STATES EASE ANTI-CRIME EFFORTS AS PRISON COSTS SOAR

Reversing a 20-year trend toward tougher laws, a number of states have
quietly rolled back some of their most stringent anti-crime measures
this year, including those imposing mandatory minimum sentences and
forbidding early parole.

The new laws, along with a voter initiative in California that
provides for treatment rather than prison for many drug offenders,
reflect a political climate that has changed markedly as crime has
fallen, the cost of running prisons has exploded and the economy has
slowed, state legislators and criminal justice experts say.

After a two-decade boom in prison construction and a quadrupling of
the number of inmates, states spend $30 billion a year to operate
their prisons, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. With
voters saying they are more concerned about issues such as education
than about street violence, state legislators are finding they must
cut the growth in prison inmates to satisfy the demand for new
services and balance their budgets.

With several states re-examining their criminal laws, including New
York, Alabama, Georgia, New Mexico and Idaho, the changes are likely
to hasten a decline in the number of state prison inmates, which began
to fall in the second half of last year for the first time since 1972,
experts and lawmakers say.

Perhaps the most significant changes, the experts say, occurred in
four states that this year dropped some 1990s sentencing laws that
required criminals to serve long terms without the possibility of
parole. The four are Louisiana, Connecticut, Indiana and North Dakota.

Iowa passed a similar law this year, giving judges discretion in
imposing what had been a mandatory five-year sentence for low-level
drug crimes and certain property crimes.

"These may be small states, and the new laws are not comprehensive
reforms, but it is very significant that these are not just liberal
Northeastern states," said Nicholas Turner, director of the State
Sentencing and Corrections Project at the Vera Institute of Justice in
New York, a research organization. "What has happened this year in
these states implies a lot about a change in the political culture."

Not everyone has supported the revised laws. Some legislators have
been accused of being "soft on crime," and prosecutors have complained
that scrapping mandatory minimum sentences takes away one of their
best tools to get criminals to plea bargain and trade information
about other criminals in exchange for lesser sentences.