STATES EASING STRINGENT LAWS ON PRISON TIME

Reversing a 20-year trend toward ever-tougher criminal laws, a number of
states this year have quietly rolled back some of their most stringent
anticrime measures, 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 that quadrupled the number
of inmates, the states now spend a total of $30 billion a year to operate
their prisons, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. And with
voters saying they are more concerned about issues like education than
street violence, state legislators are finding they must cut the growth in
prison inmates to satisfy the demand for new services and to balance their
budgets.

"I think these new laws are pretty significant, with legislators taking
politically risky steps that would have been unthinkable even a couple of
years ago," said Michael Jacobson, a former corrections commissioner for
New York City who is now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

"When the spigot stops, you are forced to look at the items that have grown
the most, and inevitably, in every state, it is corrections," Professor
Jacobson said.

With several states re-examining their criminal laws, including New York,
Alabama, Georgia, New Mexico and Idaho, these 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, the experts and
lawmakers say.

Perhaps the most significant changes, the experts say, occurred in four
states that this year dropped some 1990's 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 last spring, giving judges discretion in imposing
what had been a mandatory five-year sentence for low-level drug crimes and
certain property crimes, including burglary.

In May, Mississippi passed a law making first-time nonviolent offenders
eligible for parole after serving only 25 percent of their sentences,
instead of the 85 percent required under a law enacted in 1994. Since the
earlier law went into effect, the number of prison inmates in Mississippi
jumped to 37,754 this year, from 10,699 in 1994, according to state figures.

And West Virginia, which has had one of the fastest-growing prison systems,
enacted a law to reduce the number of inmates by giving money to local
counties to develop alternatives to prison, like electronic monitoring of
people on probation and centers where probationers would report each day.

"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 that is working with a number of the states to reduce
prison costs and explore options instead of prison. "What has happened this
year in these states implies a lot about a change in the political culture."

Some lawmakers and lobbyists say such a shift is looming in New York, where
Gov. George E. Pataki has proposed softening the state's notoriously tough
Rockefeller-era drug laws, and the Democratic-controlled State Assembly has
insisted on even more far-reaching changes.

Perhaps the most surprising change has come in Louisiana, which has the
highest per capita incarceration rate in the nation and has long had a
reputation for brutal prison conditions and wide racial disparities in who
is sentenced to prison.

Louisiana's new law, strongly supported by Gov. Mike Foster, a conservative
Republican, and the state district attorneys' association, eliminates
mandatory prison time for crimes like burglary of a residence, possession
of small amounts of drugs, Medicaid fraud, prostitution, theft of a firearm
and obscenity. Since Louisiana imposed mandatory minimum sentences six
years ago, its prison population has increased by 50 percent, to 38,000
from 25,260, and was projected to grow to 46,000 by 2004. Under mandatory
minimum sentences, state expenditures for prisons have soared 70 percent,
state figures show.

"This is an attempt to bring under control a system that was bankrupting
the state and was not reducing crime," said State Senator Donald R.
Cravins, a Democrat who was one of the law's prime supporters.

The situation had reached a point in Louisiana, Senator Cravins said, that
"we had half the population in prison and the other half watching them,"
while the state spent $600 million a year on corrections and was facing a
budget deficit.

"We were pouring money into a bottomless pit, but we couldn't address the
real causes of crime like the lack of early childhood education," he said,
a particular problem in Louisiana, which has the lowest per capita income
in the nation.

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 street criminals to plea bargain and trade information about other
criminals in exchange for lesser sentences.

Stephen Mallory, a former deputy director of the Mississippi Bureau of
Narcotics who is now chairman of the department of criminal justice at the
University of Southern Mississippi, opposed his state's new law restoring
eligibility for parole for first-time nonviolent criminals.

"It's a joke," Professor Mallory said, because "anyone in law enforcement
knows these are not first-time offenders. There is a strong likelihood that
they've committed 30 or 40 crimes before and just finally got caught."

The change in the law will be costly for society, Professor Mallory said.
"If you turn out someone who is a real career criminal, you will save
$30,000 in prison costs, but he will do $100,000 worth of property and
emotional damage in more crimes."

But State Representative Michael P. Lawlor, a Democrat who is chairman of
the Connecticut House judiciary committee, says he sees another advantage
to the new laws, including the one sponsored by Gov. John G. Rowland, a
Republican, that ends a decade-old system of mandatory prison terms for
nonviolent drug offenders. He said the changes would help reduce huge
racial disparities in who goes to prison.

Nine out of 10 people in jail and prison in Connecticut for drug offenses
are black or Hispanic, Mr. Lawlor said, but half of those arrested on drug
charges are white. Part of the problem, he said, is a Connecticut law that
established a mandatory sentence for selling or possessing drugs within
two-thirds of a mile of a school, day care center or public housing project.

The result, Mr. Lawlor said, is that 90 percent of cities like Hartford or
New Haven are within these areas, and so poor and minority people who live
in these areas end up in prison for any drug charge.

"I think this is the most significant change in criminal justice policy we
have made in more than 10 years," Mr. Lawlor said. "Two or three years from
now you are going to be able to look back and see the new law has made a
tremendous impact on who is in prison."

And there are more states where change may soon come. The sponsors of the
California referendum that was approved by voters last November mandating
drug treatment instead of incarceration for first- and second-time
offenders convicted of drug possession, are pushing to get a similar
initiative on the ballot in Florida, Ohio and Michigan for the 2002 election.