THE PRISON BOOM

Interesting how not only people have their 15 minutes of fame. Issues
do, too. A powerful beam of concentrated light has fallen, suddenly,
on the astonishing share of our population we've been putting behind
bars.

In the past dozen years, the number of Americans in jails and prisons
has doubled, says a Justice Department survey released this month. At
the end of 1985, there were 744,208 people locked up; by mid-1998, 1.8
million.

The prison boom -- and the degree to which it is fed by drug-related
arrests -- had been generating headlines even before the study. Take a
Feb. 28 New York Times story: "War on Crack Retreats, Still Taking
Prisoners." It began: "Every 20 seconds, someone in America is
arrested for a drug violation. Every week, on average, a new jail or
prison is built to lock up more people in the world's largest penal
system."

A March 7 New York Times Week in Review analysis, "Less Crime, More
Criminals," noted that "the ranks of prisoners grow enough each year
to fill Yankee Stadium and then some." Last year the Atlantic Monthly,
in "The Prison Industrial Complex," looked at the number of jobs for
depressed regions and "windfalls for profiteers" brought by the boom.

But surely the story that showed most dramatically how far we've come
with this addiction to imprisonment was a Feb. 22 Washington Post
piece, "Voting Rights for Felons Win Support; 13 percent of Black Men
Ineligible With Ban." The story described proposals in various states
to allow felons, and in some cases current prisoners, to vote.
Hand-wringing is one thing; when worry over the huge numbers of
nonvoters in and out of prison spurs legislation, you know something
big has happened.

And something big has. The U.S. rate of imprisonment, once comparable
to that of other democracies, is now six to 10 times higher than those
of countries of the European Union, according to Council of Europe
figures.

It's hard now even to remember back to the '60s, when America's prison
population was shrinking. Leaders of both parties then talked of
emptying the nation's jails of all but the most dangerous criminals
and moving to more humane alternatives. Instead we now have mandatory
minimum sentences, "three-strikes" laws and other anti-crime measures,
increasing both the number of people sent to prison out of all those
arrested and the length of time served.

These measures set us so resolutely on our new path that now, well
after crime rates began their descent, imprisonment rates continue to
soar. And the boom eats greater and greater shares of federal, state
and local budgets. In 1994 the California Department of Correction
budget rose higher than that for the University of California.

More and more research is showing that this spending for prisons at
the expense of other government responsibilities is seriously
misguided. Words once voiced only by such liberals as Jesse Jackson
are now being presented simply as sound policy: It's more efficient to
spend on programs that may prevent crime -- afternoon activities for
unsupervised youth, family therapy for troubled kids, support for
"at-risk" young mothers -- than on imprisoning people. Some of the
best of this work has come out of Rand, the very think tank that made
longer prison terms popular, as the National Journal noted in a fine
piece last summer called "All Locked Up."

That piece ends with a powerful sentiment from former Democratic
representative Dan Rostenkowski, who learned a lot about what his
votes had produced -- once he himself had been locked up on corruption
charges. He was amazed, he said, by the great number of sentences of
15 or 20 years for minor drug offenses. "The waste of these lives is a
loss to the entire community. That's not a problem many people spend
much time thinking about. . . . Certainly, I didn't give these issues
a lot of thought when I was a member of the civilian
population."

Rostenkowski added that he felt guilty over having voted for these
"misguided" policies. "I was swept along by the rhetoric about getting
tough on crime. Frankly, I lacked both expertise and perspective on
these issues. So I deferred to my colleagues who had stronger opinions
but little more expertise."

That combination of strong opinions and little expertise has given us
a huge and continuing boom in prison building, but little else in the
way of sound public policy to deal with the problems filling the
cells. Perhaps this 15-minute spotlight will nudge us toward the
better path that social science research is bringing to light.