INMATES GO FREE TO HELP STATES REDUCE DEFICITS

LEXINGTON, Ky., - They began walking out of the Fayette
County Jail here this afternoon, the first of 567 Kentucky state
prison inmates that Gov. Paul E. Patton abruptly ordered released this
week in a step to reduce a $500 million budget deficit.

Governor Patton said only nonviolent offenders were being given the
early mass commutation. But those let out today included men convicted
of burglary, theft, arson and drug possession, some of them chronic
criminals.

"A percentage of them are going to recommit a crime, and some of them
are going to be worse than the crimes they are in for," Mr. Patton
acknowledged in announcing the emergency releases. But, he added, "I
have to do what I have to do to live within the revenue that we have."

It is a quandary that confronts an increasing number of politicians
across the nation in this time of deficits. After three decades of
building ever more prisons and passing tougher sentencing laws,
politicians now see themselves as being forced to choose between
keeping a lid on spending or being tough on crime.

As a result, states are laying off prison guards, or giving prisoners
emergency early releases like those in Kentucky. Some states have gone
so far as to repeal mandatory minimum sentences or to send drug
offenders to treatment rather than to prison in an effort to slow down
the inflow of new inmates.

And in other locales, prosecutors or courts have placed a moratorium
on misdemeanor cases like shoplifting, domestic violence and
prostitution.

"What has happened is that as corrections has grown so enormously and
consumed so many resources, it has finally become a target for budget
cutters as the economy has turned down," said Chase Riveland, a former
director of the corrections departments in Washington and Colorado and
now a prison consultant.

The pressure to change stems from the math. Since the early 1970's,
the number of state prisoners has risen 500 percent, making
corrections the fastest growing item in most state budgets.

With more than two million inmates currently in state and federal
prisons and local jails, the bill for corrections has reached $30
billion, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

To cope, Iowa has laid off prison guards. Ohio and Illinois have
closed prisons.

Montana, Arkansas and Texas, along with Kentucky, have discovered
loopholes that allow them to release convicted felons early, getting
around the strict truth-in-sentencing laws and no parole policies
passed in the 1990's that were supposed to prevent such releases.

In Oklahoma, Gov. Frank Keating, a conservative Republican who added
1,000 new inmates a year to the state's once small prison system, has
asked the Pardon and Parole Board to find 1,000 nonviolent inmates to
release early as a result of the state's budget crisis.

"Oklahoma has always prided itself on being a law-and-order state,"
said Cal Hobson, a Democrat who is president of the State Senate. "Now
we've got more law and order than we can afford."

In Virginia Beach, Commonwealth Attorney Harvey L. Bryant III, the
local prosecutor, has announced that because of state cutbacks to his
office's budget, he will no longer prosecute the 2,200 misdemeanor
domestic violence cases he gets a year.

"I deeply regret that the victims of domestic violence will no longer
have a prosecutor on their side," said Mr. Bryant, a Republican. "But
something had to go. I'm two assistant attorneys short."

All of these changes will save some money, but will not undo the
fiscal imbalances caused by the prison boom of the 1980's and 1990's,
said Nicholas Turner, director of national programs at the Vera
Institute of Justice in New York, a research organization.

To make larger savings, a number of states have begun to look at more
fundamental changes in the very laws they passed over the past two
decades.

Last week the legislature in Michigan, faced with a budget deficit and
prison overcrowding, voted to repeal the state's strict mandatory
minimum sentencing laws for drug crimes which have led to even life
sentences for possession of cocaine or heroin. John Engler, the
departing Republican governor, is expected to sign the bill into law.

In Kansas, the Kansas Sentencing Commission will recommend to the
Legislature next month a new policy under which people arrested for
simple drug possession, with no record of prior arrests for violent
crimes or drug trafficking, will be placed in mandatory treatment
instead of sent to prison.