CRIME OFF-BUT PRISONS SWELLING

Justice: Even as more serious offenses decline,drug convictions requiring
mandatory incarceration create a need for more jail cells.

Later this month,the U.S. government will release new figures showing
how many Americans are behind bars, and the numbers will reveal that
the bull market for prisons is still charging ahead. Nearly 1 of every
150 people in the United States is in prison or jail, the Justice
Department will announce, a figure that no other democracy comes close
to matching.

Soon, the total number of people locked up in federal and state
prisons and local jails will likely reach the 2 million mark, almost
double the number a decade ago. For an American born this year, the
chance of living some part of life in a correction facility is 1 in
20; for black Americans, it is 1 in 4.

Most experts failed to predict that the inmate population would triple
from 1980, and now nobody seems to know how to stop the buildup. By
all logic, prisons should be experiencing a few vacancies, and the
cost of arresting, prosecuting and putting away an army of criminals
should be at ebb. After all, the economy could hardly be better, and
crime has fallen steeply six years in a row.

Surely, if crime continues to fall, the number of new prisoners must
also fall.

Not quite. No matter how much crime plummets, the United States will
still have to add the equivalent of a new 1,000-bed jail or prison
every week - for perhaps another decade, federal officials say.

A big reason is that so many of the new inmates are drug offenders. In
the federal system, nearly 60 percent of all people behind bars are
doing time for drug violations; in state prisons and local jails, the
figure is 22 percent. These numbers are triple the rate of 15 years
ago.

Americans do not use more drugs, on average, than people in other
nations; but the United States, virtually alone among Western
democracies, has chosen a path of incarceration for drug offenders.
More than 400,000 people are behind bars for drug crimes - and nearly
a third of them are locked up for simply possessing an illicit drug.

Many of the drug inmates have committed numerous crimes. But a growing
number of them have broken no laws other than the ones on drug use.

In the 1980s, Congress and the states passed drug laws that required
judges to put people in prison - even first-time offenders, or those
caught with small amounts of an illicit substance.

The idea was that more arrests would lead to more convictions, which
would put more people in jail, and the crime rate would fall. That did
happen.

Another dividend was supposed to be a drop in drug use, but that has
not happened. Arrests of people who use drugs just hit an all-time
high, the FBI reported. For virtually all other crimes, of course, the
figures are stunning-with huge drops in murder, robbery and assault.
Whether this is because the United States will soon have 2 million
people locked up is subject to much debate.

But many of the authorities who argue that the prison boom has taken

the worst criminals out of circulation - and has thus been the biggest
factor in reducing crime - are at a loss to explain the drug-use figures.

"I am in favor of the federal government ceasing and desisting the war
on drugs," said Dr. Morgan Reynolds, director of the Criminal Justice
Center at the Dallas branch of the National Center for Policy
Analysis, a free-market think tank.

He described himself as being on the conservative side of the debate
over prisons and crime; he says the crime drop can be directly
attributed to the prison boom. But he is less sure that the federal
government's war on drugs has an effect on crime rates and drug use.

Even some of the architects of punitive drug policies now argue that
stuffing the prisons with ever more drug offenders is not a wise
investment. Edwin Meese, who was attorney general under President
Reagan, when most of the drug laws were rewritten, said in an
interview that he has started to look favorably on treatment for
low-level offenders rather than jail.

Beyond the laws that send drug offenders to prison with reflexive
certainty, there are now institutional incentives to keep locking up
more people - a trend that some people call the prison industrial complex.

The stock price of the Corrections Corporation of America, the
nation's largest private jailer, has increased tenfold since 1994. The
company's stock is now privately held. But Corrections Corp. has
created a popular real-estate investment fund to get a return on all
those new prisons being built at the rate of one a week.

Unions representing prison guards are the fastest-growing public
employee associations in many states. In California last year, the
union was given a raise of 12 percent, which brought the annual salary
for a seasoned prison guard up to $51,000.

And it is the rare rural community that rejects a new prison in its
back yard, with the prospect of permanent, high-paying, benefit-rich
government jobs.

"Once you have a society committed to building new prisons and keeping
them, it's very difficult to close them down," said Marc Mauer,
assistant director of the Sentencing Project, a non-profit group that
has been critical of the prison buildup. "Particularly in rural areas
that come to depend on them. It's like trying to close a military base."

The one thing that may finally slow prison growth, said Dr. Allen
Beck, the Justice Department's lead statistician on criminal justice
trends, are budget concerns.

It costs taxpayers $20,000 a year to house and feed a new inmate - and
that does not include the cost of building new prisons and jails. The
states are spending nearly $30 billion to keep people in jail - about
double the rate of 10 years ago.

The prisons in California, as in virtually every other state, are near
capacity, even though the state has built 21 new institutions in the
last 15 years. Soon, it will cost nearly $4 billion a year to run the
state's prison system. Some states are starting to balk. California
legislative leaders say they will build no new prisons in coming
years, but they have not said what they will do with excess prisoners.

Cracking Down

Despite a steadily dropping crime rate,the prison population continues
to climb,in part because of increased drug convictions that are not
included in the FBI crime index.

At this point the article shows two graphs 1)Index of reported
incidents per 100,000 inhabitants* 2)Population of federal,state and
local prisons Graph #1 shows a drop of approximately 1,000 incidents
over the years from 90-97 (5,900 incidents down to 4,900) Graph #2
shows an increase in the prison population every year from 1990
1997(from 1.15 million to 1.75 million)

*Murder/manslaughter,rape,robbery,aggravated assault,burglary,larceny/theft
and motor vehicle theft.

Source: bureau of Justice Statistics,FBI-The New York Times