SCALING BACK THE SUPERMAX

Virginia pragmatically reduced its supermax prison space. Putting greater
emphasis on rehabilitation is only sensible, too.

The supermax prison is out. Education and rehabilitation are making a comeback.

Driven more by financial hardship than a triumph of reason over populist
fears, states are easing expensively draconian,
lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key sentencing.

And - blessedly - many are abandoning the idea that large numbers of
criminals require security so tight that they must be isolated and their
living conditions so harsh as to be inhumane.

Virginians can ruefully count their own state among the latter.

In truth, a poor economy and bankrupt tax policies weren't needed to show
the foolishness of the commonwealth's supermax fervor. From the start,
reasonable observers could see the state had overbuilt when it opened both
Red Onion and Wallens Ridge prisons, with a total 2,400 beds, to hold "the
worst of the worst" felons.

Virginia simply couldn't fill even one supermax, much less two - at least,
not with the appropriate class of criminal.

So, with none of the political fanfare that accompanies tough-on-crime
measures, the state reclassified first Wallens Ridge, then half of Red
Onion as maximum-security prisons. That leaves 550 supermax beds - still,
at almost 2 percent of the prison system's population, about twice the
norm. But that's much more reasonable than nearly 9 percent, the initial
proportion.

Unfortunately, the re-classification also leaves Virginia with
maximum-security prisons that were built to be supermax facilities - in a
word: mean.

They are not designed, nor or they readily adaptable, for the education,
job training, drug and alcohol treatment and other rehabilitation programs
that should be taking place in a corrections system.

Yes, these prisons house men who have committed crimes, often violent and
terrible crimes. The inmates are deservedly being punished. But what they
lack in opportunity to improve themselves and their chances to live
productively will hurt not only them, but the families and communities to
which most eventually will return.

Maryland's secretary of public safety says that state's supermax should be
razed. In more conservative Virginia, such a radical solution hardly
warrants mention.

But Virginians should remember - when the state's revenue picture finally
brightens - that taxpayers need to spend substantial money not just on
incarceration but on rehabilitation.

Fight crime. But don't fight harsher; fight smarter.