Source: Houston Chronicle, page 16A
(http://www.chron.com/cgibin/auth/story/content/chronicle/editorial/
97/08/12/prisoneditorial.00.html)
Contact: viewpoints@chron.com

LOCKED UP

Bulging prison population a twoedged sword

The U.S. Justice Department reports now that, for the first time,
combined federal and state prison populations in this country
total more than 1 million and that the number of those locked up
as a percentage of the nation's population also has risen.

"There were more people coming in the door and fewer people going
out the back door," one expert told the Associated Press.

But this phenomenon is a twoedged sword that must be looked at
carefully.

On the one hand, with tougher sentencing laws and a prison
building boom having taken place in the last few years, the
parallel between locking more people up for longer periods and a
declining crime rate cannot be ignored.

On the other hand, the fact that we continue to have to lock up
so many should be sending warning signals that something is
seriously wrong somewhere.

At the very least, the huge costs of building and operating
prisons and the subsequent growth in government and bureaucracy
all should cause us to take a much closer look at prevention
programs that work.

That includes things like just plain old basic education. It's
far cheaper and wiser in the long run to teach a youngster to
properly read and write than it is to keep a young hoodlum locked
up.

There are now more than 1 million reasons why both ends of the
crime pipeline have to attacked. We need law, but we also need
order.