The opinion of the Mercury News:

POPULOUS PRISONS

They're a crude and expensive way to fight crime

AS the numbers of crimes have gone down, the prison population has,
until now, continued to surge in California and in most of America.
Instead of moving in sync with the crime rate, the rate of
incarceration has been driven upward by a complex dynamic of drug
prosecutions and harsher and longer sentences. The costs -- in wasted
lives and wasted dollars -- have become too onerous to ignore.

Last year, the number of inmates in U.S. prisons and jails reached 1.8
million -- a record for the 25th straight year. Soon America may
surpass Russia with the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Two-thirds of these inmates are in state and federal prisons,
one-third in local and county jails. The numbers in prisons alone have
quadrupled since 1980, from 330,000 to 1.25 million, while the rate
has tripled, from 134 prisoners to 415 per 100,000 population.

The trend in California has been even starker. The number in the
state's prisons has risen six-fold since 1980, to 158,742 in mid-1998.
In 1980, the rate of state imprisonment rate was 20 percent lower than
the national average; last year, it was 15 percent higher. California
was the tenth among the states, with 477 inmates per 100,000
population in the state's 32 prisons.

Meanwhile, the state's crime rate has fallen 37 percent in five years;
the homicide rate has dropped even more. Hard-liners credit the high
rates of incarceration for making streets safe, through get-tough laws
such as truth in sentencing, requiring that a prisoner stay behind
bars for at least 85 percent of his term. No doubt there has been some
positive effect of incapacitating a hard-core element most likely to
victimize others.

But Frank Zimring, a professor with the University of California's
Boalt Hall School of Law, and others say the correlation is tenuous
and probably small. An improved economy, a decline in the use of crack
cocaine and maybe effective community policing are factors. And it's a
mystery, says Zimring, why the youth crime rate has fallen.

In 1980, the Department of Corrections represented 3 percent of the
state's budget. This year, its $4.2 billion budget will consume 8
percent. At the cost of $21,000 per year per prisoner, imprisonment
has become a crude and expensive prophylactic of crime. It's a wide
broom that has swept violent and nonviolent together, diverting state
money that could be better used elsewhere, improving schools or
unclogging roads.

Looking at reduced sentences or sentencing alternatives for nonviolent
offenders -- reinstituting good time, discharging old inmates to
community settings, expanding electronic monitoring -- all of these
present a starting point. Only about 40 percent of the state's inmates
are in prison for violent or sex crimes. Property crimes and drug
possession each comprise 30 percent.

The Legislature also should take a hard look at the three-strikes law,
even if the initiative remains popular five years after voters
overwhelmingly passed it. The law doubles the prison time for a second
felony and mandates a sentence of 25 years to life for a third, but
does so regardless of whether for homicide or theft. A quarter of the
state's inmates -- 40,000 -- have been sentenced under it.

A study by the Justice Policy Institute in San Francisco found that
only 1 percent of the second and third strikes were for murder
convictions; two-thirds of convictions involved property or drug
crimes, mainly for possession.

Prosecutors argue that nonviolent crimes sometimes are their only hook
to put away violent criminals. But the law is too harsh and broad; it
should be tightened and evenly enforced across county lines --
something that the institute found is not happening.

For years, the Legislative Analyst's Office has urged a balance of
prison construction and substitutes for long-term incarceration: more
drug treatment, a parolee crime prevention program, greater
vocational, academic and prison industry offerings in prison. But
they've not been given high priority. Instead, Corrections has found
itself trying to keep afloat amid a rising tide of inmates.

Now, however, there's an opportunity in numbers. Corrections is
projecting the growth of the prison population to drop over the next
two years to only 4.5 percent -- down from near double digits in the
boom years. That, according to the analyst's office, will free up $29
million that would have been spent next year on warehousing prisoners.

The analyst's office recommends putting $10 million of that into
cutting rates of recidivism. That, we'd say, should be the minimum.

California has led the nation in being tough on crime. Now it's time
to be smart with punishment and to break the momentum of imprisonment
that's been sapping the state's resources.