SNAPSHOTS BEHIND BARS

Today, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Corrections and
Rehabilitation is scheduled to hear findings from the Commission on
Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons' report, released today. The
commission began last year as a nonpartisan effort co-chaired by
former LBJ Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and former appellate
court Judge John J. Gibbons to study the state of America's prison
system, which holds on any given day 2.2 million prisoners at an
annual cost of $60 billion.

The magnitude of the prison system, although trumpeted often enough
by the liberal media, remains a troubling part of our society, all
the more so since, as the report found, data collection remains poor
to nonexistent.

For instance, Arkansas, North Dakota and South Dakota each reported
zero assaults among prisoners statewide in 2000 -- a laughable
statistic. As Commissioner Pat Nolan will tell the committee today,
"there is no way to track the number of assaults by prisoners on
other prisoners, by prisoners against staff or the use of excessive
force used by corrections officers."

Not only does this endanger prisoners and the officers who guard and
protect them, but it affects communities in that a majority of
prisoners are no better citizens when they leave confinement than
when they entered.

The Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics found in a
15-state study that more than two-thirds (67.5 percent) of released
prisoners in 1994 were rearrested within three years, an increase
from the 62.5 percent released in 1983. Aside from violent offenders,
whose recidivism rate remained relatively unchanged at 60 percent,
every major category of prisoners (property, drug and public-order
offenders) saw at least a five-point increase over the 1983-94 period.

Improving life inside a prison is step one for improving prisoners'
lives outside.

Another of the commission's disturbing findings related to medical
care. As the report found, "more than 1.5 million people are released
from jail and prison carrying a life-threatening contagious disease."
Part of the problem is that a lot of prisons have a low
prisoners-to-doctor ratio, in some cases as low as two or three
doctors for 4,000 or 5,000 prisoners.

Much of the commission's recommendations involve increased funding
and independent oversight. What the subcommittee should remember
today is that prisons -- which the report compares to hospitals and
schools -- are often reflections of the quality of administrators,
who must be held accountable.

By their crimes, prisoners have forfeited the kind of life
law-abiding citizens take for granted, and we must remember that they
are being punished. But we shouldn't forget that a vast majority will
also be returned to society, which has as much a stake in their
rehabilitation as they do.