ENORMOUS PRISON POPULATION A REASON FOR CONCERN, QUESTIONS

The statistics are alarming, the questions troubling. The government
reported Sunday the nation's prison population has topped 2 million for the
first time. Bureau of Justice statistics pegged the total number of people
in the nation's jails and prisons at 2.1 million, an increase of nearly 3
percent over the previous year.

The numbers are not surprising, given a decades-long trend of tougher
sentencing. But the numbers are sobering, if not outright alarming.

Since 1979, the prison population has risen from 263,000 inmates to today's
record numbers, nearly an eight-fold increase. During that period, around
1,000 new prisons were constructed in the U.S. Currently, about one of
every 142 U.S. residents is locked away.

There is no single reason for this trend. The executive director of The
Sentencing Project, Malcolm Young, says tougher drug charges and "three
strikes'' laws bear much of the blame. Political one-upmanship -- seeing
who can be tougher on drugs or crime -- undoubtedly is responsible for much
of the increase. Old-fashioned racism probably plays a hand, given that
about 12 percent of black males between the ages of 20 and 39 are in
prison, compared to 4 percent of Hispanic males and 1.6 percent of white
males of the same age. (Over the course of their lifetime, according to
Bureau of Justice Statistics, nearly one-third of black males will see the
inside of a jail or prison).

The numbers are booming. Our nation has a larger prison population than
China or Russia; with about 5 percent of the world's population, we have 25
percent of the prisoners. The nations of the European Union, with 100
million people than more than the United States, has one-sixth the number
of prisoners. More people are in American jails than there are people,
period, in Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming combined. When you add in the number
of people on parole or on probation, the numbers reach 6.6 million -- one
of every 32 people in the country.

Those are the numbers. Here are the questions.

Is this approach making us safer? Are the right people being locked up? Is
this cost-effective? And most of all, have we Americans become such a bad
people in the last 20 years that we need to be locked up in such prodigious
numbers?

You can argue the first question from two sides. Yes, we're becoming safer,
in that between 1994 and 2001, violent crime declined by half. In fact, the
figures in 2001 were the lowest ever recorded. It can also be pointed out
that while those numbers dipped, the number of people incarcerated
continued to rise and rise. As far as the right people being locked up,
that seems to be another yes-and-no answer. Certainly, repeat violent
offenders seem to be receiving longer sentences. Because of the volume the
prison system faces, there are almost certainly people being let loose on
parole who shouldn't be in order to free a bunk for a less dangerous person.

Is it cost-effective? This one is an almost-certain "no.'' It costs about
$25,000 to house an inmate for a year. That inmate isn't paying taxes into
the system during this time, creating sort of a double-whammy on the tax
structure. The cost of housing a maximum security prisoner is $100,000 a
year, a cost that is justifiable given what such a prisoner could cost
society. For the general prison population as a whole, society is not
getting much bang for its buck. The streets are not full of rehabilitated
prisoners.

Finally, are we such a terrible people? There does seem to be something in
the American psyche that gives us an aversion to following the rules. There
is also an astoundingly deep reservoir of goodness in our people. This
question is probably best left to philosophers and sociologists.

Prisons are wholly terrible places but entirely necessary for a civilized
society. There are people who simply are a menace to society and should be
locked up.

But the trend of locking more people away should not be shrugged off. We've
created a vast and expensive prison system. Given that we are not a perfect
society we have also created a system that has become a big business.

We should ask ourselves if it's a business we want a democracy to be in.