PRISON POPULATION SHACKLES STATE BUDGETS

Utah considers freeing 400 convicted felons by March 1. California
inches toward early release of nonviolent and elderly prisoners.
States begin to lay off prison guards. Kentucky Gov. Paul Patton
endures political brickbats for providing early release to 567
nonviolent prison inmates.

Everywhere, the reason is clear. States must balance their budgets.
They face the worst fiscal crises of a half-century or more. It costs
$20,000 to $25,000 a year just to hold one prisoner. So after three
decades of tough "law and order" penal policy, the temptation is
growing to change course and release some of the 2 million prisoners
incarcerated in the United States.

But will the criminal-justice establishment - and the media - allow us
a clear-headed debate about the choices states face?

I'm not hopeful. The knee-jerk reaction is to suggest we'll have
soaring crime rates soon after the first criminal gets early release.
An example: Ogden, Utah, Police Lt. Dave Tarran recently told The
Deseret News that early releases would constitute "our worst possible
nightmare."

Don't "seek to remedy budgetary woes by endangering the safety of our
communities," warns Lawrence Brown, director of the California
District Attorneys Association.

A New York Times story emphasizes how the state of Kentucky's early
releases include men convicted of burglary, theft, arson and drug
possession, "some of them chronic criminals." What the report doesn't
note is that the average sentence of the Kentucky convicts was for
only three years and that the inmates were released, on average, only
80 days early.

Sadly, we're being presented with a false choice. Either, goes the
message, we can pack our prisons and have "safe" communities. Or, we
can reduce incarceration and live in fear.

There's a sliver of truth in the choice: Surely we want incorrigible,
violent offenders incarcerated as long as can be.

But most prisoners aren't incorrigible, and most will be released one
day anyway. For them, it's fair to ask: Was prison the right place to
be sent in the first place - especially the huge numbers of nonviolent
offenders, including those held for minor drug-dealing or drug-
possession offenses?

And will prison correct, or actually exacerbate, some of the other
prime reasons for crime: joblessness and poverty, splintered families,
mental instability, peer pressure from gangs? Might it be that
substance-abuse treatment, community service, restitution, intense
(and adequately staffed) probation tied to local community policing,
could do better?

The public is way ahead of the politicians on alternatives to
incarceration, argues Marc Mauer of the Washington-based Sentencing
Project.

Crime has not only dropped since the early '90s, Mauer argues - the
public is less fearful. Drug courts - based on the premise that
treatment will serve addicted people better than a jail cell - have
spread to 400 locations nationally, and are well accepted.

But there are disturbing problems. One is the prison industry: Many
small towns embraced prisons as a job generator - even though the
locations are sometimes hundreds of miles from prisoners' homes and
their families. Now, prison-town legislators are fans of
incarceration.

Then there's race. Vast majorities of inmates are now blacks and
Hispanics - even though their use of illegal drugs is no more than
that of whites. In big cities, up to 75 percent of black men can
expect to be incarcerated during their lifetimes. They get sent to
distant state penitentiaries where they can only call home by
exorbitantly expensive collect calls (an area rife with kickback fees
for prison operators).

In the Trent Lott affair, George Bush spoke out for racial accord. But
what happened when Congress last year considered a bill to start
equalizing penalties for powder cocaine possession and crack cocaine?
Currently, penalties are 100 times as high for possessing crack
cocaine, which thrives in the inner cities. There may be no more
blatantly racist element in federal law. But Bush's operatives put the
kibosh on any reform.

The prison conundrum, in short, is deeply ingrained into today's
American way of life. It's part of our enduring racism. We talk an
equity game but actually have preferred a sort of blind vengeance.

The ray of hope now is that the fearsome budget crisis of '03 will
oblige us to rethink incarcerating some of the 2 million we now hold.
Two million is 500 percent more than the early '70s. How many do we
really need to imprison for our safety? Couldn't economy and security
- - and American ideals - coincide for once?