VOTERS DEMAND A CUT IN THE $30 BILLION STATES SPEND ON PRISONS YEARLY

Get Tough On Crime Trend Quietly Losing Ground

Reversing a 20-year trend toward ever-tougher criminal laws, a number
of states this year have quietly rolled back some of their most
stringent anti-crime measures, including those imposing mandatory
minimum sentences and forbidding early parole.

The new laws, along with California's passage in November of a voter
initiative that provides for treatment rather than prison for many
drug offenders, reflect a political climate that has changed markedly
as crime has fallen, the cost of running prisons has exploded and the
economy has slowed, state legislators and criminal justice experts
say.

After a two-decade boom in prison construction and a quadrupling of
the number of inmates, states across the country now spend a total of
$30 billion a year to operate their prisons, according to the Bureau
of Justice Statistics.

And with voters saying they are more concerned about issues like
education than street violence, state legislators are finding they
must cut the growth in prison inmates to satisfy the demand for new
services and to balance their budgets.

"I think these new laws are pretty significant, with legislators
taking politically risky steps that would have been unthinkable even a
couple of years ago," said Michael Jacobson, a former corrections
commissioner for New York City who is now a professor at the John Jay
College of Criminal Justice.

In California, 61 percent of voters approved Proposition 36, which
allows most nonviolent, first- and second-time drug offenders to
receive drug treatment instead of a jail or prison sentence. The new
law took effect July 1 and is the biggest revision of California
criminal code since the three-strikes law was adopted in 1994.

With several states re-examining their criminal laws, including New
York, Alabama, Georgia, New Mexico and Idaho, these changes are likely
to hasten a decline in the number of state prison inmates, which began
to fall in the second half of last year for the first time since 1972,
the experts and lawmakers say.

Perhaps the most significant changes, the experts say, occurred in
four states that this year dropped some 1990s sentencing laws that
required criminals to serve long terms without the possibility of
parole. The four are Louisiana, Connecticut, Indiana and North Dakota.

Iowa passed a similar law last spring, giving judges discretion in
imposing what had been a mandatory five-year sentence for low-level
drug crimes and certain property crimes, including burglary.

In May, Mississippi passed a law making first-time nonviolent
offenders eligible for parole after serving only 25 percent of their
sentences, instead of the 85 percent required under a law enacted in
1994.

And West Virginia, which has had one of the fastest-growing prison
systems, enacted a law to reduce the number of inmates by giving money
to counties to develop alternatives to prison, like electronic
monitoring of people on probation and centers where probationers would
report each day.

Perhaps the most surprising change has come in Louisiana, which has
the highest per capita incarceration rate in the nation and has long
had a reputation for brutal prison conditions and wide racial
disparities in who is sentenced to prison.

Louisiana's new law, strongly supported by Gov. Mike Foster, a
conservative Republican, and the state district attorneys'
association, eliminates mandatory prison time for crimes like
burglary, possession of small amounts of drugs, prostitution and obscenity.

"This is an attempt to bring under control a system that was
bankrupting the state and was not reducing crime," said state Sen.
Donald R. Cravins, a Democrat who was one of the law's prime supporters.

State Rep. Michael P. Lawlor, a Democrat who is chairman of the
Connecticut House judiciary committee, says he sees another advantage
to the new laws, including the one sponsored in his state by Gov. John
G. Rowland, a Republican,

that ends a decade-old system of mandatory prison terms for nonviolent
drug offenders. He said the changes would help reduce huge racial
disparities in who goes to prison.

Nine out of 10 people in jail and prison in Connecticut for drug
offenses are black or Hispanic, Lawlor said, but half of those
arrested on drug charges are white. Part of the problem, he said, is a
Connecticut law that established a mandatory sentence for selling or
possessing drugs within two-thirds of a mile of a school, day care
center or public housing complex.

The result, Lawlor said, is that poor and minority people who live in
these areas end up in prison for any drug charge.

"I think this is the most significant change in criminal justice
policy we have made in more than 10 years," Lawlor said. "Two or three
years from now you are going to be able to look back and see the new
law has made a tremendous impact on who is in prison."