BAD DEAL: TOUGH STAND ON CRIME IS TOUGH ON US

We may well have made a pact with the devil. My fear now is that the devil
is soon coming for his due.

It was a bargain that lured Republicans and Democrats. In response to a
dramatic rise in crime beginning in the early '80s, fueled in part by the
crack epidemic, we demanded that elected officials set a get-tough policy
that would lock up criminals and throw away the key. Three strikes, you're
out. Do the crime, do the time.

Few objected to what has now turned out to be a massive transfer of
Americans into our criminal-justice system. America the land of the free
has become the land of the jailed. We are now the world's leading jailer.
By the middle of 2000, there were about 1.9 million Americans behind bars.
According to the Justice Department, there are now 4.6 million Americans on
probation or parole - an increase of 44 percent in the last 12 years. There
are estimates that as many as 13 million Americans have been found guilty
of a serious crime.

Back in the community

But there was much more to our Faustian bargain than we may have imagined.
Indeed, the devil was very much in the details, in the form of massive
numbers of prisoners returning to our communities.

In 2002, American prisons will release more than 630,000 people - the
largest prison exodus in history. If current trends continue, some
criminologists suggest that number could reach 1.2 million by 2010. For the
40 percent of those now in state prisons, the release has been occurring
within the past 12 months.

While we were sending people to prison in record numbers, we were also
cutting back on rehabilitation programs. It was as if we never expected to
see them return to society. Drug-treatment programs were deemed too
expensive. Politicians who supported transition programs were considered
soft on crime.

In North Carolina, the growth in the prison population has outpaced the
number of prison beds. Even with the doubling of the number of prison beds
since 1990, the state's prison system will have a cell shortage by 2005,
which is forcing state legislators to consider reducing sentences and
returning prisoners to the communities earlier than planned.

In Forsyth County, 888 prisoners were released last year. Most of the
Forsyth returnees are black males, and the average age is 32. Only 53
percent have completed high school.

Costs to society

Jeremy Travis of the Urban Institute warns that returning prisoners also
bring with them enormous social costs. In a report, "But They All Come
Back: Rethinking Prisoner Reentry," Travis says that not only is there a
growing number of prisoners now being released into the community after
serving their sentences, but there is also no systematic process of
reintegrating returning prisoners into society. In Forsyth County, 82
percent of returning inmates were unsupervised.

According to Travis, returning prisoners are less prepared for re-entry
than ever before. Within three years, 63 percent of returnees are
re-arrested, and 41 percent are reincarcerated. In 1982 we spent $9 billion
on the problem, but by 1997, that figure had grown to $44 billion.
Prisoners often have mental and physical health problems related to
substance abuse.

Most released prisoners return to neighborhoods that are the least able to
deal with their problems.

So why not leave them in prison? Longer sentences mean an increase in the
aging prison populations, which will require special care and drive up
taxpayer expenditures.

The devil is demanding his due, and somebody has got to pay him.