AS CRIME RATE FALLS, NUMBER OF INMATES RISES

BOSTON -- Despite a decline in the crime rate over the past five years, the
number of inmates in the nation's jails and prisons rose again in 1997, led
by a sharp increase of more than 9 percent in the number of people confined
in city and county jails, according to a study released Sunday by the
Justice Department.

The total number of Americans locked up in jails and prisons reached
1,725,842 last June, the Justice Department said, meaning that the national
incarceration rate was 645 per 100,000 persons, more than double the 1985
rate of 313 per 100,000.

The continued divergence between the shrinking crime rate and the rising
rate of incarceration raises a series of troublesome questions, said
criminologists and law enforcement experts, including whether the United
States is relying too heavily on prison sentences to combat drugs and
whether the prison boom has become self-perpetuating.

"In the stock market, the smart money is always with the law of gravity:
What goes up must come down," said Franklin Zimring, director of the Earl
Warren Legal Institute at the University of California-Berkeley. "The
astonishing thing with the rates of incarceration in the United States is
that they've been going up for 20 straight years, defying gravity."

Particularly worrisome, Zimring said, is that the biggest increase last
year was in the jail population, which had been growing more slowly than
the prison population. The number of jail inmates jumped 9.4 percent,
almost double its average annual increase since 1990 of 4.9 percent, while
the number of state and federal prisoners rose only 4.7 percent, less than
its annual average since 1990 of 7.7 percent.

Jails generally house those awaiting trial or serving terms of less than a
year, while prisons hold convicts serving longer sentences.

Decisions about who is going to jail, compared to who is going to prison,
are made much earlier in the criminal justice process, Zimring pointed out,
often right after arrest by a judge in considering bail requests, and
"therefore, jail numbers are a kind of leading indicator."

"I hope I am wrong," Zimring said, because "today's jail folk are
tomorrow's prisoners."

Experts point to several factors to try to explain why the number of
inmates has continued to climb, while crime has fallen since 1992. One of
the most important is that the crimes that led to the largest increase in
incarceration, the sale and possession of drugs, is not counted in the
FBI's crime index, which includes violent crimes like murder and robbery
and property crimes like burglary and auto theft.

Since the early 1970s, said Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie
Mellon University, drug offenses have accounted for more than a third of
the growth in the incarcerated population, and since 1980 the incarceration
rate for drug arrests has increased 1,000 percent.

In fact, Blumstein said, the incarceration rate for drug offenders alone
today is about 145 per 100,000, which is higher than the average
incarceration rate for all offenses from the 1920s to the early 1970s: 110
per 100,000.

In another indication of the problem, John DiIulio Jr., a professor of
politics and public affairs at Princeton University, said he has found that
25 percent of the new inmates entering prison in New York state are
"drug-only" offenders, with no record of other types of crimes. If that
estimate is borne out by further research, he said, the criminal justice
system is doing "a worse and worse job of diverting drug-only offenders"
into alternative programs that would be less expensive and where drug users
might be more likely to get treatment.

Another important factor is that the prison boom has created its own growth
dynamic. The larger the number of prisoners, the bigger the number of
people who will someday be released and then be likely to be rearrested,
either because of their own propensities or because of their experience
behind bars. There is also evidence that an increasing number of inmates
who have been paroled are being picked up for parole violations such as
failing a urine test. Indeed, the proportion of criminals being sent to
prison for the second or more time has increased steadily since 1980, said
Allen Beck, chief of corrections statistics at the Bureau of Justice
Statistics, a branch of the Justice Department, and a co-author of the new
report.

Longer prison sentences, more mandatory minimum sentencing laws and a
greater reluctance by state officials to grant parole have also contributed
to the increase in inmates even as crime has fallen.

More than half of the growth in prisoners was accounted for by just four
states and the federal prison system. The states were California, with an
increase of 11,475 inmates, Texas, 6,662, Missouri, 3,146, and Illinois,
2,052.

Massachusetts, Virginia and the District of Columbia had decreases in their
prison systems, though all under one percent. The largest jail population
was in Los Angeles County, with 21,962 inmates, followed by New York City,
with 17,528.

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company