STATE HAS NATION'S NO. 2 INCARCERATION RATE

WASHINGTON - Mississippi has passed Texas and now has the second-highest
incarceration rate in the United States, according to a Justice Department
study released Tuesday.

The state's prison population grew 6 percent during 2001 and has grown at
almost a 9 percent annual rate since 1995, the study says. For every
100,000 people in Mississippi, about 715 are incarcerated, a figure topped
only by neighboring Louisiana, where the rate is 800 per 100,000. Texas'
rate is 711 per 100,000, a drop from the previous year.

One expert said the prison population boom is not the result of a surge in
the state's crime rate, which has actually been dropping steadily since
1993 before an uptick last year. Rather, "it's because of this 85 percent
rule," said Peter Wood, associate professor of sociology at Mississippi
State University. "I believe we're the only state in the nation that
applied the 85 percent rule across the board."

Wood was referring to the state's "truth in sentencing law," in effect
since 1995, which required all prisoners to serve 85 percent of their time.

"It's not that there's a lot more criminals," Wood said. "They're just
spending more time in prison."

The law was amended 18 months ago to allow first-time nonviolent offenders
to be paroled after serving 65 percent of their sentence, rather than 85
percent.

Mississippi's incarceration rate would be even higher, Wood said, except
that judges have been giving lighter sentences, according to a study Wood
has done. Judges may be adjusting their sentences to reflect the time they
believe the prisoners will ultimately serve, he said.

An official with the Sentencing Project, a group that supports alternatives
to incarceration, said Mississippi, along with Louisiana and Texas, the
states with the leading incarceration rates, has begun to respond to the
prisoner boom.

"What appears to us is happening is that the costs and high rates of
incarceration are getting lawmakers to look at costs," said Marc Mauer,
assistant director of the group. The states "are looking at a variety of
options; in particular, more parole options."

Louisiana has scaled back its "three strikes" law and cut sentence lengths
for certain drug and nonviolent crimes, he said. And Texas increased the
number of inmates paroled by 31 percent from 2000 to 2001, according to the
group.

The Mississippi move to amend "truth in sentencing" is part of that, Mauer
said. In Mississippi, the incarceration rate has doubled in a little over
10 years, he said. In 1991 the Mississippi rate was 335 per 100,000, while
the national average was 287 per 100,000, he said. With that figure now at
715, the state has had to spend far more money and may be feeling the
pinch, he said.

Mississippi Department of Corrections figures show it spent about $83
million in 1992 and expects to spend about $258 million in 2002.

"Mississippi has funneled more money into corrections than any other
government agency in the last seven or eight years," Wood said. "We went on
a prison building binge." As a result, he said, the state's prisons are
still 2,000 inmates below capacity despite the soaring incarceration rate.

But Mississippi, in Wood's view, is unlikely to ease criminal penalties or
create loopholes to ease prison burdens as other states have done.
Politically, he said, "you have to be tough on crime in this state."