TENNESSEE'S PRISON POPULACE GREW NEARLY 5% IN 2003

CHATTANOOGA - Despite declining crime rates in its major cities,
Tennessee's prison population grew by nearly 5 percent last year, outpacing
all but three Southern states.

Only Mississippi, South Carolina and West Virginia had prison populations
grow more than Tennessee's, according to a report by the Justice
Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. The inmate population in the
South grew faster than in any other region.

The number of people serving time in state and federal correctional
facilities in Tennessee jumped 4.7 percent last year to more than 25,000,
the report says.

The state Department of Correction expects to meet the demand until at
least 2008 by adding more than 2,000 beds to facilities across the state,
spokeswoman Jennifer Johnson said. "We are right on target with what our
population projections are," she said.

The report and experts attribute much of increase in Tennessee and across
the nation to get-tough policies enacted during the 1980s and 1990s, such
as mandatory drug sentences, "three-strikes-you're-out" laws for repeat
offenders and "truth-in-sentencing laws" that restrict early releases.

But the rising numbers have some experts concerned and advocating other
options.

Kenneth Venters, a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga criminal justice
professor, said the way states use incarceration is "really overkill."

Expanding prisons only will add to the problem, Venters said, because a
prison filled to capacity is cheaper to operate. "We keep on building the
prisons, so we feel compelled to fill them," he said.

Johnson said the Department of Correction is adding 1,292 beds to the
Southeastern Tennessee State Regional Correctional Facility in Bledsoe
County and 838 beds to the Brushy Mountain Correctional Complex in Morgan
County. The department also is housing two inmates to every cell at the
Turney Center Industrial Complex in Hickman County.

Johnson said the department is reorganizing its upper management to focus
more on rehabilitating inmates in an effort to control the number of
inmates who re-enter the prison system.

She said Jim Cosby, now state director for the Tennessee Board of Probation
and Parole, will join the department as the assistant commissioner for
rehabilitative services, a newly created position.

Nationally, the prison population grew by 2.9 percent last year to almost
2.1 million inmates, according to the federal report. One out of every 75
men last year lived in prison or jail. There were 715 inmates for every
100,000 U.S. residents at midyear in 2003, up from 703 a year earlier.

In Tennessee, there were 435 inmates for every 100,000 residents.