When a legislative committee is assembled around a politically convenient investigation, the North Carolina General Assembly’s offices in Raleigh have a distinct atmosphere. Depending on which side of the aisle you’re asking, this purposefulness goes beyond the procedural and falls somewhere between accountability and theater. It is a feature of the bipartisan legislative committee looking into the jail settlement made in 2021 while Roy Cooper was governor.
Republicans are referring to it as an investigation into the release of violent, recurrent offenders. It’s being referred to by Cooper’s camp as an attack during election season. The reality lies in a more unpleasant place than either framing acknowledges, as it nearly usually does in these circumstances.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when North Carolina’s prisons were dangerously overcrowded and facing lawsuits from the state NAACP and the ACLU claiming that the conditions inside were illegal, the settlement was made. At first, Cooper’s administration opposed the lawsuits. They reached a settlement after a judge in Wake County Superior Court indicated that the state would probably lose in court and that the documented prison conditions were unconstitutional.
As a result, about 3,500 prisoners were either transferred to supervised release or freed early. The criteria did not, in theory, target the demographic stated in the Republican framing of events; instead, they prioritized nonviolent offenders, pregnant inmates, and those who were already within months of their projected release dates.
The story is complicated by the 18. Republican lawmakers have frequently cited a report that claims 18 people who were freed under the terms of the settlement were later charged with murder. This figure is specific enough to be hard to ignore and context-dependent enough to be genuinely difficult to assess without knowing more about how those cases evolved over time.
Charged is not the same as convicted, and the connection between a release decision made during the pandemic and a crime committed years later involves a series of decisions made by parole boards, the criminal justice system, and the individuals themselves, which the political debate tends to reduce to a single causal line. As a campaign pitch, that flattening works well. As an examination of what actually occurred, it is less helpful.
Cooper’s defense is based on two factors: the precedent set by the federal government’s own COVID-era releases during the Trump administration, which employed comparable standards, and the legal inevitability of the settlement given the judge’s suggestion. Additionally, his team has pointed out that congressional leaders were informed of the release procedure over five years ago, implying that the current committee probe is revealing material that the same politicians who are now labeling it a scandal had access to. Political timing and prior knowledge are not the same thing, and the crime figures are real regardless of when anyone was briefed, so it’s possible that this is true and that it really doesn’t matter.
The prison settlement is almost perfect opposition research material in a state like North Carolina, where public safety message tends to resonate well with swing voters. The Senate contest between Cooper and Republican challenger Michael Whatley is looking to be fairly competitive. It involves a lot of people, a decision made by the government, and crimes that follow.
There isn’t a clear counter-message given that the decision was taken under judicial pressure and that only a small portion of the released population was involved in the crimes. It’s hard for anyone watching from the outside to know what to think because it seems like both sides have settled on narratives that are only partially true and fully serving their respective purposes while the investigation proceeds in Raleigh and the campaign runs attack ads in Charlotte and Greensboro.
