BARS AND STRIPES

After Three Decades Of Getting Tough On Crime, The U.S. Is The World's Top
Jailer, With A Quarter Of All The Prisoners On The Planet Now Behind
American Bars. But Are The Overcrowded Prisons And Skyrocketing Costs Worth It?

AVENAL, California - In the early afternoon at Avenal State Prison, inmates
wait to be let out into the exercise yard under the blistering central
California sun.

Scattered among the army-style bunks that line the barracks' walls, 100
prisoners play cards, talk or read. In the corner, a few sit on benches
watching TV, the volume loud enough to be heard over the din of voices and
loudspeakers. Oprah Winfrey is discussing personal growth.

Off to one side, a prisoner sits on a toilet; another steps naked from the
shower stall. Both are in plain view of the other inmates and the guard,
who sits on a raised platform like an auctioneer.

Avenal is a Level I/II facility, placing it somewhere between a minimum-
and a medium-security prison. All prisoners live in barracks, although this
particular hall was originally a gymnasium.

"We have six gyms like this at Avenal State Prison," says Jim Melero, a
correctional officer, waving at the bunks occupying what was supposed to be
a basketball court. "The others are the same." Across California, prison
gymnasiums have likewise been converted to accommodate a flood of convicts;
some even have triple bunks.

For the past 15 years, California has been furiously building prisons, but
has failed to keep up with demand. Avenal, built at the beginning of the
boom, is designed to hold 2,300 prisoners, huge by Canadian or European
standards. Today, almost 6,500 men are incarcerated here. By contrast, Bath
Institution, a comparable Canadian prison near Kingston, houses only 310 men.

Two million people are now incarcerated in the United States -- double the
American prison population in 1990 and more than six times what it was in 1972.

The U.S. imprisonment rate of 702 people per 100,000 is almost six times
times the Canadian rate of 119 per 100,000; it is 7.5 times the rate in
Germany and more than nine times the rate in France. The state of
California alone, which has a population slightly larger than Canada's, has
more prisoners than Canada, Germany and Italy combined. And that doesn't
include Californians held in federal prisons.

With just five per cent of the world's population, the United States is
home to one-quarter of the world's prisoners. In one of history's ironies,
the United States recently surpassed Russia, its Cold War enemy, as the
world's top jailer. Today, with one in every 142 residents of the U.S. in
jail or prison, the Land of the Free is also the Home of the Prisoner.

During the past two years, the U.S. prison-population boom has finally
slowed or even stopped in some states. California's prison population is
among those that have topped out, thanks largely to the recently enacted
Proposition 36, which diverts those convicted of drug possession to
treatment programs.

But the end of the explosion is hardly the end of the crisis. Officially,
California's state prisons are designed to house 80,000 -- 2.5 times the
capacity of all the prisons and jails in Canada. They now house more than
160,000 prisoners. Another 80,000 are held in the county jails. To
alleviate crowding, the union representing prison guards has suggested
California build mega-prisons that could hold 20,000 inmates each.

The situation is much the same in most other American states. Even though
prison construction has emerged as a major industry, and a growing slice of
government budgets is devoted to incarceration, American prisons are often
dangerously crowded.

It was not always this way. In the 1930s, the U.S. imprisonment rate was
actually lower than that of some western European nations. As late as 1972,
at 159 per 100,000, it was not much higher than the current rate in
England. It was also remarkably stable, never varying more than a few
percentage points, decade after decade.

But in the early 1970s it began to soar. A chart of American prison
populations from then to now looks like an F-14 taking off until finally,
in the past two years, it finally plateaus in the stratosphere.

This steady upwards climb does not mirror the crime rate. The incidence of
property crime rose until the early 1980s, and has fallen ever since.
Violent crime rose sharply until 1980, fell for the next five years, and
then rose again until 1992. Since then, violent crime, like property crime,
has dropped steadily. In fact, many types of crime are now at their lowest
level in 30 years.

Politicians and voters, not the crime rate, caused the American prison
boom, beginning in the 1970s, when they began embracing tough-on-crime
policies.

By the 1980s, those policies had become orthodoxy in public debates,
stifling discussion of crime-control alternatives not grounded in
punishment. Today, politicians of all persuasions vie to be seen as the
toughest, passing a steady stream of laws that incarcerate more criminals
in harsher prisons and keep them there longer. "When you see one of these
boogers loose," said the sponsor of a bill that put Mississippi's inmates
in 19th-century-style striped uniforms, "you'll say, 'I didn't know we had
zebras in Mississippi.' " Such bare-knuckle sentiments are routinely
rewarded at the ballot box.

But did the get-tough approach work? Critics hotly deny the tough-on-crime
revolution is responsible for the major drop in crime in the U.S. over the
past decade, pointing instead to demographic trends, as well as other
socio-economic factors. But for those who credit the hard line, the
argument is straightforward: More severe sentences deter people from
committing crimes and keep criminals locked away so they can't do it again.
Prison populations soared, and crime fell. Case closed.

In this country, the Canadian Alliance tried to make this case in the last
federal election with a crime platform lifted straight from American
reforms. Ontario's Conservative government, another get-tough booster, has
imported such American policies as boot camps for offenders and restricted
access to parole, while pressing the Liberal government to take the same
tack at the federal level.

The Liberals have been swayed only modestly, so far. But in the post-Sept.
11 world, security is a higher priority. That may well translate into
greater public support for tough American methods.

The push to get tough on crime has crossed the border. How it swept the
United States, what, if anything, it did to American crime rates, and what
it is costing American society is now very much a Canadian concern.

The transformation of American criminal justice can be traced to one man
and one event: Barry Goldwater and the 1964 presidential election.

Until 1964, as Michael Tonry, a noted criminologist at the University of
Minnesota, has written, "public safety was generally seen as one among
several important, but unglamorous, core functions of government, such as
public health, public transit, and public education ... Criminal justice
policy was a subject for practitioners and technocrats and sentencing was
the specialized case-by-case business of judges and corrections officials."

In 1964, for tactical reasons, Barry Goldwater's Republican campaign team
made crime a political issue for the first time. Even though Mr. Goldwater
was buried by Lyndon Johnson, by introducing crime to the world of partisan
politics, he may have had a more lasting impact on American society than
Mr. Johnson.

In subsequent elections, crime proved a marvellous political tool. In 1968
and 1972, it helped win the White House for Richard Nixon, who coined the
phrases "War on Drugs" and "War on Crime." And in both 1980 and 1984,
Ronald Reagan re-declared the War on Drugs and turned drug offenders into a
staple of the prison boom. Today, almost 500,000 Americans are incarcerated
for drug crimes, more than the total prison population of the European Union.

In 1988, George Bush Sr., in a fierce fight to retain the White House,
dredged up the obscure case of Willie Horton, a black man who had committed
a rape while on furlough from prison in Massachusetts at a time when Mr.
Bush's opponent, Michael Dukakis, had been governor. That was enough to
make Mr. Dukakis responsible in the eyes of much of the electorate. This,
plus an insufficiently hardline response to a question on the death
penalty, sank the Dukakis campaign.

The lesson for conservative political strategists was clear: A single
crime, properly exploited, could put a candidate in office. Law-and-order
became the all-purpose weapon in Republican campaigns.

The Democrats responded with their own tough-on-crime politics. In the
middle of the 1992 campaign for the Democratic nomination, the governor of
Arkansas, Bill Clinton, returned home to personally authorize the execution
of Ricky Ray Rector, a convicted murderer so mentally damaged he saved a
piece of pecan pie from his last meal "for later." After the execution, Mr.
Clinton remarked, "I can be nicked on a lot, but no one can say I'm soft on
crime."

In preparation for his 1996 re-election, Mr. Clinton signed a crime bill
that read like a Republican wish-list: $8 billion for new prisons, $8.8
billion to hire more police officers, $1.8 billion to incarcerate illegal
aliens, money to encourage states to restrict parole, and so on.

During Mr. Clinton's two terms as president, state and federal prison
populations grew by 673,000 -- one-third more than under Ronald Reagan. A
few weeks before the end of his presidency, Mr. Clinton told an interviewer
that the explosion of imprisonment in the United States was unsettling and
had to be re-examined.

The crackdown on crime affected not just the legal system, but living
conditions in prisons as well. Politicians and conservative commentators
commonly denounced American prisons for "coddling criminals," describing
them as "country clubs" and "resorts" where inmates enjoy amenities not
available to the average voter. Education and other rehabilitation programs
were the first to be cut. In the mid-1990s, weightlifting equipment was
pulled. Televisions were restricted or banned. Basketball courts and
baseball diamonds were torn out. Conjugal visits were restricted or
eliminated. Some states re-introduced chain gangs. Alabama brought back
rock-breaking.

Joe Arpaio, a sheriff who runs five jails in Arizona, put small-time
prisoners on chain gangs -- "they learn discipline," he told 60 Minutes --
and bragged that he spends more on food for guard dogs than for inmates.
Despite reports of abuse in his jails, including one case that ended in an
$8-million settlement after a prisoner was gagged and beaten to death by
guards, Mr. Arpaio has been repeatedly re-elected. With a public approval
rating hovering around 85 per cent, Mr. Arpaio has even been courted by
Republican heavyweights such as Bob Dole and John McCain, who understand
the value of a photo-op with the beloved sheriff.

The predominance of television news helped boost get-tough policies.
Violent crime makes for good television because it produces startling and
shocking pictures -- "if it bleeds, it leads," the saying goes. As a
result, television news played up violent crime, with little regard for
actual crime rates. Notably, crime coverage in the 1990s increased sharply,
even as crime rates plummeted. At the same time, the proliferation of
"reality shows" such as Cops only added to the impression the public was
under siege. One Florida study in 2000 indicated that the more local
television news viewers watched, the more likely they were to believe
they'd personally fall victim of crime.

The get-tough approach was also boosted by a backlash against the failure
that preceded it. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely felt among
opinion-makers that human beings were perfectible. If a person committed a
crime, he must have been driven to it by poverty, racism or other social
factors. Eliminate those factors with social programs and you would
eliminate crime. The promises were utopian. When crime began to soar in the
late 1960s, a backlash was inevitable.

Soon, the opposite view prevailed: Criminals were solely responsible for
their actions, regardless of any personal circumstances. They were simply
bad people, perhaps even inherently bad. The backlash accelerated in 1974,
when Robert Martinson published What Works?, a critique of rehabilitation
programs. "Nothing works" instantly became conventional wisdom. Mr.
Martinson actually hoped his findings would persuade policy-makers to
divert offenders away from prisons, but his work had the opposite effect.
If nothing works, the public and politicians concluded, then prison
conditions and rehabilitation programs were of no concern. Prisoners could
be simply locked in bare cells and forgotten.

In 1970, 73 per cent of Americans thought rehabilitation should be the
primary purpose of prison; by 1995, only 26 per cent agreed. Deterrence,
incapacitation, even vengeance, became the guiding principles of prisons.
In 1976, California removed the word "rehabilitation" from its criminal
code: "The purpose of imprisonment," the law now reads, "is punishment."

While hardliners believe the surge in crime rates that began in the
mid-1960s was the fallout from an overly lenient justice system, most
criminologists say it stemmed from other factors. Demographics is one. The
rise in crime rates corresponds to the period when Baby Boomers were
hitting their late teens and early 20s -- the time when youths are most
likely to commit crimes. Analysts also point to profound social changes,
including rapid urbanization, growing consumer wealth and social mobility.

This is why the rise in crime of that era was similar in every western
nation. As for the crime drop in the United States over the last decade,
that too has been echoed in other western nations, including Canada,
although the declines in violent crime in other countries have been less
pronounced, largely because violent crime never rose to the level it had in
the U.S.

Today, crime rates in the U.S. are, for the most part, little different
than elsewhere in the West. It is the rate of serious violent crime,
especially murder, in the U.S. that outstrips the rates of other western
nations, and because these crimes account for a very small proportion of
total criminality, they do not explain the immense gap between the
imprisonment rate in the U.S. and elsewhere. As for lesser crimes of
violence and property crime -- the great majority of offences -- American
rates are equal to or lower than those of other western nations.

But only in the United States was rising crime blamed on the leniency of
the justice system. That blame transformed state and federal justice systems.

In the 1970s and '80s, sentencing guidelines became punitive, rejecting,
for example, any consideration of circumstances such as poverty, lack of
education, child or spousal abuse, mental or emotional state, or family
responsibilities.

Legislators also created mandatory minimum sentences, usually for crimes
that generate media attention and public fear. These sentences tend to be
severe: In 1973, widespread panic about heroin use led to New York State's
"Rockefeller minimums," which force judges to sentence offenders convicted
of selling as little as two ounces of drugs such as heroin, or possessing
more than four, to life with no chance of parole for 15 years.

The ultimate mandatory minimum is the "three strikes, you're out" laws that
exist in more than half the 50 states. These laws generally require that a
person convicted of a third violent felony be sent to prison for life.
California's three-strikes law even calls for a life sentence when the
third crime is non-violent -- as in the notorious case of the man sentenced
to life in prison for stealing a slice of pizza.

Critics of the prison boom point out that high rates of incarceration can
also have devastating emotional effects, not only on inmates, but on their
families as well. Mandatory minimum sentences may punish a person out of
all proportion to the crime. Gangs and criminal networks can flourish.
Young offenders who might have gone straight are labelled "adult" criminals
and shunted to the margins of society. In communities with high rates of
incarceration, the shame of crime may become deadened; children of inmates
doing long sentences grow up in single-parent families, or in foster care.
The mentally ill are more likely to be incarcerated than treated.

Whatever the true costs, in dollars and suffering, the American prison boom
will continue. Although the imprisonment rate has finally begun to level
off, the U.S. Department of Justice predicts expansion will continue until
2005. The incarceration rate will then be 735 per 100,000. There will be
2.1 million prisoners in the Land of the Free.

For places such as Avenal State Prison, relief can't come soon enough. The
prison, with its 6,500 inmates, is a small town, covering 129 acres. Staff
get from building to building in school buses and golf carts driven by inmates.

The prison owns another 270 acres, so there's room to grow, even though it
already has 13 times more inmates than the American Correctional
Association recommends as the limit for an effective institution.

Avenal's guards are friendly and talkative, asking about Canada's
incarceration rate. I tell them it's only a fraction of the American rate,
that no other western nation puts people in prison as often as the United
States, that the U.S has passed Russia as the world's top jailer. A few
guards shake their heads a little sadly.

One brightens and adds, "But it's working 'cause crime is going down."

Some Canadians would agree. In interviews with the Citizen, both Vic Toews,
the Canadian Alliance justice critic, and David Young, Ontario's attorney
general, cited the American experience as proof that tough-on-crime
policies work.

Since taking over as attorney general earlier this year, Mr. Young has
pushed for tougher justice policies, including mandatory minimum sentences,
harsher prisons and automatically trying young offenders charged with
serious crimes as adults.

He recalled that a senior American prosecutor in Washington, D.C. recently
told him Canada's justice system was too soft.

Mr. Young said the prosecutor told him, "We had a realization in the States
that ... criminals were laughing at the laws and the way that they were
applied and that something had to be done." The American's conclusion:
Canada "is about 15 years behind the times." It is a conviction Mr. Young
shares.

Prisons swollen to the size of towns. New prisons being built as fast as
the concrete can be poured. A rising flood of human beings disappearing
behind razor wire and electrified fences.

"I have seen the future; and it works," wrote American journalist Lincoln
Steffens in 1919 after a visit to the Soviet Union. Canada's tough-on-crime
advocates have also seen the future, and they too are sure it works.