PRISON POPULATION: 1.8 MILLION, GROWING

The United States is not only the world's leading economic and military
power, it is rapidly closing in on No. 1 in another category: number of
citizens incarcerated.

Justice Department officials say the nation's prison population has doubled
in only 12 years, and the United States, with 1.8 million people behind
bars, now has higher rate of incarceration than any other nation for which
such statistics are kept - except Russia.

With twice as many people locked up, are we twice as safe as we were 12
years ago? Clearly, law-abiding Americans have less to worry about these
days by virtually any statistical measure available. Crime rates have been
declining in almost every major category and in every region of the country.

The improvement is almost certainly due, in part, to tough sentences and the
kind of truth-in-sentencing reforms the Daily Herald has strongly supported.
If violent offenders are serving longer sentences, fewer of them are on the
streets, where they can do harm.

But reports of such a large prison population prompt questions and doubts in
other ways.

For one thing, the prison population includes a disproportionately large
number of black men, which carries serious implications for urban black
communities. Failure to find ways to improve that situation could carry
devastating economic and cultural consequences.

And it's worth asking: Would every inmate pose a serious threat if he were
out? Probably not. For instance, tough mandatory drug sentencing laws, while
having limited success in stemming drug traffic, do result in keeping
non-violent offenders behind bars for a long time.

Moreover, the troubling message behind the growing use of mandatory
sentences is that judges can't be trusted to make discretionary calls. Yes,
judges sometimes err and occasionally with tragic results. But unless
there's more evidence than we've seen on judges giving inappropriate
sentences, we'd like to see judges retain greater discretion about when to
throw away the cell key and when to go a little lighter.

Here in Illinois, Gov. George Ryan is expected to win legislative approval
of his proposal to automatically tack 15, 20 or 25 years onto the sentence
of anyone who uses a gun in the commission of a crime.

We favor additional time for those who use guns to commit crime. But surely
the circumstances vary sufficiently from crime to crime that judges should
be able to determine whether use of a gun is worth another two years or 20
when it comes to sentencing. Making such long sentence additions mandatory
further increases the prison population and related expenses. It's fair to
ask whether that's always necessary.