PRISON NATION

After three decades of explosive growth, the nation's prison
population has reached some grim milestones: More than 1 in 100
American adults are behind bars. One in nine black men, ages 20 to
34, are serving time, as are 1 in 36 adult Hispanic men.

Nationwide, the prison population hovers at almost 1.6 million, which
surpasses all other countries for which there are reliable figures.
The 50 states last year spent about $44 billion in tax dollars on
corrections, up from nearly $11 billion in 1987. Vermont,
Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan and Oregon devote as much money or
more to corrections as they do to higher education.

These statistics, contained in a new report from the Pew Center on
the States, point to a terrible waste of money and lives. They
underscore the urgent challenge facing the federal government and
cash-strapped states to reduce their overreliance on incarceration
without sacrificing public safety. The key, as some states are
learning, is getting smarter about distinguishing between violent
criminals and dangerous repeat offenders, who need a prison cell, and
low-risk offenders, who can be handled with effective community
supervision, electronic monitoring and mandatory drug treatment
programs, combined in some cases with shorter sentences.

Persuading public officials to adopt a more rational, cost-effective
approach to prison policy is a daunting prospect, however, not least
because building and running jailhouses has become a major industry.

Criminal behavior partly explains the size of the prison population,
but incarceration rates have continued to rise while crime rates have
fallen. Any effort to reduce the prison population must consider the
blunderbuss impact of get-tough sentencing laws adopted across the
United States beginning in the 1970's. Many Americans have come to
believe, wrongly, that keeping an outsized chunk of the population
locked up is essential for sustaining a historic crime drop since the 1990's.

In fact, the relationship between imprisonment and crime control is
murky. Some portion of the decline is attributable to tough
sentencing and release policies. But crime is also affected by things
like economic trends and employment and drug-abuse rates. States that
lagged behind the national average in rising incarceration rates
during the 1990's actually experienced a steeper decline in crime
rates than states above the national average, according to the
Sentencing Project, a nonprofit group.

A rising number of states are broadening their criminal sanctions
with new options for low-risk offenders that are a lot cheaper than
incarceration but still protect the public and hold offenders
accountable. In New York, the crime rate has continued to drop
despite efforts to reduce the number of nonviolent drug offenders in prison.

The Pew report spotlights policy changes in Texas and Kansas that
have started to reduce their outsized prison populations and address
recidivism by investing in ways to improve the success rates for
community supervision, expanding treatment and diversion programs,
and increasing use of sanctions other than prison for minor parole
and probation violations. Recently, the Supreme Court and the United
States Sentencing Commission announced sensible changes in the
application of harsh mandatory minimum drug sentences.

These are signs that the country may finally be waking up to the
fiscal and moral costs of bulging prisons.