TEXAS TOPS ALL STATES IN PRISON POPULATION

Study Says Governor And Presidential Hopeful George Bush Plays Down Crime
Issue On Campaign Trail

Washington -- A sobering study that brands Texas the prison capital of the
world has suddenly thrust Texas Governor George Bush's get-tough record on
crime into the spotlight in the presidential race.

An exploding prison population in the 1990s vaulted Texas past California
- -- a state nearly twice its population -- as the jurisdiction with the
largest prison population in the United States, according to a study
released yesterday by the Washington-based Justice Policy Institute.

One out of every 20 adults in Texas is either in jail, on parole or on
probation, and its prison population grew faster than all other states in
the 1990s, the study found.

The authors also found that if Texas were a separate country, it would
easily lead the world in putting its people behind bars.

"It's a factory system," Jason Ziedenberg, a senior researcher at the
institute and the report's co-author, said in an interview. "It would have
a higher incarceration rate than Russia, China, the United States and the
rest of the industrialized and non-industrialized world."

Texas, with 20 million people, has a prison population of 163,190 and a
total of 706,600 people under some form of criminal justice control.

Texas accounted for one out of every five people added to the U.S. prison
population in the nineties, according to the institute, which favours
rehabilitation over imprisonment.

In marked contrast to previous Republican presidential candidates, Mr. Bush
has played down the crime issue as a major topic on the campaign trail. He
did not mention crime -- which has been declining in recent years -- in his
acceptance speech at the Republican national convention in Philadelphia
earlier this month, and he wasn't talking about it yesterday in Austin, Tex.

Yet his get-tough record is well known. In six years as governor, Mr. Bush
has presided over 143 executions. Fully one-fifth of all executions in the
United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 have occurred
in Texas.

Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore has said he wants to be "a
law-enforcement president" and has advocated beefed-up policing over
incarceration.

A Bush campaign spokesman defended Mr. Bush's record yesterday, arguing the
state's crackdown has taught criminals there are consequences to their actions.

"What the authors of that study might not understand is that Texas also has
been very aggressive in using rehabilitation efforts and faith-based
organizations to change people's hearts," spokesman Mike Jones said. "The
bottom line to all these efforts is that, under Governor Bush, Texas has
the lowest violent crime rate in 26 years and the lowest murder rate since
the 1950s."

But the study raises questions about the soundness of locking people up to
fight crime, not just in Texas, but across the United States. The country
has the largest prison population in the world at two million people.

The study pointed out that the Texas prison boom has not had a matching
impact on the crime rate. Crime has dropped in Texas, but at a
significantly slower rate than in the rest of the country, and well behind
states of similar size, such as New York.

"In light of these lackluster results, the architects of Texas' prison
policies should question whether these mediocre crime drops are worth the
social costs the state is paying," the study concluded.

From 1995 to 1998, crime fell 5.1 per cent in Texas, or half the national
rate and well behind a 20-per-cent drop in New York.

The U.S. Justice Department reported Sunday that violent crime dropped 10.4
per cent last year nationwide to its lowest level since the government
started gathering data in 1973.

Mr. Zeidenberg insisted the report was not politically motivated nor
calculated to embarrass Mr. Bush. He said both Democrats and Republicans
share the blame for the state's criminal justice system; Mr. Bush became
Texas Governor in 1994 by beating Ann Richards, a Democrat.

He also pointed out that Mr. Gore must likewise answer for a doubling of
the federal prison population to more than 135,000 since 1992.

The study comes as Texas prison officials and legislators are appealing for
more funds to build 14,600 new prison spaces by 2005.

"The sheer numbers of people in prison and jail in Texas are signs of a
system fixated on punishment, and devoid of compassion," Mr. Zeidenberg and
co-author Vincent Schiraldi said in a statement.

But Larry Todd, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
said the increased prison population is a result of get-tough policies
Texas voters approved in a series of elections over the last decade, rather
than any administrative decisions made by Mr. Bush.