MORE IN U.S. ARE IN PRISONS, REPORT SAYS

The number of Americans under the control of the criminal justice system
reached 5 million last year, including a record 1.5 million inmates in
federal and state prisons and local jails and another 3.5 million convicted
criminals on probation and parole, the Justice Department said on Wednesday
in the most comprehensive report ever done on the scope of law enforcement
network.

If the current trend continues - as law enforcement experts and
criminologists interviewed on Wednesday predicted it would - the number of
Americans behind bars or on probation or parole will soon approach the 6
million students enrolled full-time in four-year colleges and universities
nationwide. Within a decade the number of people behind bars will exceed the
entire New York City population, currently about 7.3 million.

During 1994, the number of inmates in federal, state and local prisons
increased by more than 1,600 a week, and the number of people incarcerated
at year's end had tripled since 1980, according to the study, by the Bureau
of Justice Statistics, a research arm of the Justice Department.

There are wide divergences among experts on how fast the prison population
will grow, with estimates depending both on the crime rate and changes in
legislation. This year, for instance, the Republicans' Contract With America
calls for providing possible billions of dollars in federal financing for
state prison construction if states lengthen the required amount of time
inmates serve to at least 85 percent of their sentences, a provision that
Florida recently met.

Criminologists and politicians on Wednesday offered conflicting opinions
about whether the large increase in the number of Americans behind bars had
had any effect on the crime rate. The FBI reported in May that the rate of
violent and serious crimes had dropped 3 percent in 1994, the third
consecutive year of decline. Some cities, including New York, have reported
a significant decrease in homicide.

Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Fla., who is chairman of the House subcommittee on
crime, called today's report was "encouraging" and said it showed that
Congress' efforts to stop crime by lengthening prison sentences and building
more prisons were beginning to work.

"If you can get these violent criminals to serve more time, you will
inevitably reduce the violent crime rate," McCollum said. "Anyone who is
locked up will not commit a crime."

Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University,
acknowledged that the increase in imprisonment clearly removed some
criminals from the streets and meant that fewer murders would be committed.
But he said that since 1985 there had been only a 10 percent reduction in
the homicide rate among adults over the age of 24, a disproportionately
small gain when measured against the vast increase in the number of
prisoners.

"We should think very hard about the trade-off" between the tripling in the
prison population and the relatively small decrease in crime, Blumstein
said.

Wednesday's report found that there were 95,034 people in federal prisons at
the end of 1994, with 958,704 in state prisons. The total represented an
overall increase of 9 percent compared with 1993, which was the second
largest yearly increase on record.

Allen J. Beck, an author of the report, said there were another 483,717
people locked up in city and county jails at the end of 1994. Most inmates
in local jails at any given time are awaiting trial or have been sentenced
to terms of a year or less.

There were widespread variations by region in rates of incarceration, the
report found. Southern states had the highest per capita rate of
incarceration, 451 per 100,000 residents, while the Northeast had the lowest
rate, 285 per 100,000 residents. During 1994, Texas led the nation in the
growth of its state prison population with an increase of 28 percent,
followed by Georgia with a 20 percent increase.

The report offered conflicting evidence about whether many of those being
arrested are simply drug users instead of serious, violent criminals, as
some critics of America's crime policy have charged. The study showed that
between 1980 and 1993, the number of people imprisoned for violent offenses
grew by 221,200 nationwide, while those convicted on drug charges increased
by 167,000.

But at the same time the report found that from 1980 to 1993 the percentage
of drug offenders in state prisons rose to 26 percent from 8 percent, while
the proportion of drug offenders in federal prisons soared to 60 percent
from 25 percent.

John J. DiIulio Jr., professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton
University, said that the report had overlooked an important development:
that violent criminals are gradually being made to serve a greater
proportion of their sentences. In 1988, he said, violent offenders served
only 43 percent of their sentences, compared with 51 percent today. "This is
good news and will account for tens of millions of serious crimes averted,"
DiIulio said.

But Jerome G. Miller, the director of the National Center on Institutions
and Alternatives, said that Wednesday's report was discouraging because it
showed that "the percentage of Americans going in and out of jails is
phenomenal" and that "as you go down the socio-economic scale the percentage
gets much higher." America, Miller asserted, is relying too heavily on
imprisonment as a way to stop crime, and the criminal justice system is
turning the majority of impoverished minorities in the inner cities into
criminals.

Almost three quarters of the new admissions to prisons are now black or
Hispanic, Miller said, and if present trends continue, he asserted, by 2010,
"we will have the absolute majority of all African-American males between
age 18 and 40 in prisons and camps."