LOUISIANA TOPS NATION IN THE MARCH TO PRISONS

U.S. Inmate Population Has Reached 2 Million

NEW ORLEANS -- Presumed innocent, they shuffle into the sooty, granite
fortress on Tulane Avenue every morning, ankles shackled, hands chained to
their hips. Every evening, at least a dozen leave Orleans Parish Criminal
District Court as felons, an exodus of the desperate, foolish, heartless and
addicted.

In one courtroom, Donald Smith is slapped with a 30-month prison term after
being caught stumbling in the shadow of the Superdome at 1 a.m. with a crack
pipe in his pocket. Down the hall, veteran New Orleans police detective
Norbert Zenon Jr. gets a seven-month sentence for fondling a woman while
purporting to examine injuries she suffered at the hand of an abusive
boyfriend.

Next door, prosecutors lay out their death-penalty case against Blaise
Fernandez, a former high school football star who will be convicted of
murdering a security guard during the robbery of a Popeye's chicken stand.

Before the day is done, Renetta Wells is looking at a maximum of 15 years
for attempted cocaine distribution; after being approached near the French
Quarter by an undercover cop, she helped find a dealer who could sell him a
$10 rock.

And on it goes, in the grimmest courthouse in the biggest city in the
strictest state in the world's most incarcerated country, a nation that is
holding an estimated 2 million men and women behind bars. That statistical
milestone -- 1.2 million in state prisons, 645,000 in county jails, 145,000
in federal penitentiaries -- was reached Tuesday, according to a study by
the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington think tank that supports
alternatives to imprisonment.

Although calculating a single day for such an occasion is an imprecise
science -- and clearly done for political effect -- nobody denies that the 2
million era is upon us, or that the growth in incarceration over the past
decade represents a social experiment unlike any the United States has seen.

Doubled In 10 Years

``This is the most punishing decade on record,'' said Vincent Schiraldi, the
institute's executive director, noting that the nation's inmate population
at the start of the 1990s was 1 million, an unprecedented number at the
time. To double that -- adding another million in just 10 years -- is to
equal the growth of the prison population during the previous 90 years.

Based on the U.S. Justice Department's most recent data, 461 of every
100,000 Americans are serving a prison sentence of at least one year.
California, though home to the largest prison population, is about average
per capita, with 483 inmates per 100,000 residents. In Louisiana, the rate
is 736, tops in the nation.

Having reached such an extraordinary tally so fast, the United States
appears deeply ambivalent about what it has sown. While a plummeting crime
rate stands as vindication for many, a growing number of critics -- not just
liberals, but also fiscal conservatives and anti-government independents --
are beginning to question the costs, both economic and social, of keeping so
many people locked up.

Drug offenders account for the greatest percentage of new inmates, yet
hardly anyone believes the drug war is any closer to being won. Sentences
everywhere have become longer and more stern, but each year 500,000
ex-convicts return to society, often less equipped to function than before.

Racial disparities are so extreme -- blacks are nearly seven times as likely
to be incarcerated as whites -- that many blacks consider the prison system
nothing short of a modern-day slave plantation. As crime rates continue to
drop, even a few law-and-order politicians have begun to wonder whether the
$40 billion that taxpayers pay annually for incarceration could not be
better spent.

``There are some who think we ought to keep everybody in jail and throw away
the key -- I know, because I was one of them,'' said John Hainkel, president
of the Louisiana state Senate.

But that was before the New Orleans Republican took over as chair of the
Senate Finance Committee. Now, four years later, he has come to the
conclusion that the state's swelling correctional budget is undermining
another of his priorities: improving Louisiana's dismal investment in public
schools.

``It's no great mystery,'' said Hainkel, a believer in education's
crime-fighting virtues. ``The state of Minnesota has the highest rate of
college graduates and the lowest rate of individuals in prison.''

The Racial Factor

Race is often the subtext, an unspoken code that contributes to the
perception of criminals as ``the other,'' a distinct and deviant caste.
Although blacks compose about 13 percent of the U.S. population, they make
up 50 percent of the state and federal prison population. The odds that a
black man will do time at some point in his life are 1-in-3; for whites, it
is 1-in-25.

The disparity has only increased under the war on drugs, which has
disproportionately targeted young black men. Most racial and ethnic groups
consume drugs at roughly the same rates, meaning that whites account for
about 75 percent of the nation's drug users. Blacks, however, account for
about 75 percent of the nation's drug prisoners, a function largely of
police priorities and a lack of resources for treatment.

``They should put up a statue here of a black kid on a street corner with a
bag of dope in his hand,'' said Joseph Meyer Jr., a New Orleans public
defender, as he walked the cavernous, marble halls of Criminal District
Court. ``You get rid of those cases and you could get rid of half the judges
in this building.''