A PRISON BOOM THAT WON'T STOP

The state's prison cells are filling up faster than taxpayers can build
them. We lead the nation in state lock-ups and are planning more. That's
the wrong way to spend the public's money.

Texas just surpassed California as the state holding the most state
prisoners. An annual review by the U.S. Department of Justice found that in
late 1999, Texas had incarcerated 163,190 of its 20 million people.
California prisons held 163,067 inmates, out of 32 million people.

During the 1990s, when crime was declining, the Texas prison population
grew 173 percent. The Texas system grew faster than that of any other
state. The extraordinary growth was fueled by a $1.7 billion
prison-building boom. Declining parole rates helped keep the new prisons full.

That's done, and now state prisons officials say the state must start
building anew. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice board recently
announced plans for three new maximum-security prisons, which prison
officials say would meet just a portion of the projected need for new beds.

At some point, the state needs to take a hard look at its criminal justice
system and figure out how to slow down the assembly-line production of ex-cons.

Texas is out of line with the nation, and even the national incarceration
rate exceeds that of most other developed countries. The U.S. incarceration
rate is six times that of Canada and Australia, according to The Sentencing
Project, a research and advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. The U.S.
rate is five times that of any European Union nation.

The overdeveloped Texas prison system drains resources away from schools,
social services and other areas the public cares deeply about. And the
frenzy to incarcerate has not seemed to markedly increase the sense of
security among the free.

New York just became the first state to require that most drug addicts
convicted of nonviolent crimes get addiction treatment instead of
incarceration. Other states are trying the same approach on a trial basis.

Texas should consider a similar plan. At the very least, it should increase
the scale of rehabilitation programs in its prisons, where a majority of
the prisoners are addicted. The state needs more halfway houses to
reintegrate freed prisoners back into society. It should increase the
parole rate for nonviolent offenders, which may require new expenditures
for monitoring and rehabilitation.

The continuing rapid growth of the state criminal justice system puts the
state outside the norms even of an eager-to-incarcerate nation. It's not a
healthy situation. The state needs to do more crime prevention, which means
increasing services to children so that they don't grow up damaged, angry
and prone to crime and substance abuse.

Otherwise, we will keep attempting the impossible: locking up all our problems.