WHEN WILL WE SPEND MORE ON BOOKS THAN PRISON BARS?

Que pena!

What a shame, that is, for America to be the world leader in the
percentage of its population behind bars - 690 people per 100,000
compared to Canada and most of Western European countries, which
incarcerate from 80 to 120 people per 100,000.

And, it's equally troubling that this supposedly great nation of ours
now has more black men behind bars than are enrolled in college or
universities.

"It's certainly nothing to be proud of to be the world leader in
prisons," Marc Mauer, a leading expert on criminal justice reform,
said as we talked over the telephone yesterday. "Here we are, the
wealthiest society in human history but the most punitive in terms of
how we use imprisonment.

"It suggests that we are not using wealth equitably and
constructively to build strong communities as a way of preventing
crime. Instead, it seems that we are writing off certain communities
from the larger economic community and just dealing with the negative
effects of crime after the harm has been done."

Mauer, assistant director of the Washington-based Sentencing Project,
which promotes criminal justice reform and the development of
alternatives to incarceration, and I were on the telephone discussing
a report released Tuesday showing that the number of black men in jail
or prison has grown fivefold in the past 20 years.

The increase has resulted in more black men now being in jail or
prison rather than being in an institution of higher education.

The report, prepared by the Justice Policy Institute in Washington,
also shows that the increase in black male prison population coincides
with the prison construction boom that started in 1980.

The report, titled "Cellblocks or Classrooms? The Funding of Higher
Education and Corrections and Its Impact on African-American Men,"
said in 1980 that three times more black men were enrolled in
institutions of higher education than behind bars.

Two years ago, according to the report there were 791,600 black men in
the criminal justice system compared to 603,000 in institutions of
higher learning. The report draws new attention to the debate over
whether policymakers should invest more in prisons or programs.

"It's continuing evidence that the basic policies that have been in
place for three decades have not changed in any significant way and
are still contributing to very significant racial disparities in the
prison system," said Mauer, who in 1999 published a book titled Race
to Incarcerate (The New Press). "The impact on the war on drugs,
mandatory sentences and cutbacks on parole have affected the American
community in some very dramatic ways."

But, Mauer said, there are some moderate signs of change.

"One is the renewed attention to racial profiling," he said. "Many
people have known for a long time that racial profiling has existed
for as long as people have been driving cars. Only in recent years has
documentation come to light about the extent of the problem.

"I think there is renewed questioning about the impact of the war on
drugs and the fact that it has been a war on low-income drug use
involving large scale of imprisonment of African Americans and
Hispanics while many white middle-class drug users go through a
treatment process instead of prison.

Mauer noted that more drug treatment is being used thanks to drug
courts, where "it is much more common now for a drug offender to be
diverted to treatment rather than a prison cell."

He reminded me that one of the issues often lost in this discussion is
the disenfranchisement and loss of voting rights to many of those
incarcerated.

"In just the last five years, five states have made significant
changes in disenfranchisement policies to now allow a great number of
ex-felons to have voting rights," he said. "There is going to be a
national conference in September to address the disenfranchisement
problem and consider strategies designed to scale back the
disenfranchisement in an additional number of states."

But, Mauer said, prison has almost become a way of dealing with social
problems in America's low-income communities.

"It's not that most of these people have not committed a crime," he
said. "They have and have been convicted, and there should be
consequences. But the problem is that if we rely primarily on prison,
which is the back end of the system, we're neglecting more
constructive approaches such as involving family support and treatment.

"We know that investing a dollar in treatment is far more effective
than a dollar in prison construction. We have been trying the get
tough approach for 30 years and have achieved a world-record prison
population. But ask the question, 'Do people feel safer?' I don't know
very many people who feel that way."

I don't either, and the race to incarcerate needs to come to an end.
There are surely better ways of dealing with many of these crimes.