NO LONG-TERM PAYOFF TO BUILDING MORE PRISONS

THROUGH HEAVY lobbying, Gov. Davis got the money to buy land and start
design work on a new prison, but he missed an opportunity to change
direction on nonviolent crime and halt California's slammer-building frenzy.

Arizona, North Carolina and Vermont have taken the lead in acting on the
knowledge that the increasingly harsh and fixed prison sentences that have
become so popular in recent years -- especially for drug offenses -- do not
ultimately serve society.

Prison-building as the solution to crime siphons off scarce state money from
higher education and other vital programs without preparing the hordes of
inmates who will eventually be released with the skills to make it in the
outside world. And there is evidence that many nonviolent offenders could
better pay their debt to society through alternative programs.

Laws initially crafted with the idea of forever locking away monsters like
Richard Allen Davis have cast too wide a net, and minor offenders are
serving long, inflexible terms that have little to do with what is best for
society given the circumstances of their individual cases.

And because of inadequate training and the fact that the skills needed to
survive in prison are antithetical to those needed to thrive in American
communities, inmates often are a greater menace when they get out of prison
than they were when they went in. The result is that many prisoners cannot
make it in normal society, and they end up back in jail.

In an effort both to cut the huge cost -- about $20,000 a year -- to house
each criminal and to curb the revolving-door syndrome, Vermont has
instituted community reparative boards, which use mediation to decide how
first- and second-offense, nonviolent criminals will ``pay back'' their
victims, both monetarily and through work such as community service.

North Carolina passed a series of sentencing laws that reserve prison and
jail for violent and repeat offenders and allow for a range of punishments
for those who do not fit into those categories

- --always with the caveat that prison is still an option. The punishments,
called intermediate sanctions, can include boot camp, residential community
facilities, electronic house arrest, day-reporting centers and conditions
such as restitution, community service, alcohol or chemical dependency
treatment, curfews or random drug testing. In Arizona, voters passed an
initiative requiring that all nonviolent drug offenders be treated rather
than locked up. The savings for the first year are estimated at more than
$2.5 million. Arizona officials say that treatment, in combination with
probation and a luxury tax that helps pay for the drug therapy, has
significantly increased the odds of success.

To his credit, Davis earmarked more money for counseling and job training,
services for parolees, drug treatment for inmates and drug courts, in which
sentences are cut for first-time offenders who agree to complete treatment.
Drug courts differ from Arizona's program in that offenders avoid trial and
a criminal record if they agree to complete the treatment.

But Davis needs to steer away from his main emphasis: that building more
prisons is the most effective way to deal with crime.

He should listen to his former colleague, Pat Nolan. The former California
Assembly Republican leader spent 25 months in federal prison on a
racketeering conviction and has been transformed from a hard-nosed advocate
of punitive sentences to a reformer.

``As a legislator, I of course always thought of the worst-case scenario --
the drug kingpin moving large amounts to a neighborhood,'' Nolan said of his
propensity to approve tougher and longer sentences for all crimes. ``When I
got inside, I saw those mandatory minimums used mostly against small-fry.''

When that small-fry comes out, ``he will have spent 10 years in a stew pot
of noise and anger and barely controlled violence, and the skills he had to
learn to survive in prison won't help him when he gets out.''

To stop the flood of state money to more prisons and give ex-convicts some
chance of a productive life in the outside world, Davis needs to mute his
emphasis on prison construction as the solution to the state's crime
problems. Alternatives to prison should not be considered a frill or a last
resort.

Such a switch will take political courage, especially for Davis, who has
indicated that nobody is going to out-tough him on crime and who, as
candidate Davis, cited Singapore, the land of flogging, as a good model for
criminal justice.

The drug courts are a good start, considering the huge increase in the
number of nonviolent drug offenders in prison. In the 15 years since 21 new
prisons have been built in California, violent criminals have gone from 57
percent of the prison population to 42 percent, while drug inmates grew to
27 percent, from 8 percent. Approving a bill that would amend the ``three
strikes and you're out'' law so that it would apply only to serious crimes
should be a top legislative priority. A re-evaluation of mandatory
sentencing, which is absurdly applied in many drug cases, also is in order.
And the experiences of Arizona, North Carolina and Vermont should be
carefully considered. California can afford neither the fiscal cost of
building more and more prisons nor the psychic cost of treating inmates as
less than human and then expecting them to fit in and get jobs when they are
released.

SNAPSHOT of CALIFORNIA PRISONS

Budget: $4 billion
Number: 33 prisons; 38 camps, 6 prisoner mother facilities
Population: 160,332
Normal Capacity: 82,222
Violent Offenders: 42.1%
Drug Offenders: 27.8%
Property Offenders: 23.5%
Other Offenders: 6.6%
Average Cost per Inmate: $20,758/year
Males: 92.9%
Females 7.1%
Parole Violators: 16.7%
Hispanic: 34%
Black: 31.4%
White: 29.5%
Other: 5.1%
Sentenced to life with possibility of parole: 19,422
Sentenced to life without possibility of parole: 2,303
Sentenced to die: 537
Average Reading Level: 7th grade
Median Age: 34
Average Sentence: 41.4 months
Recidivism Rate: 58%

Source: California Department of Corrections

(c)1999 San Francisco Chronicle Page 6