COMING TO A NEIGHBOURHOOD NEAR YOU

A small hitch with America's policy of imprisoning more people than any
other country on the planet: most have to be released at some point

Jose Vasquez has a scar on his right cheek and a conviction for accidental
manslaughter. Arrested at the age of 16, he was convicted as an adult and
locked up for seven years in an upstate New York prison. He should have
been released earlier, but the prison authorities dished out "disciplinary
sanctions" for a series of fights. At first that meant solitary
confinement; then, for several months, being locked in his cell for 23
hours a day. The parole board twice put off his release. Now Mr Vasquez is
25 years old, has been free for two years, but must do at least two more
years of parole. Still, he counts himself "pretty fortunate".

He was lucky because prison, eventually, turned his life around. "Prison
made me realise I made a mistake, it really moulded me." Inside, he passed
a high-school exam, then a college degree. In solitary confinement he read
"poetry, novels, spy stories, a lot of stuff, some Freud," and started to
write. After a couple of years of casual jobs, he now works at the Osborne
Association, a New York group that helps ex-inmates to find jobs and homes.
Last year it placed 1,162 ex-prisoners with local employers-not bad,
considering that its average client is 33 years old, has only a sixth-grade
education and has done four years behind bars.

Few are as lucky as Mr Vasquez. Each year, hundreds of thousands of people
leave America's prisons, but only a few thousand get help from groups such
as Osborne. Most are ill-prepared for life outside, educated in little else
but how to commit crimes more efficiently. Outside his job, Mr Vasquez
unsurprisingly avoids cellmates who might lead him into "shady ways".

States seem to put far more effort into locking up people than trying to
reform them. In New York, Governor George Pataki has made a point of
cutting prisoners' education and other services. Today, Mr Vasquez would be
unable to "mould himself" with a college degree in prison. And, although
vastly more criminals are jailed for drug offences than in the past, many
states have cut efforts to rehabilitate inmates. The number of inmates in
drug programmes dropped from 201,000 in 1993 to 99,000 in 1998.

As the economy turns down, jobs will be harder to get; and there is an
ever-rising number of ex-prisoners chasing them. An estimated 614,000
people will leave prison this year, says the Bureau of Justice, compared
with 423,800 in 1990 and 156,400 in 1980. In all, there are now nearly 4.5m
people on probation (served instead of detention) or on parole (served
after detention).

This army of ex-cons is the final, perhaps unforeseen, stage of the
country's love affair with mandatory sentencing. Ever since the mid-1980s,
politicians have won votes by promising to get tough with criminals. The
most prominent effect has been in the law courts: limiting the discretion
of judges to make the punishment fit the crime, and imposing harsh minimum
terms. Between 1986 and 1997, average prison sentences (in federal prisons)
increased from 39 months to 54 months.

California's "three strikes" rule, which enforced a prison sentence for
anybody caught committing a third felony (no matter how small), drove more
into prison. Punishments for drug offences have been particularly severe.
Drug-dealers can expect five-year or ten-year terms if caught. And the
definition of drug-dealing is a harsh one, sweeping in spouses of dealers,
whose crime may be simply failing to shop their husbands. Drug convictions
are the reason for the massive growth in prison numbers.

Once behind bars, inmates find it increasingly difficult to get out early.
Parole boards are stricter than ever, quickly returning criminals to
complete their sentences if, for example, they are found to be taking
drugs. And, since prisoners are less likely than before to get time off for
good behaviour, they have less incentive to behave well.

The result: America's prison population has boomed, to roughly 2m. One
person in 142 is behind bars, up from one in 218 a decade ago. America not
only has more people in prison than anywhere else, but a higher
incarceration rate (it recently passed Russia). It now spends $40 billion a
year, roughly $20,000 per prisoner, on keeping offenders behind bars.

What is the effect of having so many people passing through the prison
system? Some argue that prison has helped to reduce the country's crime
rate, which has been dropping steadily for a decade, by as much as 8% a
year. James Wilson, a criminologist at the University of California in Los
Angeles, points out that the median number of offences committed each year
by those going to jug is now 12.

Others, such as Alfred Blumstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, say that
locking people up only partly explains the drop in crime. The rest is
accounted for by changing economic fortunes, by shifting demography (when
there are fewer young people, there is less crime), and by new fashions in
drug abuse (crack cocaine is out of vogue, so the violence associated with
its sale has declined).

Either way, with more people leaving prison, there are more ex-convicts in
society. Just as enthusiasts for tough sentences once sought to tie the
prison population to lower crime rates, now opponents argue that it is
spells in prison that are helping to increase criminal behaviour.
Recidivism rates have not changed for decades, but there are far more
ex-convicts: roughly two-thirds of the ex-cons are likely to be rearrested
within three years, and 40% will probably go back behind bars.

This debate will rumble on-not least because it is impossible to prove the
deterrent effect of tougher sentences. But two things are happening. First,
the crime rate has begun to edge up again in some places. In all, crime
dropped by only 0.3% last year, much less than in recent years. In bigger
cities, such as New York and Los Angeles, violent crimes such as murder
(which tend to lead the way for other crime trends) are beginning to rise
again. Some of that may be explained by a demographic bulge in young
people, but it could also be explained by the large number of ex-cons in
society.

Second, in a delayed reaction to the generally lower crime rates of the
past decade, the prison population is beginning to peak. Having risen on
average by 5.6% for the past decade, last year it grew by only 2.3%, the
lowest annual increase since 1971. In several states, including New York
and Massachusetts, the number of people coming out of prison already
exceeds the number going in.

How this will affect public opinion remains to be seen. For most of the
past decade, Americans have believed (wrongly) that the crime rate has been
rising. They have generally supported building more prisons, partly because
this brings jobs, but also because of their punitive effect. The
reintroduction of chain-gangs, or dressing inmates in pink uniforms and
giving them mind-numbing work, are all popular.

In a new book on prisons, "Going up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation"
(Random House), Joseph Hallinan cites surveys showing that, 30 years ago,
most Americans saw the purpose of prison as rehabilitation. Now they say it
is punishment. Among the fruits of that policy are the bulging
penitentiaries across the country-and the flood of ex-cons now hitting the
streets.