From The Herald-Sun of Durham, Aug. 3

What happened to North Carolina’s probation system last year was similar to what happened to the nation’s financial system.

A meltdown occurred, a failure so massive and public that it exposed fundamental flaws and made the need for reform obvious.

In the economy, the meltdown was the collapse of the housing market and the failure of respected financial firms.

In North Carolina’s probation system, the meltdown was the Eve Carson murder, when it was found that both men charged in the slaying of UNC’s student body president had fallen through the cracks of a probation system that was supposed to be keeping tabs on them.

Then there was the case of Patrick Burris, who had a long criminal history in North Carolina, who went on a killing spree in South Carolina. Burris was released two weeks earlier from the Lincoln County Jail despite the fact there was a new arrest warrant for him.

In her campaign, Gov. Beverly Perdue promised to reform the system, and she recently followed through. It was a pledge made a lot more difficult because the reform will cost more than $20 million through mid-2011 to hire new probation officers and improve recruitment and retention of officers.

And this is in a year when the nation’s financial crisis is causing the state to make millions of dollars of painful cuts from its budget.

Still, the reform was desperately needed, as the events described above and a subsequent investigation showed. Today there are still more than 12,000 criminal defendants on parole who are unaccounted for, out of a pool of 110,000 offenders.

Both houses have approved a bill that, in addition to adding new officers, would allow probation officers access to juvenile records without a court order and allow warrantless searches as a regular condition of probation. Previously, lawmakers approved allowing low-risk probationers to go unsupervised, another way to lighten caseloads for officers.

The changes were clearly needed. We applaud Gov. Perdue and the General Assembly for their response. Now let’s closely monitor the reforms to make sure the probation system continues to show improvement.