SAFE WAYS TO REDUCE PRISON COUNT NEEDED

America's Prison Population Must Come Down

Of course, that's easy to say and much harder to do, but we cannot
continue to put Americans behind bars at the rate we're putting them
there - 900 each week in federal and state prisons from mid-year 2003
to mid-year 2004.

Building and maintaining more jails and prisons steal from our economy
and more worthwhile endeavors. Imprisonment is disruptive to families
and society, as children are shuffled from one family, usually
low-income, to another and people in and out of prisons lose a sense
of community and assume an attitude of dependency on others.

The Bureau of Justice reported last week that the number of inmates in
federal and state prisons topped 2.1 million in June of last year. The
United States incarcerates its citizens at a higher rate than any
other country in the world, and Oklahoma has one of the higher rates
in the nation, falling behind only Texas and Louisiana.

Experts say the high numbers are the result of get-tough policies
enacted in recent years, despite the fact that the crime rate in the
United States is falling.

The public should be protected from violent offenders, and jail and
prison cells are appropriate places for the violent. But as one expert
has pointed out, imprisonment shouldn't always be the "primary
response to crime."

We should be establishing community work programs and other
alternatives to imprisonment for nonviolent offenders. Some experts
are recommending drug treatment programs for low-level drug offenders
and assistance for the mentally ill.

And despite years of sentencing reforms, sentencing sometimes does not
make sense. Locally, a man who killed another man's cow received a
20-year prison sentence and a man who sexually abused a child
repeatedly only received 15 years in prison.

Crime is the result of many factors, and we won't find simple
solutions to eliminating or even slowing down crime. But we can take a
more productive approach in sentencing.

Prison stats

With 726 prisoners per 100,000 residents, the United States imprisons
people at a rate nearly 10 times that of other democracies.

12.6% of all black men in their late twenties were behind bars,
compared to 3.6% for Hispanic males and 1.7% for whites.

Women remain the fastest growing segment of the prison population,
increasing by more than 2.9% to 103,000. Twenty-five years ago, there
were 12,000 women prisoners in the US.

Three prisons systems - the federal, Texas, and California - hold over
100,000 prisoners each, with the feds in the lead at 179,000, Texas at
166,000, and California at 166,000. Driven largely by drug offenders,
the federal prison population continues to grow at a rate more than
twice that of the states.

Source: U.S. Department of Justice