RECORD FOR THE MAN IMPRISONED LONGEST

Paul Guidel, who was 17 when he committed second-degree murder, lived in a
Fishkill, N.Y., prison cell for 68 years, eight months, and two days before
being released at age 85. He holds the record for the man imprisoned longest
in the United States. He made the Guinness Book of Records. You can look it
up.

But he has lots of company.

The numbers are out again, and the totals are eye-popping: At the rate
we're going, we'll have just under 2 million Americans behind bars by
the end of 1999. Happy New Year. As of last June, the government
counted 1.8 million, an all-time high. And that's not counting the
hundreds of thousands of Americans paid to guard, feed, house,
inoculate, and otherwise fuss over them. Only Russia imprisons
citizens at a higher rate, among the, ahem, advanced countries.

We had just under 1.7 million men in prisons and jails run by federal,
state, county, and city authorities last June, out of a total of 128
million American males.

That means one out of every 76 men is behind bars as we speak, and the
number grows daily.

At this rate, we're going to run out of men, when you consider the
inmate population is six times what it was in the early '70s during
Richard Nixon's first term. We cannot sustain these rates. There are
as many blacks as whites in prison, but a black male is six times more
likely to be sent away as a white male. As many as one out of every
four black men between 20 and 30 has had some encounter with the
criminal justice system.

Only one out of 16 prisoners is female.

The New York Times quotes experts saying the prison population
explosion is caused by several factors, including longer sentences and
a surge in drug-related arrests. In five states, more than one black
man out of 10 is disenfranchised - barred from ever voting because of
a criminal conviction. Look at it another way: As things stand today,
it is as if the total population of Maine and Vermont was behind bars
- - and we had to hire everyone in Wyoming to guard them. Ludicrous? Of
course.

But that's our policy. See any change coming?

Not in the near term. Politicians love to point to lowered crime rates
- - crime rates have dropped for the last seven years. Longer sentences
and harsher penalties sound great on the evening news. People like to
hear that, among them fearful voters, eager-to-please pols, those
making money off the billions we spend for new $100,000-a-pop prison
cells, where it costs 30 grand a year to keep some wretch locked up.
Academic studies have shown a direct correlation between voters' fear
of crime and media hype, tabloid outrages exploited by news reports,
with television the leading offender. ''If it bleeds it leads'' is
cynical TV shorthand for the allure of bloody tales to jack the
ratings up. Our print brethren gasp trying to catch up in the
titillation department. The ultimate result is harsher treatment of
criminals, typically young, poor, nonwhite, ill-educated, socially
backward, and, let us be frank, sometimes dumb as a mackerel.

Yes, there are many, many prisoners who are vicious, violent, and
deservedly tucked away. But there are also hundreds of thousands of
prisoners who are nonviolent, who could be handled outside the costly
and ineffective prison apparatus, who could benefit from learning to
read, compute, talk straight and walk straight, stand straight and
live straight. House arrest, ankle bracelets, more parole and
probation officers, drug treatment where it is needed, when it is
needed, and alcohol and spousal abuse programs would be much more
sensible, effective, and economical. No, not every poor boy is a good
boy. Yes, there are some people too dangerous to release.

But the way we're going is the wrong way. It's the easy way, but it's
not the cheap way. It's the dumb way. But rare is the politician
who'll buck the mob on this score.

The votes of a handful of inmate wives, inmate girlfriends, inmate
relatives are drowned out by the cacophony that erupts after every
notorious crime, every grisly episode recounted breathlessly by some
TV reporter doing a formulaic standup outside the cop shop. Passion is
what sells on TV. That's why you hear far more often from the angry
cop, the aggrieved victim's family, the posturing politician, than you
hear from the more thoughtful, less impassioned folk who have managed
to overcome their fears and argue reasonably for humane treatment of
inmates. Prison can be a cruel environment, particularly for the young
and vulnerable. Vicious things happen behind bars. Stacking all these
wayward teenagers in with older, hardened, rotting souls is like
storing the gas can next to the oil burner.

You have only yourself to blame when it blows. Here's another
troubling trend: The Sun Belt states are way out of line with prison
sentencing. Louisiana and Texas incarcerate 700 of every 100,000
citizens. Maine locks up criminals at about one-sixth that rate,
Vermont at one-fourth. How come? Are they more law-abiding up north?

Or are those frugal Yankees wiser when it comes to squandering human
potential?