THINK THAT STUFFING PRISONS WITH LAWBREAKERS MAKES SENSE?

You Clearly Haven't Run The Numbers. Here Are Some Better Ways To Buy Safety.

America is an exceptional country. Compared with citizens of other nations,
Americans tend to be more religious and more entrepreneurial. We send more
people to university, have more millionaires, and enjoy more living space.
We are the world leaders in obesity and Nobel Prizes.

And we send people to prison at a rate that is almost unheard of. Right
now, almost two million Americans are either in prison (after conviction)
or jail (waiting for trial). Of every 100,000 Americans, 481 are in prison.
By comparison, the incarceration rate for Britain is 125 per 100,000, for
Canada 129, and for Japan 40. Only Russia, at 685, is quicker to lock 'em up.

America was not always so exceptional in this regard. For the 50 years
prior to 1975, the U.S. incarceration rate averaged about 110, right around
rich-world norms. But then, in the 1970s, the great prison buildup began.
This was a bipartisan movement. Democrats like Jerry Brown of California
and Ann Richards of Texas, for example, presided over prison population
booms, as did Republican governors like John Ashcroft of Missouri and
Michael Castle of Delaware. Bill Clinton worried in public about rising
prison populations but signed legislation, much of it Republican sponsored,
that kept the figures rising. No surprise, then, that spending on
incarceration has ballooned from less than $ 7 billion in 1980 to about $
45 billion today.

Just because the U.S. is different doesn't mean it is wrong. But prison is
a serious matter in a way that, say, America's inexplicable affection for
tractor pulls is not. Accordingly, a number of people--social scientists,
prison professionals, even a few politicians--have begun to examine how and
why the U.S. sends people to prison. What they are finding, in broad terms,
is that there is a substantial minority of prisoners for whom incarceration
is inappropriate--and much too expensive.

Who deserves to be imprisoned is, of course, partly a question of moral
values. Prison keeps criminals off the streets; it punishes transgressors
and deters people from committing crimes. But it is also a question of
economic values. Everyone agrees that caging, say, John Wayne Gacy is worth
whatever it costs, but that locking up a granny caught shoplifting makes no
sense. The question to consider, then, is not "Does prison work?" but "When
does prison work?" Economics can help draw the line.

On one level, it makes sense that America imprisons more people than its
peers. The U.S. has historically been more violent than Europe, Japan, or
Canada--in particular, our homicide rate is well above world norms--and the
public wants violent people punished while freeing society from their
presence. "We are a culture that believes change is possible, that human
beings can be saved," says Francis Cullen of the University of Cincinnati,
who specializes in public attitudes toward crime and rehabilitation. "The
dividing line is violence. That's where people start becoming unwilling to
take risks."

Fundamentally, America's prison population grew because people got sick of
feeling scared and elected politicians who promised to deliver freedom from
that fear. Moreover, it could be argued that America had some catching up
to do: From the early 1960s to the early 1970s, the violent-crime rate rose
sharply while the incarceration rate actually fell. Those trends probably
helped spawn the "tough on crime" mentality that has reigned since. In the
1980s lawmakers delivered mandatory minimums--statutory requirements for
harsh sentences for certain offenses, mostly gun- and drug-related. In the
1990s came "three-strikes" laws, designed to target repeat felons;
truth-in-sentencing legislation; and the abolition of parole in many states.

All those policies filled prisons, but not necessarily with the hardened
thugs people thought they were putting away. Though there are now 400,000
more violent offenders behind bars than there were in 1980, the proportion
of violent offenders in the prison population has actually fallen.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the percentage of violent
offenders in state prisons has dropped from almost 60% in 1980 to 48% at
the end of 1999; 21% were in prison in 1999 for property crimes, 21% for
drug crimes, and the rest for public-order offenses, such as immigration,
vice, or weapons violations. In the federal system, home to about 145,000
offenders, 58% are in for drug offenses (compared with 25% in 1980) and
only 12% for violent crimes--down from 17% in 1990. Of the six crimes that
account for the great majority of prisoners (murder, robbery, aggravated
assault, burglary, drugs, and sexual assault), drug offenders made up 45%
of the growth from 1980 to 1996, figures Allan Beck of the BJS. Every year
from 1990 through 1997, more people were sentenced to prison for drug
offenses than for violent crimes.

Because imprisonment went up in the 1990s and crime went down, you might
conclude that locking up so many criminals bought us less crime. Up to a
point that's true. Steven Levitt, a professor of economics at the
University of Chicago, has cleverly provided an empirical foundation to
prove the link between incarceration and crime reduction. In 1996 he
studied what happened after the courts ordered 12 states to reduce
overcrowding in their prison systems. By looking at how the states
responded, either by releasing convicts or by building new prisons, he
estimated that the effect of imprisoning one additional lawbreaker for a
year was to prevent two fewer violent crimes and about a dozen fewer
property crimes. The social costs of these crimes Levitt estimated at $
53,900 (a figure derived from published estimates commonly used by social
scientists). That's well above the $ 25,000 or so it costs to keep a
prisoner behind bars for a year.

But that doesn't prove that every prison cell built in America's 25-year
construction spree was worth it. There could be ways to deliver just as
much public safety for less money. Take Canada. Like the U.S., Canada saw a
sharp decline in violent crime in the 1990s--but while America's prison
population almost doubled, Canada's rose only slightly. Or take next-door
neighbors New Hampshire and Maine. In the first half of the 1990s, both saw
similar declines in crime, but New Hampshire sharply increased the number
of people it imprisoned, while Maine did not. Ditto for Kansas and
Missouri; the latter built lots more new prisons, but the crime rates in
the two states remained similar. In short, building prisons is not the only
way to fight crime--and often not a cost-effective way to do so.

In economic terms, this is because not every prison cell delivers equal
returns, in terms of havoc unwreaked. As more and more people are
imprisoned, the nastiness of the inmate population diminishes, so the crime
control delivered per convict drops. Consider the research of John DiIulio,
the new director of President Bush's office of faith-based programs; Bert
Useem, director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of
New Mexico; and Anne Morrison Piehl, a professor of public policy at
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In 1999 the trio surveyed male
inmates in Arizona, New Mexico, and New York about their criminal pasts.
Then they multiplied each crime by its social cost, using National
Institute of Justice numbers. (The cost of a rape, for example, is
estimated at $ 98,327; of a burglary, $ 1,271.)

They found that the social cost of the crimes committed by the median
inmate in New York--that is, one whose crimes rank 50 on a scale of 100 in
terms of seriousness--was $ 31,866; in New Mexico, $ 26,486; and in
Arizona, $ 25,472. That's slightly more than the $ 25,000 cost of
incarceration. For the 40th percentile, though, that figure dropped to less
than $ 14,000 in all three states, and for the 20th, less than $ 7,000. At
the 80th percentile, the monetary value of crime caused was almost $
240,000 for New York and $ 163,311 for New Mexico--marking the perpetrator
as the type of person for whom prison is clearly an appropriate solution.

The major dividing line between cost-effective and non-cost-effective
incarceration? That turns out to be fairly easy to figure. As a general
rule, those who were imprisoned for property or violent crimes caused
damage to society that cost more than their incarceration; those convicted
solely of drug offenses did not.

Drug dealing is not harmless, of course. Having an open-air crack market on
the corner kills commerce and devastates neighborhoods. But the authors
became convinced that the incarceration of so many drug-only offenders--28%
in New York and 18% in Arizona--made no economic sense, because one drug
seller sent to prison just created a job opening for another seller.
Consider the example of a Milwaukee street corner. In 1996 a Wisconsin task
force noted that although the police had made 94 drug-related arrests in
three months at the corner of 9th and Concordia, most of them leading to
prison sentences, the drug market continued and public safety did not
improve. And the price was substantial: It costs about $ 23 million to jail
94 people for a year.

In short, the authors found that for drug offenders, "the crime averted by
incarceration is low," says Piehl. "We need to come up with sanctions that
are graduated so that our only options are not nothing, or prison, or
probation." What made that conclusion particularly noteworthy was that
Piehl and DiIulio had argued for years in favor of more prisons. But by
last year DiIulio, who is no one's idea of a bleeding-heart liberal, was
writing an article for the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal titled
"Two Million Prisoners Is Enough."

Are there better, less costly alternatives to prison for drug offenders?
Lisa Roberson offers one answer to that question. She is a resident at the
Phoenix Career Academy in Brooklyn, N.Y., which offers residents--many of
them repeat offenders who would otherwise be in prison--intensive drug
treatment, vocational training, and after-care assistance. Roberson, 31,
who started selling drugs at 17 and using them at 21, spent four years at
Clinton State in New Jersey for selling drugs to an undercover cop. "All I
did there is learn how to jail," she says. When she was arrested again in
2000, the court gave her a choice: prison or two years at Phoenix.

This is no country club. Residents sleep ten to a room. Just about every
minute of their day, starting with a 6 A.M. wake-up call, is plotted for
them. If Roberson makes it through the program--and about 60% do--she will
be drug-free and will have completed training as a drug counselor. Phoenix
will help her find a job, an apartment, and child care for her 4-year-old
son. Yes, Roberson may regress--of those who complete the course, about a
third eventually go back to drugs--but clearly she has a much better shot
at establishing a real life than if she had spent several more years
"learning how to jail." The cost of her treatment, funded mostly by state
and local governments: $ 17,000 to $ 18,000 a year.

Many successful drug-treatment programs are run out of prisons too--such as
Amity Righturn, a program in a medium-security facility in San Diego that
provides more than a year of assessment and counseling, plus further
treatment after the inmates have left prison. A 1999 study found that three
years after release, 27% of inmates who completed all three parts of the
program had returned to prison; among those who got no treatment, 75% did.

On the subject of drug treatment, cost-benefit analysis has something to
say: It works. Numerous studies have concluded that well-run drug-treatment
programs, particularly long-term residential ones with follow-up care, can
pay for themselves just by reducing crime. Add in the value of
incarceration avoided and taxes paid by the freed, and it adds up.

Given this context, it's little short of tragic that drug-treatment
programs in prison are not keeping pace with the need for them. In 1991
about a third of the inmates who reported drug use in the month prior to
their arrest were getting treatment; by 1999 that was down to less than
15%, according to the Department of Justice, and much of that was of the
nonintensive variety that has little long-term effect. Treatment is no
panacea: Lots of people will drop out or go back to their bad habits. The
point is simply that treatment works often enough for the benefits to
outweigh the costs--the exact opposite of the economics of prison for drug
offenders.

What about other prison programs? Social scientists have applied
cost-benefit analysis to those too. They have found that busy
inmates--those given the chance to learn to read, to finish high school, to
learn basic job skills--are significantly less likely than idle ones to
return to prison. In Maryland, for example, a follow-up analysis published
last October of 1,000 former inmates found a 19% lower recidivism rate for
those who had taken education programs in prison than for those who hadn't.
Extrapolating that 19% figure for the state as a whole suggests that
Maryland could save $ 23.2 million a year in reduced incarceration--double
what it spends on prison education programs.

More evidence that educational programs save money: In 1999 analysts from
the state of Washington surveyed studies dating back to the mid-1970s on
what works and what fails in reducing crime. The researchers concluded that
for every dollar spent on basic adult education in prison, there was $ 1.71
in reduced crime; for every dollar on vocational education, $ 3.23.

If you think such data have prompted more educational programs in prisons,
think again. Congress passed "get tough" legislation in the 1990s that
eliminated Pell grants to prisoners for college courses; it also reduced
the requirements for basic and vocational education for prisoners. Many
states have therefore taken the opportunity to cut back. Prisoners have a
limited constituency, after all, and nixing programs for them is a
politically painless way to cut budgets.

Ironically, surveys show that the public strongly supports
prisoner-rehabilitation programs. So do many who run the prisons. Tommy
Douberley, warden of Florida's Moore Haven Correctional Facility, is
convinced that no-frills prisons are a mistake. "These people are going to
be returned to society," he says. "We need to make some provision for them
that when they get out they are better than when they went in."
Politicians, however, seem to have interpreted the public's clear desire
for greater safety as a mandate for more and harsher prisons. And they are
not the same thing at all.

There are signs that America is beginning to recognize the limits of
prison. Drug offenders are less likely to be sentenced to prison today than
they were in 1992 (though still more than three times as likely as in
1980), in part because of the emergence of drug courts in many states,
which force defendants into treatment on pain of prison. But past policies
continue to exert expansionary pressure. From June 1999 to June 2000, the
last 12-month period for which figures are available, the incarcerated
population rose 3%. Though the smallest rise in decades, that still meant
that 31,000 more Americans were behind bars. To house them means building a
prison every ten days or so--an expensive hobby, considering that a
medium-security facility for 1,000 inmates can cost $ 50 million.

Make no mistake: A large proportion of inmates thoroughly deserve to be
exactly where they are. Incarceration is an effective way to isolate really
awful people. But too many prisons stuffed with nonviolent, idle inmates is
simply wasteful, of both people and money. We would do better to learn from
several states that have lowered the crime rate without substantially
raising prison populations--as New York did at least in part by
aggressively funneling drug offenders into treatment, for example. Instead
of being exceptional for its willingness to jail its citizens, the goal for
America should be to become exceptional in the application of wisdom to its
criminal population. At the moment, it is not even close.

FEEDBACK: cmurphy@fortunemail.com

BOX STORY:

The land of the free?

Incarceration rate per 100,000 residents

Russia, 685

USA, 481

Singapore, 465

Canada, 129

Britain, 125

China, 115

Spain, 110

Australia, 95

Germany, 90

France, 90

Italy, 85

Japan, 40

Sources: U.S. Department of Justice, World Prison Population List,
Statistics Canada

U.S. prison population

Drug-only offenders

1980 7%

1998 24%

In state and federal prisons. Does not include the 76,000 people in private
prisons, or those in jail awaiting trial.