PACKED PRISONS

New Orleans Conference Addresses Reasons Behind Rising Number Of People
Behind Bars

Principal Sheila Young says the family portrait drawn by one of her
brightest New Orleans third-graders was disturbing: There, next to the
smiling faces of the girl and her eight siblings was a frowning woman,
their mother, with vertical bars over her face.

"I ran to get the social worker, because it's such an exaggerated frown,"
says Young, whose Craig Elementary School is in one of the city's poorest
neighborhoods. "It was frightening."

That's when Young learned that the girl's crack-addicted mother was serving
a year for a parole violation. When Young asked the girl's classmates how
many of them had a relative or neighbor in prison, more than half the hands
shot up.

When it comes to locking people up, Louisiana leads the South. And the
South leads the nation.

Since 1980, the country's prison population has quadrupled to 2.1 million,
with the South accounting for 45 percent of that increase, according to a
report released Friday by the grass-roots group Critical Resistance South.

Activists push reform

Citizen activists from around the region plan to converge on New Orleans
and Craig Elementary for a weekend conference to address the situation and
brainstorm about how to change it.

At a time when nearly every state is facing crushing deficits, Rose Braz
believes prison beds are a good place to start cutting.

"I do think this is a unique opportunity for states to re-examine their
spending priorities," says Braz, national director for Critical Resistance.
"We have a limited amount of money that is getting smaller by the minute.
Do we want to invest in prisons, prisons and more prisons?"

Louisiana's incarceration rate is 800 per 100,000 residents. The rate for
the South is 526 per 100,000 --- higher than that of 63 percent of
countries in the world, according to the report generated for the group by
the Justice Policy Institute in Washington. The West is a distant second at
408 per 100,000.

Thirteen of the top 20 states with the highest incarceration rates are in
the South.

Funds, attitude blamed

Why are the region's numbers so high?

Some would argue that Southern states have spent less money for the kinds
of social programs that tend to keep people off the path to prison.

"The South historically has had either less money available or less
political interest in making those investments," says Marc Mauer, assistant
director of the Sentencing Project.

A recent national survey conducted by a group of Florida State University
researchers found that Southerners were more politically conservative and
racially prejudiced in their attitudes than people in other regions, and
more punitive.

Prison populations soared through the past two decades as states got tough
on crime, with so-called "three strikes you're out" and "truth in
sentencing" measures that guaranteed repeat offenders long stays. But as
crime rates have fallen, many states in the South and elsewhere have
attempted to cut their prison populations.

In the past two years, Louisiana and Mississippi --- which has the
second-highest lockup rate --- have backed away from mandatory minimum
sentences for certain offenders. Georgia, which ranks sixth in its lockup
rate, is considering moving toward sentencing guidelines, which seek to
divert nonviolent offenders into community-based programs.

Alternatives to prison

Faced with a looming $400 million shortfall, Kentucky recently granted
early release to about 900 inmates.

South Carolina's corrections department is considering releasing up to
4,000 inmates, and Arkansas' governor wants to put more drug violators in
treatment programs.

"I would argue that high incarceration rates are not terribly
cost-effective," Mauer says. "But many of those arguments have not been
persuasive in most of those states until the budget crunch hit."

One Southern state, North Carolina, has had success with alternatives to
locking people up.

In 1980, it had the highest incarceration rate in the country. Today, it
ranks 31st.

Sentencing guidelines

Dan Wilhelm of the Vera Institute of Justice gives much of the credit to
the decision in 1994 to switch to sentencing guidelines, or structured
sentencing.

He says the result was a system that simultaneously "increased the
likelihood and length" of sentences for violent offenders, while
establishing "a continuum of community punishments for nonviolent offenders."

With crime rates down and corrections budgets among the highest-growth
areas of state spending, Wilhelm says policymakers from both sides of the
political aisle can agree on the need for prison reform.

"There's an opportunity right now for changes to be made," he says.
"Because there's a common interest that's brought these unlikely bedfellows
together."