'AVENUE OF INCARCERATION'

Building more correctional facilities in Florida without rehabilitating
prisoners is not a viable crime-fighting method.

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 quick answer is that tough laws that crack down on offenders are
responsible for decreasing crime rates. But to maintain that decrease, it
is necessary to accommodate an ever-expanding prison population.

But that's both a simplistic and ultimately self-defeating criminal-
justice strategy. 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, 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 cost-efficient and more humane public policies. Instead of
continually expanding the prison system, state lawmakers should be
exploring ways to shrink it.

As for the proposed correctional facility for Suwannee County, there is
additional reason for concern. The state has settled on a location with
wetlands that drain into Crab Creek and discharge into Little River Spring.

"The site was chosen, after others were rejected, because there were few
neighbors to complain and the land was cheap," notes Eric Lindskold in the
latest newsletter of Save our Suwannee Inc. "The reason the land was cheap
and unpopulated was because it was wetlands."

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 terrible 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?