IOWA HELPS DRIVE TREND OF HIGHER INMATE NUMBERS

Iowa historically has been an island of sanity on prisons, especially
when compared to states such as Texas and California. Iowa long
believed that prison should be the last option. That has changed in
recent decades, however, and Iowa has racked up some of the fastest
prison-growth rates in the nation.

In the past 20 years, the state's prison population has tripled - to
8,727 inmates as of Tuesday. At the same time, the number of convicts
in community-based corrections programs has doubled, to more than
30,000. In the past decade alone, those two populations combined
increased by nearly 60 percent.

What explains this growth? For one, it is the "war on drugs": Iowa,
like the rest of the country, has poured huge law-enforcement
resources into policing illegal drugs. According to a state analysis,
as of 2005, 26 percent of prison inmates were convicted of
drug-related crimes, a 10-fold increase from just a decade earlier.
Also, there is an increased emphasis on sex crimes: At the current
growth rate, sex offenders alone could fill a 750-bed prison in short
of a decade. Also, prisons have become substitute warehouses for the
mentally ill. In 2005, nearly a third of prison inmates were
clinically diagnosed as suffering mental illnesses.

At the same time, the Iowa Legislature has steadily increased
penalties, lengthened prison sentences and added to the list of
sentences that require mandatory-minimum terms. The result is that the
rapid growth of incoming inmates has overwhelmed the system. Even
though Iowa has steadily added capacity, prisons house 1,300 more
inmates than they were designed to hold.

The Iowa Legislature is expected to take up the issue of prisons next
session. Unfortunately what's on the agenda is not finding more
resources for drug abuse or mental-health programs. Rather, lawmakers
will consider whether to invest in new and expanded prisons. This much
is predictable: They will be filled to overcapacity before they are
opened.