PRISONS NOT ONLY ANSWER TO CRIME

It is a perplexing enigma of our times: Why is it that crime rates
have been dropping for years, and, yet, our prison system continues to
grow and grow? The obvious answer is that tough laws that crack down
on offenders and take them off the streets for many years are
responsible for decreasing crime rates. There is truth in that. People
prone to committing crimes have considerably less opportunity if
they're behind bars.

But that presupposes that new generations will produce as many or more
criminals as in the past, making it necessary to accommodate an ever-
expanding prison population. Clearly, more needs to be done to keep
people from becoming criminals -- and candidates for Florida's prison
system -- early.

Corrections has become a $2 billion-a-year enterprise in Florida. And
the fact that the state Department of Corrections wants to increase
its bed capacity to 91,165 this year, at an additional cost of $125
million, is a terrible indictment of Florida's failure to combat crime
by investing in better early child care and youth services, education,
family intervention, drug treatment, counseling and job training.

The DOC is asking the Legislature to increase bed capacity at prisons
in Columbia, Marion, Taylor, Wakulla and Union counties this year. And
it wants to build a brand-new prison in Suwannee County, one that will
eventually cost $82.9 million and house more than 2,000 prisoners.

The Suwannee facility, when completed, will provide 305 jobs and a
payroll of nearly $14 million a year to that rural county. And perhaps
that's yet another reason for the unchecked growth of Florida's
correctional empire -- it has become as much an economic-development
tool as a crime suppressant.

It is not for nothing that U.S. 90, as it winds its way through rural
North Florida, is called the "Avenue of Incarceration."

A prison system that is within spitting distance of reaching 100,000
beds is a gigantic monument to Florida's failures. Recidivism rates in
Florida's prisons are approaching 50 percent. Because the emphasis is
on incarceration, rehabilitation is given short shrift. Of the nearly
$50 a day spent housing an inmate, only about $1 is spent on education.

Warehousing human beings is not a long-term solution to fighting
crime. Strategies and programs that address the root causes of crime
are ultimately more costefficient and more humane public policies.
Instead of continually expanding the prison system, state lawmakers
should be exploring ways to shrink it.

Investing billions of dollars a year to warehouse human beings while
skimping on rehabilitation and programs that can truly address the
root causes of crime is short-sighted public policy. More and more,
Florida prisons are becoming large-scale AIDS wards, holding pens for
the mentally ill and enforced retirement homes for elderly inmates who
can never be released because of inflexible "three strikes" sentencing
laws.

It does our society no credit that America's incarceration rates
outpace those of nearly every other industrialized nation in the
world. And the need for jobs in rural counties notwithstanding,
prisons are not the answer to economic development.

If the Suwannee prison is built, just four of Florida's 67 counties
will lack state correctional facilities. Is that really a winning
strategy to fight crime?