TOO MANY BEHIND BARS

THE UNITED STATES locks up more of its citizens than any other prosperous
country, and its current rate of incarceration would have been
inconceivable to Americans a generation ago. In 1960 the U.S. inmate
population (counting those locked up in long-term prisons plus short-term
jails, but not counting illegal immigrants and minors) stood at 333,000,
and during the next two decades it rose at a comparatively modest pace to
474,000. Then, between 1980 and 2000, the number of incarcerated quadrupled
to 2 million.

This astonishing jump was both worrisome and unsustainable, so it's
encouraging that the latest data from the Justice Department show that the
population of state prisons fell slightly in the second half of last year,
the first such decline since 1972.

The big jump in prison population since 1980 has burdened public budgets.
States spent upward of $25 billion during the past decade on prison
building, and annual operating costs for state and federal prisons come to
about $30 billion.

The rise in the number of people being incarcerated also raises questions
of racial equity.

Fully 9.7 percent of black males in their twenties are imprisoned, compared
with 2.9 percent of Hispanic men and 1.1 percent of white men in the same
age group.

This disparity exceeds anything that can be explained by differential rates
of criminal activity across racial groups.

When it comes to assault, burglary and drug crimes, for example, more
whites are arrested than blacks.

And yet more blacks are behind bars for all three categories of offense.

The rise in incarceration responded in part to a rise in crime, including
crime associated with crack cocaine.

Subsequent declines in the rates of serious crimes no doubt result in part
from having so many criminals behind bars, though many other factors also
come into play. But if it has improved public security to some extent, the
quadrupling of the prison population also may have stored up trouble.

Forced to process more and more inmates, the prison system has deemphasized
rehabilitation and concentrated on the basic task of removing people from
society.

Most of these people will reenter society at some point, and their lack of
preparation while in prison makes a return to crime a real possibility. In
some cases, harsh conditions in prison may produce individuals more prone
to violence than they were before incarceration. This is especially true of
people locked up under mandatory drug-sentencing laws who were not violent
in the first place.

The good news from the Justice Department should not be exaggerated. The
statistics show a decline of just 0.5 percent in the state prison
population, and the total state and federal prison population rose by 1.3
percent last year. With luck, however, the headlong growth of incarceration
may be ending.

In many states, parole officers are working to keep parolees out of prison
rather than returning them for minor transgressions. Moreover, states are
reconsidering mandatory drug sentences.

In California, for example, harsh mandatory sentences have produced a
staggering 25-fold increase since 1980 in the number of drug offenders
behind bars. But a ballot initiative last year has committed California to
treating drug offenders rather than incarcerating them.

There is undoubtedly a risk in lenient standards toward parolees, and it
may be hard to compel drug offenders to undergo treatment if they are not
imprisoned. But these risks can be reduced by wisely designed policies.
California's new treatment policy does not remove the threat of
imprisonment entirely; offenders who drop out of drug treatment three times
will go to jail. The results of California's experiment will be worth
watching as other states consider ways of locking up fewer people.