A FRACTION OF GLOBE'S PEOPLE, A QUARTER OF ITS PRISONERS

WASHINGTON - 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 folks 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 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 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 present 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 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.