PRISON POPULATIONS NEED TO BE REDUCED

The Issue: The number of people incarcerated in the United States sets
a record.

Our Opinion: More drug treatment programs need to be developed as
alternatives to jailing non-violent offenders.

The get-tough-on-crime policies that were in vogue three decades ago
have resulted in jails and prisons across the country bursting at the
seams.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice reported that at the end of
2005 there was a record high of 2.2 million people behind bars in this
country, an increase of 2 percent over 2004 that saw a similar
increase over 2003.

In fact, the number of inmates in American jails has increased 35
percent in the past decade.

Additionally there were 4.1 million people on probation at the end of
last year and another 784,000 on parole.

In all, seven million Americans -- 3 percent of the U.S. population --
were either locked up or under some type of supervision by the
country's criminal justice system.

As James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern
University in Boston, noted: "These numbers are not worthy of
celebration. We are becoming more punitive."

According to The Sentencing Project, an advocacy group that supports
alternatives to incarceration, the United States is the most punitive
country in the world in terms of incarcerations.

At the end of 2005, the United States had 737 people behind bars for
every 100,000 people. By comparison, Russia, with its history of
locking up massive numbers of political prisoners as well as criminals
in Siberian prisons and gulags, had only 611 people in jail for every
100,000 population.

Other countries had far lower per capita numbers. Britain had 448,
Germany has 95 and France 85. Canada, which shares many similarities
with the United States in terms of culture and society, had only 107.

The reason for the high number of people behind bars in the United
States is no great mystery. America's war on drugs has been the
driving force behind the increase in the prison population.

At one point most states, including Pennsylvania, and the federal
government had passed mandatory-minimum sentencing laws, which often
resulted in lengthy prison terms for relatively minor drug offences.

Many of those laws have been relaxed or eliminated in recent years,
but that hasn't stopped prosecutors and judges from dealing harshly
with non-violent drug offenses.

According to The Sentencing Project, a person convicted of a drug
crime today has a greater chance of serving a long jail sentence than
he would have 30 years ago.

As a result a large percentage of those 2.2 million inmates in U.S.
prisons are there because of drug convictions, and a large percentage
of those for minor drug offenses such as possession.

In 2003, 55 percent of the inmate population in federal prisons had
been sentenced for drug crimes, according to the Justice Department.

And the cost of housing these inmates is not cheap. According to The
Sentencing Project, the average cost of a cell, three meals a day and
medical care is roughly $20,000.

There has been a lot of talk about developing more drug treatment
programs as an alternative to jailing these non-violent offenders, but
the steadily increasing prison-population figures provide strong
evidence that talk is all that's being done.

That needs to change. Not only would a person arrested for simple
possession get more from a treatment program than a prison sentence,
it almost certainly would cost less.