U.S. PRISON RANKS SURGE, STATES' SLOW

Crime: the Gap is Likely to Widen As Federal Officials Broaden Their Reach.
California and Others Opt For Treatment Rather Than Jail For Drug Offenders.

WASHINGTON -- With convictions for drugs, guns and immigration offenses on
the rise, the size of the federal inmate population is swelling in record
numbers, as California and many other states are locking up fewer people,
according to a new federal study released Wednesday.

The split between the federal and state systems is likely to grow even
wider in years ahead because of changing strategies in law enforcement:
Federal officials are broadening their reach to lock up criminals once
outside their domain, but states such as California are opting to send many
drug offenders to treatment programs rather than prison.

The result is that the federal prison population added an average of more
than 200 prisoners a week in the first half of 2001--the biggest increase
since statisticians began tracking data in 1977--while state prison
populations increased at their slowest rate in 28 years. In California, the
state prison population even decreased slightly after a decade-long boom in
the 1990s. "The federal system continues to grow, and grow quickly, but the
state systems in the aggregate are slowing down--and slowing down rapidly,"
Allen J. Beck, co-author of the Justice Department study, said in an interview.

L.A. County Keeps Title of Biggest Local System

Los Angeles County held on to its unenviable title as the biggest local
jail system in the country, with an average daily population of more than
19,300 inmates, the study showed. That far eclipsed New York City, with an
average of 14,490 inmates, and Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago,
with 10,212.

Nationwide, 1 in every 145 U.S. residents--1.97 million--was locked up in
local, state or federal prisons on the day in mid-2001 that the figures
were tracked by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Other highlights from the report:

* Privately run prisons, an increasingly popular alternative for
overburdened governments in recent years, saw inmate populations increase
nearly 5% nationwide, to about 95,000 inmates.

* The prison populations for the largest state systems decreased for the
one-year period ending June 30, 2001. Texas was down 3,661 inmates,
California down 525 and New York down 2,553. For California, the 0.3%
decrease brought the number of prisoners down to 163,965 inmates, with 468
people per 100,000 serving sentences of more than one year.

* Men continued to be locked up in prisons and local jails at far higher
rates than women, with 1,318 male inmates per 100,000 men in the population
at large. There were 113 female inmates per 100,000 women.

* Racial and ethnic differences persisted. For men in their 20s and early
30s, an estimated 12% of blacks, 4% of Latinos and 1.8% of whites were in
prison or jail. Incarceration rates for female inmates revealed similar
disparities, the study found.

The most dramatic changes in the data occurred in the federal system, where
the number of prisoners grew to nearly 153,000, a 7.2% increase over the
previous year. The increase of about 7,400 prisoners over six months
earlier represented the single biggest jump in the federal system since the
Justice Department began tracking such data 25 years ago, Beck said.

Driving the trend, he said, are rapid increases in the last five years in
the number of people locked up for drug-related crimes--a group that makes
up about 60% of the federal prison population--along with inmates convicted
on weapon offenses and immigration violations. The numbers do not include
the more than 1,000 people taken into custody on immigration offenses in
the post-Sept. 11 crackdown on terrorism.

The federal government has moved aggressively in the last several years to
implement pilot programs for prosecuting felons caught with guns, imposing
stiff prison terms in cases that previously might have generated lesser
sentences if tried in state courts.

Congress has also continued to add new crimes to the federal books, a trend
that even Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has spoken out against as a
threat to the criminal justice system.

The surge in federal prisoners "is another manifestation of the growing
presence of the federal government in crime control," said Carnegie Mellon
University criminologist Alfred Blumstein.

"It's of significant concern, because crime control has always been a state
and local function, and over the last decade or so it's been moving to the
federal system as they've passed a whole variety of new laws," Blumstein
said in an interview.

Experts Differ on Causes of States' Trend

In state prison systems, meanwhile, the reversal of many years of rising
prison populations reflects the declining crime rates of the 1990s, most
analysts agree. But experts differ over what other factors may be causing
the trend.

Jason Ziedenberg, associate director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal
Justice, a Washington group that supports alternatives to incarceration,
pointed to liberalized drug laws. He noted that judges, lawmakers and
voters in states around the country are beginning to send more drug
offenders to treatment centers instead of prison. Measures such as
Proposition 36, implemented by California voters last year, are likely to
intensify the trend, he and other legal analysts said.

"We know that some people are now being diverted to treatment who weren't
being diverted before. Time will tell how many people that ultimately
affects," he said.

However, Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal
Foundation, a victims' rights group in Sacramento, said he believes that
the stabilization of state prison numbers has been driven not by new
lenient sentencing policies, but by the wave of tougher measures
implemented years earlier, such as California's three-strikes law.

Scheidegger said it is too early to judge the effect of drug treatment
sentencing measures. What is clear, he maintained, is that get-tough
measures are deterring crime.

When California first passed its three-strikes law in 1994, analysts "made
the assumption that if you toughen sentencing, you'll have these huge
prison populations. That hasn't happened," he said. "The fact of the matter
is, when crooks fear that additional crimes will have severe consequences,
they curtail their illegal behavior."