeared.

Police, following an anonymous tip, swooped down on Lefevre/s San Diego-area home recently and arrested her. She/s awaiting extradition to Michigan, after apparently having lived an exemplary existence since the escape.

She also believes that should make her eligible to have the sentence erased.

A Michigan Department of Corrections officer believes otherwise: BWhat kind of message would it send to 50,000 other prisoners in Michigan?

If you escape and live clean, you can have your sentence dropped if you/re caught?C

What kind of message, indeed.

Certainly, we do not support or condone prison escapes. But what are we trying to accomplish by placing lawbreakers 7 especially non-violent ones whose crime is possessing and/or using drugs 7 in prison?

Presumably, the goal is to straighten them out and help them become productive, law-abiding members of society. Very much like the San Diego housewife. Which is more important in these cases 7 punishment or rehabilitation?

If all the non-violent drug offenders in our overcrowded jails and prisons were to escape tomorrow and begin leading clean, honest, productive lives, would that be a bad thing?

And if so, how?

Given the state of our local jails, and state and federal prisons, isn/t a rehabilitated inmate exactly the outcome we are looking for?

To a significant degree, our mushrooming jail and prison populations point up our failure to deal effectively with the problems associated with alcohol and drug abuse.

Society views treatment as too expensive, yet we spend billions more on a revolving-door prison system.

Too many people end up behind bars for lack of adequate treatment for what is widely recognized to be a medical problem.

That Michigan prison official and the now-jailed San Diego housewife have raised important questions that demand something more than the same old tired answers.

May 5, 2008