TWO MILLION: COULDN'T WE DO BETTER?

In a few short days, on Feb. 15, America moves past the 2 million mark in
the number of people incarcerated in its prisons and jails.

That's the estimate of the Justice Policy Institute, a nonprofit research
group that advocates alternatives to incarceration. No one seems to dispute
its figures.

Two million represents a five-fold increase over this nation's 1972 prison
population. Or check back to 1910: For every 100,000 Americans then, 122
were imprisoned. Today the figure is 724 inmates for every 100,000. We've
passed Russia as the world's incarceration leader. We're putting people
behind bars at six to 10 times the rate of other industrialized nations.

Clearly, there's something desperately wrong when a powerful nation,
respected globally and swimming in economic ebullience, feels obliged to
deny freedom to so many of its own people.

But to President Clinton, in his almost euphoric State of the Union
address, the incarceration craze was a nonissue. Ditto the nation's
governors, except for a few who referred to crime prevention in their state
of the state addresses.

Even in the media-intense presidential campaign, Texas Gov. George W. Bush
has faced few questions about the incredibly rapid expansion of Texas
prison slots - from 41,000 to 150,000 - since he took office.

For 20 years, courts have sought to force humane standards on Texas
prisons. In refusing to lift the controls, a federal judge recently ruled
that Texas inmates face an unacceptable threat of violence, living in "a
fear that is incomprehensible to most of the state's free-world citizens."

Is that "compassionate conservatism"?

There are also ugly racial overtones, so popular with politicos anxious to
show their "toughness" on crime. African-Americans represent about 13
percent of the nation's population and 15 percent of its drug users, but
about 50 percent of prison inmates in an era when drug offenses have been
the driving force in prison expansion.

Blacks suffer from gross sentencing disparity. The powder form of cocaine
preferred by wealthier, usually white consumers requires 100 times as much
weight to trigger the same penalty as the crack form. Crack users were
originally thought to be beyond help, but recent studies show crack is less
addictive than nicotine, and treatable.

Yet Congress refuses to change the law to comparable penalties. Is that
"equal protection of the laws"?

Some 1.4 million African-American men, or 13 percent of the adult male
population, have lost their right to vote because of involvement with the
criminal justice system. One study, based on 1996 figures, found more
African-Americans in prison than in universities.

The United States' "War on Drugs" juggernaut also catches whites and
Hispanics, condemning hundreds of thousands of small-time addicts and
street dealers of all backgrounds to years behind bars, away from
productive employment, their families and children.

Yet there's little public outcry, little demand for justice.

So, have today's harsh penalties helped drive down the crime rate?

Well, maybe a little. Take habitual offenders and put them under tight
supervision -- in prison, or on probation -- and it follows that crime will
drop (temporarily, at least).

But New York had the country's second-slowest-growing prison population
when it experienced sensational drops in homicides and other violent crimes
in the mid-to-late '90s. California, by contrast, was adding inmates
wildly, and its violent crime rates dropped much more slowly.

Bottom line: There's little correlation between incarceration and crime rates.

Few people oppose hunting down, prosecuting, imprisoning truly violent and
incorrigible criminals. Yet as Marc Mauer showed in his 1999 book, "Race to
Incarcerate," despite three decades of ballooning prison populations, crime
rates, before and after the prison buildup, were about the same.

Just look back past the bulge of the crack epidemic, notes Lynn Curtis of
the Eisenhower Foundation, and the lack of progress is apparent: "We have a
policy that not only doesn't work but breeds more and more destruction."

And it's the nature of that destruction - the pursuit of legions of
nonviolent, petty offenders - that has made war zones of so many inner-city
neighborhoods, decimated families, compromised police, and still besmirches
American democracy as we enter this new century.

The key words for these times need to be prevention, treatment, outreach to
the imperiled communities. Yet our official dollars for treatment are
paltry, spasmodic, insufficient.

We could do better. In 1966, notes San Diego Union-Tribune columnist
Richard Louv, Arizona voters passed an initiative mandating treatment
instead of prison for nonviolent drug offenders. In 1998 they passed it
again, overriding their state Legislature's attempt to kill it.

It turns out more than three-quarters of the Arizona offenders have tested
drug-free at the end of their treatment programs. And they're not in prison.

Couldn't we collectively, as a nation, get so smart?

Peirce can be reached via e-mail at npeirce@citistates.com