PRISON POPULATION FALLS

The number of inmates in state prisons fell in the second half of last
year, the first such decline since the United States' prison boom began in
1972, says a Justice Department report released Sunday.

The decline was modest, a drop of 6,200 inmates in state prisons in the
last six months of 2000, or 0.5 percent of the total, the report said.

But it comes after the number of state prisoners rose 500 percent over the
past three decades, even growing each year in the 1990s as crime dropped.
The total number of people incarcerated in state and federal prisons, local
jails and juvenile detention centers was 2,071,686 at the end of 2000, the
report said.

Experts attributed the drop to the continuing decline in crime, which began
in 1992; new attitudes about offering drug offenders treatment instead of
locking them up; and a greater willingness by parole officers to help
parolees instead of sending them back to prison for minor infractions.

In 1972 after 50 years of stability in the incarceration rate, 200,000
Americans were in state and federal prisons, said Franklin Zimring, a
professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley. Now 1.3
million are.

Law enforcement officials and criminologists cautioned that the drop in the
second half of 2000 was not enough to indicate a trend. In fact, for all of
2000, counting state and federal prisons, the number of inmates actually
grew 1.3 percent, the report said. But that is well below the average
growth rate of 6 percent in the 1990s and is the lowest rate of increase
since 1972, the report said.

At the end of 2000, there were 1,236,476 people in state prisons and
145,416 in federal prisons.