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ST. LOUIS — There’s poetry in the chapter of life that Kimberly M. Gardner has just written.

This week, U.S. Attorney Sayler A. Fleming announced that Gardner, the former St. Louis circuit attorney who resigned last year in disgrace, has been placed in a federal prosecution deferment program. She’s accused of essentially stealing $5,004 from a contingency fund in her office. Gardner used the money to pay a fine and court costs she was charged by the Missouri Supreme Court for ethics violations in her attempted prosecution of former Gov. Eric Greitens.

If Gardner doesn’t break any laws over the next 18 months and doesn’t miss any meetings or ignore any directives from an assigned court officer, the federal charge hanging over her goes away. It’s the same sort of deal Gardner promised to make with certain defendants before she was elected in 2016.

Deferments, also known as pre-trial diversion, are good public policy. The reality of the American criminal justice system — and there is wide, bipartisan agreement on this — is there are too many people in jail. If Missouri were a country, it would have one of . Only three countries — Cuba, El Salvador and Rwanda — have put more people in prison per capita than the U.S.

There are several reasons why the U.S. got into this mess. But in the past few years, sometimes for different reasons, both Democrats and Republicans have tried to figure out how to solve the problem. One of the things policy makers have learned is that too many people are in jail or prison for financial reasons — either they can’t afford bail or they’re being punished for their .

This is the delicious irony in Gardner’s deferred prosecution. She faced charges over her chosen payment method for fines and court costs. When Gardner was disciplined by the Missouri Supreme Court over her ethical violations in 2022, the court fined her $750. But it also charged her more than $4,000 in court costs related to the investigation of her case.

This is not all that different from what happens every day in municipal, county and state courts across Missouri. Somebody with a speeding ticket or shoplifting charge, for example, leaves court with a small fine meant to deter further criminal activity. But they also get hit with hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of dollars in fees and costs. Some may be related to actual court costs, but many of them are not. And people who can’t afford to pay end up further entangled in the criminal justice system, or even jailed, over their poverty.

Gardner had a well-paying job, courtesy of voters and taxpayers. She could afford her fines and fees. But because of arrogance or a sense of entitlement, she chose to use public money to reimburse herself. Just as her removal from office was an appropriate outcome because of her inability to do the job, the federal government is right to force her to pay back the money.

There will be those in the “lock her up� crowd who will be upset that she doesn’t end up with a conviction on her record and that she is avoiding jail time. But to what end? And at what cost to taxpayers?

The issue of cost helped drive the program by the Department of Justice more than a decade ago. The goal was to encourage federal prosecutors to use deferred prosecution and help reduce the nation’s unsustainable prison costs.

That was a similar motivation for Gardner when she ran for office, at a time when the city’s jail system was dangerously overcrowded. If Gardner did one thing right during her tenure as circuit attorney, it was contributing to the decrease in the city’s jail population. There were other factors, such as changes to bail practices, but Gardner played a role. In 2016, the average daily jail population in St. Louis was 1,450. In 2022, Gardner’s last full year in office, it was 541. (It has since climbed back to 706, ).

Gardner’s attorney, Ronald Sullivan, is a Harvard law professor who has been a longtime advocate for pretrial diversion programs. In this case, he got to practice what he preaches.

“We should begin to think much more seriously about being smart on crime and not just being tough on crime,� Sullivan said in , as the issue was first gaining steam. “We should think about pretrial diversion programs to move people away from the criminal justice system prior to a case being opened against them that could haunt them for many, many years to come.�

Gardner isn’t going to jail for breaking the law. That’s poetic justice.