STATE IS LOCKED UP IN PRISON MENTALITY

CALIFORNIA has amassed the biggest prison system in the Western world.

In two decades, the number of inmates has increased eightfold. They're
housed, at $21,000 each per year, in the 21 new prisons that the state
spent $5.3 billion constructing.

The cost of incarceration has outraced other areas of spending in the state
budget, soaking up money that should have gone toward unchoking traffic,
maintaining parks and raising public education spending.

Enough. It's time to stop adding cells and start acting smart about
incarceration.

That's the strong message that the Legislature should have sent to voters
last week. Instead, legislative leaders backed down and ate their words.

The Legislature voted to build another prison, a $335 million
maximum-security facility in Delano in Kern County for 4,500 inmates. After
wrangling that continued most of the week, Democrats, who had favored no
more money for new prisons, agreed to place $24 million in the budget and
finance the rest through bonds.

They relented under pressure to pass the $82 billion state budget and at
Gov. Gray Davis' insistence. They also bowed to numbers. There is already
serious crowding in the state's 33 prisons. Despite dramatically falling
crime rates, longer prison sentences, among other factors, are driving up
the inmate census.

Now 161,000, the prison population may reach the system capacity of 175,000
in two or three years. At that point, the Republicans warned, while licking
their lips at the political prospects, a judge might step in and start
releasing prisoners into the community.

Others dissented. We agree with Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who said
that the inmate population was manageable, and with Sen. John Vasconcellos
of San Jose, who said that a moratorium on prison construction was
necessary to force the state to do things differently.

The compromise that Davis and the Legislature agreed to won't reverse the
course of Battleship Prison, but at least it may begin slowly turning it
around.

There won't be any additional money for designing a second prison, as Davis
wanted. There will be money for 3,000 more drug treatment beds for inmates,
bringing the total to 9,000 -- a significant increase but still a tiny
fraction of the need. There will also be funding for more parole officers
and $28 million for services for parolees: counseling, job training and
supervision to help reintegrate the 90,000 to 100,000 inmates released
every year. As it is now, they get $200 and a bus ticket.

For two decades, politicians and voters have passed harsher and longer
sentences: three strikes laws, truth in sentencing, mandatory terms.
They've succeeded in putting away dangerous and violent felons, but also
snared a lot of smaller fish in their big nets, at a huge public expense.

Inmates convicted of non-violent crimes constitute three-fifths of the
prison population. The majority of them -- some estimates are as high as 70
percent -- have a drug and alcohol addiction. A quarter of the state's male
inmates -- and more than a third of the women -- are in for drug offenses
alone. That compares with 7.5 percent -- one in 14 -- two decades ago.

Rehabilitation has become a dirty word. While ninth in the percentage of
the population it locks up, California is 37th in the nation in per capita
state spending on drug and alcohol treatment. The state has been releasing
nearly all of its non-violent criminals, most of whom have an addiction
problem, without drug therapy and followup treatment, literacy training,
and preparation for the world of work. Guess what: Many have ended up right
back in prison.

Arizona's experience is telling. Against the protest of most of the state's
politicians, voters there passed an initiative mandating that first-time
drug offenders be sent to treatment, not to prison.

The budget that passed last week does expand the use of drug courts, in
which first-time users who agree to and complete treatment have sentences
deferred or waived. Santa Clara County runs a more intensive variation for
addicted pregnant women and hard-core addicts charged with a history of
non-violent crimes. The initial evaluation was impressive: a much lower
recidivism rate for those who went through intensive therapy and
supervision. The state budget also includes crime-prevention programs for
the mentally ill, and an increased use of jail, not prison, for some parole
offenses.

All are wise investments. But to make a dent in the prison census,
legislators must do more. California should not be squandering more of its
resources on new prisons. The $335 million for a new maximum-security
prison is an escape valve for failed policies that the Legislature has
tempered but not reformed.