VICKSBURG - They either mean it or they don't.
Four years ago, the Mississippi Legislature passed a law ordering "incarceration" for any person convicted of stealing $10,000 or more from the public.
Common sense says lawmakers were tired of seeing public officials and others misuse tax funds and get off with no punishment other than an order to pay back what they had stolen, if that.
Common sense also says "incarceration" means time spent in a prison or jail.
But, as State Auditor Phil Bryant said about a year ago, it may not.
Some judges, Bryant said, may read "incarceration" to include house arrest - and a recent case indicates that may be true.
Specifically, the case is that of 21-year Covington County Justice Court Judge Susan "Dess" Kelly.
In August, Kelly pleaded guilty to embezzlement. She was ordered to and did repay, in full, $52,972.79.
Her sentence was five years in prison with four years suspended and, yes, one year of house arrest.
The dates involved, however, may have been what allowed the judge in Kelly's case to avoid sending her to prison. The new law didn't go into effect until July 1, 2002. The charges say the thefts to which Kelly admitted occurred both before and after that date. When a penalty for a crime is increased, the enhancement can't be applied to crimes already committed.
The case of former Holmes Community College President Starkey Morgan is another close one.
Last week, Morgan was convicted of two counts of embezzlement for using college money to buy tires for himself and for using college employees to prepare his home for a wedding ceremony.
His sentence was five years in prison. Every day of it, however, was suspended. No house arrest was ordered.
The apparent wrinkle in Morgan's case was the amount of the public's loss. The investigation, which began in June 2005, resulted in four indictments alleging $10,000 to $12,000 worth of stealing. But jurors acquitted Morgan on two counts and the value assigned to the remaining theft was $7,000 - an amount less than the statutory trigger for mandatory "incarceration."
Generally speaking, it seems that the public doesn't realize how much public corruption occurs in Mississippi every day. Many seem to think Operation Pretense, a federal task force sweep more than 20 years ago, cleaned up the state and that the new crop of people in office have been 100 percent clean.
Not true. Not true at all. What Pretense did was consolidate a lot of prosecutions and make a big splash in the state and national press. Just an overview of Bryant's case files shows about the same percentage of people given the public's trust can be counted on to betray it.
Bryant, expected to face state Sen. Charlie Ross in the 2007 Republican primary for lieutenant governor, would probably garner more name recognition if he spent more time in front of cameras positioning himself as a champion of government purity. But there are a couple of problems with that.
First is that while the Office of the Auditor certainly has staffers who can find evidence of criminality, the next step is to a local prosecutor or to the Office of the Attorney General. To use a crass illustration, Bryant shines a flashlight on the roaches. It's up to a division of Attorney General Jim Hood's office to decide whether to stomp on them.
Second is Bryant's approach. He, in fact, does not make a big deal out of every case. His emphasis has been on having audit staff people who handle public funds set up systems of accountability. Most don't steal, he said, and helping them is the priority. The bandits tend to out themselves eventually anyway.
Priorities are needed because Bryant's staff is limited, as is Hood's. Katrina has resulted in new pressures, new priorities. There is no task force assigned to ferret out run-of-the-mill graft and other forms of corruption.
But, as court dockets indicate, it is going on in myriad forms in myriad places across Mississippi.
Four years ago, the Legislature seemed to want a serious penalty - actual time in the Gray-Bar Hotel - for those who plot and plan over months and years to steal from the public. That's still a very rare result.
