PRISONS: WILL BOOM EVER COME TO END?

Here is how prison policies made in Madison and Washington take on a
life of their own. Once prison operators, prison employees and
community tax collectors learned they could profit from harsh, lock
'em up drug control laws, a powerful political force was born to keep
prisons full.

Inmate overload. During the 1980s and 1990s tough-on-crime policies,
especially drug control laws, overfilled America's prisons. State and
federal prisons held only 315,974 inmates in 1980. By 2000 that number
had skyrocketed to 1,321,137. When inmates in city and county jails
are added, America's total prison population topped two million in
2002.

Prisons, however, are not reserved for violent offenders. In 2002, for
example, 1.2 million simple drug possession arrests were made in the
United States -- about half for possession of marijuana. While not all
of those arrested end up behind bars, the rush to lock up non-violent
offenders was, in large part, responsible for setting off America's
prison building boom.

Prison boom. A new study by Sarah Lawrence and Jeremy Travis at the Urban
Institute's Justice Policy Center in Washington tracks how prisons became a
growth industry in America. In "The New Landscape of Imprisonment: Mapping
America's Prison Expansion," they found that during the last quarter of the
20th century, state prison systems grew from 592 prisons to 1,023 prisons --
an increase of 73 percent.

In 1979, 16 state correctional facilities, including prisons, operated
in Wisconsin. By 2000, that number grew to 30.

Aboard the gravy train. The U.S. Census counts prisoners where they
are incarcerated, and both federal and state agencies distribute funds
based on this census data. The more prisoners counted in a town or
county, the bigger will be its share of tax-funded goodies from
Washington and Madison.

This gravy train includes a slice of $200 billion a year in formula
grants from Washington to all state and local governments for
Medicaid, foster care, adoption assistance and 169 other programs. In
addition, the same data is used to allocate state funds for community
health services, road construction, law enforcement and public libraries.

Regular paychecks roll in for 8,650 prison employees in Wisconsin. And
don't forget the incomes of employees of private firms that directly
sell food, fuel, clothing and furniture to prisons. No wonder
Wisconsin towns become addicted to this prison economy.

Prison politics. Wisconsin has become more economically dependent on
state prisons. And it's in the self-interest of communities with
prisons to keep their prisons full and their local economies booming.

When prisons boom, everyone wins except inmates and taxpayers.
Politicians in Madison can show how tough they are on crime. Private
prison operators and their investors make money. Prison guards pay off
their mortgage and support local businesses. Even the local tax
collector gets his cut.

Now that the jailhouse economy is going strong, the political reforms
needed to abandon the old drug war mentality will be much harder, if
not impossible, to get through the legislatures in Madison and Washington.

Chances are, taxpayers nationwide will be stuck with the cost of
keeping two million men and women behind bars well into the future --
not because justice demands it, but because the economic benefits of
the prison business are working to keep it that way.