PRISON NUMBERS REACH NEW HIGH

1.8 million are jailed despite drop in crime

The number of inmates in the nation's jails and prisons rose again last
year, to a record 1.8 million, though crime rates have dropped for seven
consecutive years, the Justice Department reported Sunday.

The number of Americans behind bars increased 76,700, or 4.4 percent, well
below the average annual increase of 7.3 percent between 1985 and 1998,
suggesting that the dramatic growth in incarceration has at least begun to
slow down.

But the 1.8 million total means that the incarceration rate has more than
doubled since 1985, to 668 inmates per 100,000 residents in 1998, from 313
per 100,000 in 1985, according to the Justice Department. And the total
inmate population is almost six times the figure of 330,000 in 1972, before
the prison boom started.

The new Justice Department report found that there were 1,277,866 inmates
in state and federal prisons last year, an increase of 4.8 percent from a
year earlier, and 592,462 people in local city and county jails, a rise of
4.5 percent. Of the states, California had the highest total number of
inmates -- 158,742.

The report was prepared by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a branch of
the Justice Department, and was based on the number of inmates on June 30,
1998.

Criminologists and law-enforcement officials generally agree that the
substantial growth in the number of inmates has helped reduce crime, at
least by keeping more violent criminals off the street. But they say it is
difficult, if not impossible, to measure that impact precisely. There is
growing concern that the prison boom has taken on a life of its own, with a
built-in dynamic that will keep the inmate population growing for years
even if crime continues to fall, forcing cities and states to divert scarce
resources to building ever more jails and prisons.

In a new study of the factors in the continued expansion of the number of
prison inmates, Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon
University, and Allen Beck, a prison specialist at the Bureau of Justice
Statistics, calculated that 40 percent of the growth was attributable to
increases in the number of people actually sent to prison per arrest and 60
percent to longer time served by inmates. The study is to be published this
year by the University of Chicago Press.

Blumstein said the increase in commitments to prison per arrest was the
result of tougher attitudes toward criminals by both prosecutors and
judges.

The longer time served by inmates, Blumstein said, is the result of several
things: tougher sentencing laws, longer sentences, greater reluctance by
parole boards to grant early release, and the increased likelihood that
once prisoners are released they will be rearrested for parole violations,
often technical violations like failing a urine test for drugs.

Little of the increase in the number of inmates is the outcome of better
police work, making more arrests per crime, or a growth in the number of
criminals being sent to prison, he said.

An additional factor driving the number of inmates up even as crime seems
to fall, Blumstein said, is that drug arrests are not counted as part of
the national crime rate reported by the FBI. That rate includes the violent
crimes of murder, robbery, rape and assault and the property crimes of
burglary, larceny and automobile theft.

But drug offenses accounted for the greatest share of the increase -- 29
percent -- in state prisoners of any single crime from 1980 to 1996. By
comparison, the crime that produced the next largest increase in state
inmates was rape, 11 percent, and then murder and assault, each at 10
percent. All the violent crimes together were responsible for 43 percent of
the growth in state imprisonment.