PRISON GROWTH: TOUGH ENOUGH?

Getting tough on crime has been tough on the country. A decade of
frenzied prison building has left us operating one of the world's
largest, costliest penal systems.

A new report shows the prison population growing more slowly than
earlier in the l990s, but still expanding shockingly. The total
population of the nation's lock-ups was about 1.8 million last year.

Nationally, 1 of every 113 adult males is behind bars. The United
States incarcerates a greater percentage of its people than any
industrialized nation except Russia. The Texas incarceration rate
exceeds Russia's.

The nation is agonizing over recent episodes of shocking gun violence,
hate crime and brutality by and toward children. During this search
for causes, it might be good to ask if the dramatic push to
incarcerate in the l990s discourages violence or contributes to it.

As a current investigation into alleged brutality in a privately
operated Travis County jail suggests, jails and prisons can breed
cruelty as well as contain it. The enormous diversion of public
resources into penal facilities during the l990s is itself altering
society, just as prisons are altering the landscape and small-town
employment patterns in Texas and some other states.

Since 1990 the nation's state-prison population increased 65 percent,
led by the 155 percent rise in Texas, and the federal-prison
population rose 106 percent, the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of
Justice Statistics reported recently. Reports from recent years
suggest that more than 1 of every 35 adults in the country is locked
up, on parole or on probation.

Violent crime rates are down, and the flow of prisoners into cells
slowed somewhat in 1998. But new, harsher sentencing laws are
extending prison stays, according to the new Justice Department
report. More parole violators are rebounding into prisons. The
incarcerated population increased almost 5 percent from 1998 to 1997.

"There is a decline in arrests for serious crimes, but offsetting that
is an increasing likelihood of going to prison," said Allen Beck, one
of the report's co-authors.

The federal agency counted about 144,500 prisoners in Texas on 1998, a
prison population second only to California's 162,000. The
incarceration rate -number of prisoners per 100,000 residents-was 724
in Texas, compared to 483 in California and 461 nationally. The rate
in Louisiana was 736 and in the District of Columbia, a staggering
1,913.

Washington Post columnist William Raspberry, for one, looks at numbers
like these and concludes that it's time to shut down the assembly
line. That means more sentencing alternatives, reaching children
"before they go bad," diverting public resources from prisons, death
chambers and protracted court activity to social and educational
services. It means encouraging eompassion and civility in domestic and
community life. It means changing courses before we're all either
living fearfully behind gates or hopelessly behind bars.