PRISON NOT THE ANSWER FOR NONVIOLENT OFFENDERS

America locks up its people at a higher rate than any industrial country in
the world. We lock up more people than China's communist dictators do. The
Justice Department just reported that the number of inmates in American
prisons now tops 2 million.

But we don't lock up everyone at the same rate. The color of your skin and
the size of your wallet are still telling. A staggering 12 percent of
African-American men between the ages of 20 and 34 are in jail or prison,
according to the Justice Department. By comparison, 1.6 percent of white
men in the same age group are incarcerated.

An immense proportion of those imprisoned are for nonviolent crimes,
particularly drug-related. Yet whites consume illegal drugs at the same
rate as blacks do. African Americans do the time; whites still pay the fine.

The Supreme Court is worried that affirmative action might give African
Americans an edge based on race in university admission or employment. But
it ought to take a look at the negative action that clamps shackles on a
staggering portion of African Americans.

The disparities are there for all to see. Racial profiling by police leads
to more minorities being arrested. Prosecutorial discretion leads to more
minorities being prosecuted. Disparity in sentencing--as between cocaine,
the rich, white man's drug, and crack, the cheaper, poor man's drug of the
same composition--leads to more minorities being locked up. Disparity in
judicial sentencing leads to African-American men doing longer time and
harder time.

But that's not all. Start with the urban ghettos and barrios that poor
children are born into. Impoverished infants start without adequate health
care and nutrition. Single mothers must work without adequate child care.
Too many families are homeless or forced to move constantly. High-quality
preschool is absent in vital years as well as after-school programs in the
hours that teenagers get in trouble. Schools are starved of funds,
overpopulated and too often burdened with the worst teachers.

Some children are on a fast track to Yale; others on a fast track to
jail--right from the start.

Add to that the punitive ''get tough'' conservative posturing on crime that
has led to locking up people--particularly minority men--for nonviolent
crimes, and you have a system in which justice is barred.

And, of course, there is immense disparity between states. Louisiana, for
instance, had an incarceration rate of 799 inmates per 100,000 in its
population. Maine had only 137 inmates per 100,000 of its citizens. Maine
is a largely white state; Louisiana is racially mixed.

But if the ''lock 'em up'' approach is popular politically, it doesn't make
much sense. We should be treating drug addicts, not warehousing them;
rehabilitating nonviolent offenders, not abandoning them. Prisons teach
crime, they don't remedy it. They instill despair and anger, not hope and a
way up.

And prisons are expensive. It costs more to keep an inmate in jail than to
send him or her to college. We're wasting, literally, billions of dollars.
These days, this is apparent. Given the dire state and local budget crunch,
even conservative governors are trying to reduce costs by paroling
nonviolent offenders. Suddenly, all those ''threats'' to society are not so
much of a threat after all.

If warehousing African-American men isn't about the danger they pose to
society and isn't about rehabilitation, what's it about? Consider it just a
modern way to impose the discredited segregated system of the past. The
Bureau of Justice Statistics calculated that one in every four
African-American men will be sent to jail or prison in his lifetime. He
will be stigmatized and traumatized. And in many Southern states, if
convicted of a felony, he will be stripped of his right to vote.

Depriving even those who have paid their debt to society of the right to
vote is simply a way of helping to suppress the black vote. Florida proved
that in the last presidential election, when Jeb Bush's election committee
used the excuse of ''cleaning the rolls'' to purge hundreds of thousands of
African-American voters, many of them innocent of any felony conviction and
eligible to vote.

Budget austerity will pare back jails, but it won't remove the bars from
justice. That will take political leaders strong enough to talk sense to
the American people and to challenge the scaremongers and race-bait
operators who have driven us down the current disgraceful path.