REPORT PRAISES HALLINAN'S PUSH FOR DRUG TREATMENT, NOT PRISON

The Study Finds No Correlation Between The Rates Of Imprisonment And Of
Reductions In Crime.

Los Angeles and Orange county residents are imprisoned for low level drug
possession at nearly five times the rate of San Francisco Bay Area
counties, but with "no discernible impact on crime rates," the Justice
Policy Institute has reported in its first ever county-by-county analysis
of California drug policy enforcement.

Of the state's 12 most populous counties, Los Angeles recorded the largest
increase in imprisonment for drug possession between 1980 to 1999, the JPI
report says, and together with Riverside, San Bernardino and Orange
counties, ranked at the top of the list for county drug imprisonment rates.

"The recent large increases in imprisonment for drug offenses show no
discernible impact on crime rates.

Rather, the pattern is a random one, with most high-incarceration counties
showing no reduction in violent or property crime categories relative to
low incarceration counties," the report says.

The report, titled "Drug Use and Justice: An Examination of California Drug
Policy Enforcement" adds that "the six counties that increased their
imprisonment rates the most for low-level drug possession actually
experienced greater increases in violent crime rates from 1980 to 1999 (up
11 percent on average) than the six most lenient counties (up 1 percent)."

In San Francisco, where District Attorney Terence Hallinan has focused on
prosecuting manufacturers and traffickers rather than low-level possessors,
violent crime showed the greatest decrease in the state.

"The fact that San Francisco has minimized severe penalties for drug
possession and at the same time has seeing the sharpest drop in violent
crimes shows that our policy makes sense in terms of public safety,"
Hallinan said.

Debra Vargas, policy analyst for JPI, said in a telephone interview, that
under Hallinan, San Francisco has "emphasized treatment over incarceration.
Southern California does not."

Vargas said San Francisco's jail programs, including a drug diversion
program called Roads to Recovery, and the availability of halfway houses
for those who complete drug treatment programs in jail, have lowered the
recidivism rate for that population of offenders by 17 percent.

"It works," Vargas said.

Vargas noted that the average cost of drug treatment in California is
$4,500 a year, while the cost of imprisoning one inmate in a California
state prison is $26,000 a year.

Overall, the report says, California's drug-offender population increased
from 1,778 in 1980 to 45,455 in 1999, about 2.5 times what it is in the
rest of the country.

"Since 1990, many counties placed increased emphasis on the prosecution and
imprisonment of low level drug offenders, especially for drug possession
offenses," the reports says. "For example, in 1980, only seven people from
San Diego County were sentenced to prison for low-level drug possession,
while in 1999 the county sent 1,002 drug possession offenders to state
prison. Los Angeles sentenced only 145 drug possession offenders to prison
in 1980, yet sentenced 5,109 in 1999."

The report notes that last year, 6,191 people with no prior offenses were
imprisoned for possessing small amounts of drugs, accounting for 11 percent
of those sent to state prisons in 1999.

"In a radical departure from past drug enforcement, more Californians were
imprisoned in the last three years for simple drug possession (38,716) than
for sale or manufacturing drug offenses (35,276). Even more surprising,
while a drug dealer or manufacturer was much more likely to be imprisoned
than a drug possession offender in the 1980s and before, today an offender
arrested for low-level drug possession is considerably more likely to be
imprisoned than one arrested for felony drug manufacture or sale."

While the JPI study focuses on drug imprisonment rates and their
correlation to crime reduction, it is consistent in its findings, with
broader studies showing that little if any of the nationwide drop in crime
in the 1990s can be credited to higher incarceration rates.

In a soon to be released Cambridge University Press book, "The Crime Drop
in America," a group of academic experts reports that "no single factor can
be invoked as the cause of the crime decline of the 1990s."

A study released in late September by the Sentencing Project, a research
and advocacy group in Washington, D.C., found that states that had
increased the number of prison inmates the most in the 1990s actually had
smaller reductions in crime than those with lower increases in imprisonment.

A similar study by Anne Piehl, an associate professor of public policy at
Harvard University, found that the incarceration increases from 1989 to
1999 accounted for only a 5 percent drop in overall violent and property crime.

Carlisle Moody, a professor of economics at the College of William and
Mary, criticized his fellow academics' estimates of the effects of
imprisonment increases because the rate of incarceration, he said, has only
recently begun to catch up with the sharp increase in crime that followed
the mid-1960s.

"I'm pretty sure these other people are underestimating the effects of
incarceration on crime, because they are ignoring the historical changes,"
Moody is quoted in a recent New York Times article. "Prison has a much
greater effect on crime than anything else, like employment or policing."