A NICE ROUND NUMBER FOR 2000 - 2 MILLION PRISONERS

Next year, America, with less than 5 percent of the world's
population, will have a quarter of the world's prison inmates, analyst
Jason Ziedenberg says. Americans love nice round numbers.
Anticipation of a 200-yard game, the year 2000, or a 12,000 Dow can
make us downright giddy.

Try this one: 2,000,000.

The folk at the Justice Policy Institute have vetted the trends,
crunched the numbers and come up with a nice round prediction. On Feb.
15, 2000, America's prison and jail inmate population will top 2 million.

What is involved, though, is a lot more than roundness, says JPI
policy analyst Jason Ziedenberg. "What blew me away when I was doing
this research was the whole issue of where we stand internationally,"
he told me. "Next year, America, with under 5 percent of the world's
population, will have a quarter of the world's prison inmates."

An astounding portion of the increase will have taken place during
this decade alone. We had fewer than 200,000 adults behind bars in
1970, 315,974 in 1980, 739,980 in 1990. By the end of this year, we
will have 1,983,084, having added 61 percent more inmates than were
added in the 1980s and nearly 30 times the average number added during
the five decades before 1970.

Sounds awful, you say, but isn't it working? Isn't America's crime
rate going down, arguably as a direct result of what was done during
what the Justice Policy Institute is pleased to call "the punishing
decade"?

Ziedenberg acknowledges the link between incarceration and crime rates
- - to an extent - but he offers this statistical tidbit:

"A number of jurisdictions - California, Texas and the federal
government - have had huge increases in incarceration rates, but those
are not necessarily the jurisdictions that have had the biggest drops
in crime. New York and California both increased their prison and jail
populations, but California did so at a much, much higher rate that
helped drive up the national total. New York, however, experienced a
much, much deeper drop in crime, helping to create the so-called "New
York miracle."

New York's drop in violent crime was sharpest between 1992 and 1997
(38 percent), when it had the second slowest growing prison population
in the country - 30 a week - and when its jail system was actually
downsized, according to Ziedenberg. During the same period,
California's inmate population grew by 270 inmates a week, a 30
percent rate, while its violent crime rate fell by 23 percent.

Nor should it be surprising that the link between incarceration rates
and violent crime should be so tenuous. The biggest contributor to
prison population growth during this decade has been drug offenses. By
some estimates, as many as half a million inmates are behind bars for
drug offenses, their last crime being either possession or low-level
dealing.

No matter, you say; it's their own fault they get locked up. It is
their fault, of course, but it does matter to the rest of us. It
matters, to begin with, because we'll be devoting more public
resources to keeping people behind bars, diverting some of those
resources from things we'd like to do just as much. I mean things like
improving the schools, which might all by itself go a long way toward
reducing crime.

It matters as well because virtually all the people we lock up will be
back on the street one day, not necessarily less dangerous for having
spent five or 10 years behind bars.

And it matters a third way, says Ziedenberg. "It is an important
indicator of the sort of society we want to be. We're not only out of
step with the rest of the civilized world; this doesn't fit with
anything in our own history - or world history."

There's nothing startling in the approaches proposed by the
Washington-based Justice Policy Institute. They include consideration
of alternative sentencing, rationalization of drug-sentence schedules
and the institution of a continuum of services to address why so many
people are in trouble in the first place.

But what may be needed more than clever new policy alternatives is for
us simply to step back and look at what we're doing - what we're
becoming - and ask ourselves how much sense it makes to continue along
the present path.