VIRGINIA IS PAYING THE PRICE FOR PRISON BOOM

Six years ago, an underdog ex-congressman named George Allen was elected
governor of Virginia in a landslide after riding a campaign that portrayed
the state in the grip of a violent crime wave.

One of his TV ads depicted the sound of gunfire and scenes of gunshot
victims and wailing ambulances. The spot accused Allen's opponent, a former
attorney general, of presiding over ``the largest increase in violent crime
in history.''

Overlooked in the rhetorical barrage was a salient fact: Crime in Virginia
in 1993, already low by national standards, was on the decline.

On taking office, Allen championed a program to ``halt the reign of terror
by violent career criminals and make Virginia safe again.''

Republicans and Democrats in the General Assembly obliged, passing sweeping
laws that lengthened many criminal sentences, abolished parole and launched
Virginia on a $400 million wave of prison construction.

Today Virginia -- a historically low-crime state -- has a criminal justice
system that stands out as one of the most punitive in the United States and
the world.

It keeps a higher percentage of its residents locked up than 31 other U.S.
states, many of which have significantly higher crime rates. Its
incarceration rate of 640 per 100,000 residents is twice that of South
Africa and not far behind Russia.

It executes more people than any other state except Texas.

And the state keeps a third of its criminals in prison for 20 years to
life, more than 40 other states.

This get-tough policy has diverted hundreds of millions in state funds to
build prisons, constricting the state's ability to reduce traffic gridlock
and move its schoolchildren from trailers to classrooms. Prison spending is
growing twice as fast as spending for colleges and universities. It costs
Virginia taxpayers nearly $22,000 to imprison one inmate for a year -- more
than twice the cost of tuition, room and board at a state university.

It costs up to three times that much to keep the growing number of older
prisoners locked up, further escalating the state's prison bill, which soon
will reach $1 billion a year.

Prisons have become a growth industry in Virginia.

Over the past five years, the state has built six new prisons containing
8,000 cells. It now incarcerates 31,000 Virginians in more than 50 prisons,
detention centers and other lockups from Chesapeake to Big Stone Gap. The
Department of Corrections and related agencies employ nearly 17,000 people
- -- 15 percent of the state government's work force -- which puts it on a
par with Newport News Shipbuilding, Virginia's largest manufacturer.

Despite Virginia's high incarceration rates, the building boom has far
exceeded the number of state inmates. As a result, the state now imports
out-of-state criminals to fill 4,000 empty prison beds.

And while violent criminals were said to be the target of the state's
get-tough policy, the swelling of Virginia's prison population has come
primarily from locking up drug offenders, not violent criminals.

Advocates of the policy claim success from the drop in the state's crime
rate, but fail to note that violent crime has dropped even more nationwide.

Virginia's tough law-and-order stance shows no signs of abating. Gov. Jim
Gilmore fully supports the Allen initiatives and believes that Virginia
still isn't tough enough on drug offenders. Last fall, with the support of
Lt. Gov. John Hager, Attorney General Mark Earley and key General Assembly
leaders, he proposed a $41.5 million anti-drug program that would include
hiring 210 new state troopers to help catch offenders.

Fear, Not Facts, Fueled Get-Tough Policy

Fighting crime was a popular political theme in the 1980s and 1990s. Allen
capitalized on that sentiment, and his anti-crime initiatives accelerated a
punitive trend that was already under way in Virginia. Counting
out-of-state inmates, the state's prison population has nearly quadrupled
since 1981, placing Virginia in the forefront of a national movement to put
more and more people behind bars.

``We were coming out of a period of social turbulence -- Vietnam, racial
tension, riots in the streets, drugs,'' said Charles Thomas, a
criminologist at the University of Florida. ``Once they detected that there
was this broad fear of criminal victimization, even though the actual
statistical risk of criminal victimization was declining, the politicians
on both sides of the aisle really began working it. There was competition
between Democrats and Republicans, each claiming to be tougher on crime
than the other.''

Crime in Virginia, which already was well below the national average, has
declined 25 percent since 1981.

The rate spiked upward for a few years in the late 1980s, but it never
again reached the 1981 level. It peaked in 1991 and was already on its way
back down when Allen, a Republican, proposed his get-tough policies and the
Assembly enacted them with the support of Democratic majorities in the
House and Senate.

Violent crime in Virginia -- the primary focus of the anti-crime campaign
- -- stood at about half the national average in 1993, the year Allen was
elected.

Larry Sabato, a government professor at the University of Virginia, said
the overwhelming legislative support for Allen's get-tough program was a
matter of political survival.

``It was the main plank in the campaign, and he was elected in one of the
largest landslides in modern Virginia history,'' Sabato said. ``The
Democrats, who already had been reduced to a small majority, were in no
position to oppose him. . . . To vote against that was potentially
political suicide.

``Even delegates and senators who privately opposed this change voted for
it,'' Sabato said. ``They would tell me off the record they had no choice.
And they were right.''

When Allen was elected, Sen. J. Randy Forbes of Chesapeake served in the
House of Delegates, where he led the governor's drive for parole reform.
Forbes, who is now state Republican chairman, said there was more than
politics behind the initiative.

Prisons were so overcrowded when Allen took office that state inmates were
backlogged in local jails. Seven sheriffs sued to force removal of the
state prisoners.

``If you look at where we were in the late '80s when the prisons were
overcrowded, I think what we did was a very rational approach,'' Forbes said.

Forbes said legislators feared the overcrowding might prompt a federal
court takeover of the state prison system, as had happened in many other
states.

``Most of the increase in cost would have been occasioned anyway, even
without the abolition of parole,'' Allen said.

Forbes said the empty beds in Virginia's prisons are only temporary. The
get-tough program is still relatively new. As it takes hold, those cells
will be filled by Virginia lawbreakers, Forbes said.

The problem of backlogged state inmates has been alleviated, said Maj.
William T. Mann, commanding officer of correctional operations in Virginia
Beach, one of the cities that sued the state.

State law requires that state inmates be moved out of local jails within 60
days of sentencing. At the height of the overcrowding, Virginia Beach had
as many as 200 state inmates in custody past that deadline, Mann said. Now
there is only a handful.

``The state has been very responsive to our needs,'' Mann said.

Prevention Takes A Back Seat

Beyond practical concerns about relieving prison overcrowding, the Allen
initiatives were driven by a philosophical conviction that efforts at crime
prevention and rehabilitation are futile -- that the only way to deal with
violent criminals is to lock them away in prison and keep them there.

In many ways, the Allen program repudiated a report produced in 1989 by a
blue-ribbon commission that studied prison and jail overcrowding in
Virginia. That was the last year of the term of Gov. Gerald Baliles, a
Democrat.

That report contrasted Virginia's low crime rate with its incarceration
policies, which even then were among the toughest in the nation, and warned
of the resulting strain on the state budget. ``One thing is clear,'' the
commission declared: ``To lower the risk to the community through
incarceration alone, the community will continue to pay higher and higher
costs.''

Saying the state needed to address the root causes of crime, the commission
recommended an array of non-punitive measures such as drug treatment,
education, vocational training and expanded use of probation and parole.

A new, Allen-appointed commission revisited the subject in 1994 and found
``no unequivocal evidence that prevention programs had a crime-reduction
effect,'' said Richard P. Kern, director of the Virginia Criminal
Sentencing Commission.

The Allen initiatives took the state farther down the punitive road that
the 1989 commission warned about, said the Rev. Joseph N. Green Jr., a
former Norfolk vice mayor who served on that panel.

``They went for the overkill,'' Green said.

The state's punitive stance extends beyond incarceration to the ultimate
sanction. Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstituted the death penalty in
1976, Virginia has put 75 prisoners to death by electrocution or lethal
injection -- second only to Texas.

The pace of executions quickened dramatically in the 1990s. Last year there
were 14, a modern-day record.

The state's restrictions on death-row appeals are the toughest in the
nation. New evidence of innocence becomes inadmissible in the trial court
three weeks after a death sentence is imposed. A legislative effort to ease
that rule is pending in a Senate committee.

Backers: Virginia Is A National Model

Allen, who is preparing a run for the U.S. Senate, staunchly defends his
program. ``It has actually worked very, very well and as we predicted,''
Allen said.

As a result of his initiatives, Allen said, ``Virginia is much safer for
people to live or to work or to raise their families.''

Many Allen supporters in the legislature echo that view.

``Virginia is the model for the nation when it comes to criminal justice
reform now,'' said Sen. Kenneth W. Stolle, R-Virginia Beach, chairman of
the Virginia State Crime Commission.

Stolle, Forbes and others say Allen and the legislature succeeded in their
primary goal: to change the focus of Virginia's incarceration policies from
nonviolent to violent offenders.

``Many of us are absolutely convinced that the policies we put in are
right,'' Forbes said.

Sentences for violent crimes in Virginia today are probably the toughest in
the country, Kern said, and sentences for drug offenses are among the toughest.

The tougher sentences sprang from Allen's 1994 ``truth in sentencing''
initiative, which lengthened sentences for some offenses up to six times
what they were before.

Despite the falling crime rate, the number of Virginians in prison
increased 5.9 percent from 1998 to 1999, reflecting the lengthened
sentences and the virtual disappearance of parole.

The Allen program abolished parole for all new sentencings after Jan. 1,
1995. Prisoners now must serve at least 85 percent of the sentence imposed;
the average is more than 90 percent. Since parole was abolished, 75,000
felons have been sentenced. Of these, 15,000 got ``dramatically longer''
sentences than they otherwise would have, Kern said.

In addition, the percentage of prisoners paroled has plummeted from 41
percent a decade ago to 6.5 percent today.

That was by design, Allen said. Since parole couldn't be abolished
retroactively, he said, ``I appointed people to the parole board who shared
our philosophy.'' The result: The board cracked down on the earlier offenders.

Critics: Prison Focus Hurts Other Institutions

Critics say Virginia's anti-crime policies have been off target,
unnecessary and a colossal waste of money. Funding that could have gone
toward improving Virginia schools and roads has been poured into unneeded
prisons, they say.

Virginia Forward, a group that includes some of Virginia's most prominent
business leaders, issued a report in December predicting that state and
local revenues will fall at least $3 billion short of needs every year for
the next decade. The options facing the state are all painful, the study
concluded: Raise taxes, cut services or let schools and roads deteriorate.

Among those throwing darts at the state's incarceration practices has been
Lucien X. Lombardo, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at Old
Dominion University. His concern has been as much economic as social.

``In my opinion, building the prison infrastructure that Gov. Allen
proposes will pour billions of dollars down a black hole never to be seen
again,'' Lombardo told a General Assembly committee in September 1994.
``Other, more productive uses for tax dollars and opportunities for
improving the quality of life of Virginians will of necessity be ignored.''

That is exactly what happened, Lombardo said in a recent interview.

``It's the politics of fear,'' he said. ``You can't get elected by being
`soft on crime.' ''

One area of state spending that has suffered is higher education. Spending
for state colleges and universities already was reeling from severe cuts in
state aid during the recession of the early 1990s. Virginia had plummeted
to 43rd in the nation in per-student funding by 1994. In-state tuition for
Virginia students consequently spiked to among the highest in the nation.

``The major budget drivers of the early 1990s were Medicaid and prisons,''
said Donald Finley, who was Baliles' secretary of education in the late
1980s and now directs the Virginia Business Higher Education Council, a
nonprofit business coalition that promotes public investment in higher
education.

``Unfortunately, a major casualty of that, which we're still trying to
recoup from, was funding for higher education,'' Finley said. ``State
funding went down and tuitions went up. There just wasn't any money left to
invest in higher education.''

In recent General Assembly sessions, lawmakers have raised the state's
per-student funding to 33rd in the nation -- $5,645, which is $200 below
the national average.

Transportation also has fallen behind. Recent national studies have found
that gridlock in Northern Virginia is second only to Los Angeles. Recently
there has been talk of imposing tolls or a regional gas tax to ease growing
congestion in Hampton Roads.

By several estimates, the state is falling at least $1 billion a year
behind on meeting its transportation needs. Gov. Gilmore, a Republican, has
proposed $2.5 billion in new spending over the next six years, which works
out to just over $400 million a year -- less than half of what's needed.

Harsher Sentences Don't Mean Fewer Crimes

Allen and his supporters say there is a cause-and-effect relationship
between his initiatives and the decline in crime since 1994.

But there is little hard evidence to back up the argument that locking up
more people longer results in fewer crimes.

Allen and others point to a recent analysis by the Heritage Foundation, a
conservative think tank, which found that violent crime is 2.4 times more
prevalent in Montgomery County, Md., than in its demographically similar
neighbor, Fairfax County, Va. The best explanation for the disparity, the
authors suggested, is Virginia's toughened sentencing policies.

``While Virginia's crime rate may have been better than the national
average, that's good, but it was still unacceptably high to me,'' Allen
said. ``. . . If Virginia had continued the lenient early-release system,
the crime rate clearly, in my view, would be worse.

``It's just logic. You have these people in prison; they're not out
committing crimes. It's just common sense.''

But crime has dropped across the country -- in states that kept parole as
well as those that didn't. In fact, the decline in violent crime from 1994
to 1998 was steeper nationwide (21 percent) than in Virginia (13 percent).

Kern, the Sentencing Commission director, said there are positive
indicators that Virginia's get-tough policies are having the desired
effect, but stopped short of claiming a cause-and-effect link to falling crime.

``I can't say A caused B,'' he said.

There is ample research suggesting that a strong economy and low
unemployment rate may do more to cut crime than denying parole or sending
increasing numbers of people to jail.

``The issue of whether the drop in crime rates is largely attributable to
the sentencing reforms or some other combination of events and/or
initiatives is complex,'' the Sentencing Commission acknowledged in 1999,
noting that Virginia's booming economy and record-low unemployment rates
are important factors.

The National Criminal Justice Commission, a group that advocates
alternatives to incarceration, declared in 1996: ``Overall, high rates of
incarceration have little or no correlation to rates of crime. . . . The
best that can be said is that the enormous increase in law enforcement
caused a marginal decrease in crime. The worst that can be said is that the
expansion did nothing for crime but caused terrible collateral harm on
society by draining money and ruining lives.''

A National Academy of Sciences report in 1993 posed the issue this way:
``What effect has increasing the prison population had on levels of violent
crime? Apparently very little.''

One study by criminologists John Irwin and James Austin found that states
that were slowest to increase their prison populations in the 1980s were
more likely to see a decrease in crime than the states that increased
imprisonment the most.

Even a scholar cited by Allen's supporters as providing philosophical
backing for Virginia's get-tough program is having second thoughts.

Princeton professor John J. DiIulio Jr., who argued for years that
increasing incarceration cuts crime, wrote last spring in The Wall Street
Journal that ``the nation has `maxed out' on the public-safety value of
incarceration.''

``Until recently, increased incarceration has improved public safety,'' he
wrote. ``But as America's incarcerated population approaches 2 million, the
value of imprisonment is a portrait in the law of rapidly diminishing
returns.''

Redefining ``Violent'' Offenders

For the get-tough program to work, Allen and his supporters say the state
had to shift its priority from nonviolent to violent lawbreakers. And they
say they are well down the road to success.

But fewer than three in 10 people locked up in Virginia prisons from July
1997 through June 1998, the last year for which there are Department of
Corrections records, were incarcerated for violent crimes. The proportion
was exactly the same as in 1993, five years before.

Nearly one in four was imprisoned for using or selling drugs, the 1998
records showed.

``Nonviolent drug offenders are driving the increase in the prison
population,'' said Monica Pratt, a spokeswoman for Families Against
Mandatory Minimums, a Washington-based drug-law reform group.

The most recent statistical snapshot of the state prison population from
the Department of Corrections shows that the proportion serving time for
violent crimes has changed little in 15 years. It has remained at about
half the state's inmates.

``When you see a state with a high incarceration rate, what that tells me
is that that state has a greater tendency than states with lower
incarceration rates to put property and drug offenders in prison,'' said
Kern, the Sentencing Commission director.

``In our case, it's the policy for the low-level drug guy, the guy with the
small amount of crack cocaine -- that's what's going to drive our
incarceration rate.''

To some extent, Allen and his backers reframed the debate over violent
crime and criminals by redefining its terms.

The 1994 ``truth in sentencing'' law defines a long list of crimes as
``violent,'' including such acts as murder, rape and robbery. But it also
includes offenses not traditionally considered violent, like burglary,
child pornography and computer crime.

And any prior conviction of an offense on that list, either as an adult or
as a juvenile, gets an offender classified as ``violent'' under the 1994
law and therefore potentially subject to more prison time.

Using that definition, two-thirds of Virginians who went to prison in
fiscal year 1998 were violent, Kern said.

Defenders of the Allen program say that this statistic is more meaningful
than the Department of Corrections records.

By basing sentences on the totality of an offender's record, they argue,
the Allen program has succeeded in targeting violent criminals and
preventing them from committing more crimes.

Skeptics' Vindication Is Bittersweet

Skeptics of Allen's lock-'em-up initiatives were few. Republicans and
Democrats alike supported his program. Some did, however, protest.

In September 1994, Del. Jay W. DeBoer, D-Petersburg, one of a tiny minority
of state lawmakers who voted against Allen's parole abolition plan, warned
his colleagues on the House floor: ``This bill won't make Virginia one bit
safer. It's futile and expensive. . . . It's going to cost taxpayers a lot
of money, and I predict that, 10 years from now, the legislature will look
back and say it was a big mistake.''

In a recent interview, DeBoer said his warnings have been borne out by the
facts.

The Allen strategy, DeBoer said, was to ``create a crisis and then solve it.''

``The crisis that George Allen had us all believe we had to solve was a
crime wave and liberal parole laws, neither of which Virginia was
necessarily known for,'' he said. ``Virginia by all statistics was and is a
low-crime state with tough laws.''

Some who supported Allen's plan, like Del. Clifton Woodrum, D-Roanoke, are
troubled by misgivings five years later. The funding of prisons and law
enforcement was a public policy choice, a spending priority that wound up
siphoning public money from other areas.

Woodrum said he voted for the Allen plan on the assurance that
prison-building would be accompanied by crime prevention programs, but he
has been disappointed. ``The prevention programs, in my estimation, have
not been sufficient,'' he said in an interview. ``We may end up paying a
very terrible price at some point when we do start releasing these people
that we put away without any attempt to modify or change their behavior,''
Woodrum said.

``It's ironic,'' Woodrum said. ``We're now in the position where we have an
excess of prison cells but a deficit of classroom space. We have people
being educated in trailers. I think somehow we've had our priorities get
out of whack.''

Below is the index for this series of articles:

US VA: Virginia Is Paying The Price For Prison Boom
URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n326/a09.html

US VA: Overbuilt Prisons Must Import Criminals
URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n327/a01.html

US VA: Virginia's Incarceration Rate Far Exceeds Crime Rate
URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n327/a02.html

US VA: Department Of Corrections Denies Information Requests
URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n327/a03.html

US VA: Drugs, Not Violence, Are The Fuel For Prison Growth
URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n327/a04.html

US VA: Expert And Inmates Find Faults In Prison Drug-Treatment
URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n331/a13.html

US VA: Poll Shows Little Support For Gilmore's Get-Tough Drug
URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n327/a05.html

US VA: Blacks Imprisoned At Rate Out Of Proportion To Drug Use
URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n327/a06.html

US VA: Cost Of Housing Older Inmates Goes Up As Risk Goes Down
URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n328/a01.html

US VA: New Prisons Bring Much-Needed Jobs To Rural Areas
URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n328/a02.html

US VA: Party And Racial Lines Divide Lawmakers On Prison Reform
URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n332/a01.html