CRIME-FIGHTING COST: $147 BILLION

The cost of combating crime in the United States, for police, prisons
and courts, was $147 billion in 1999, the last year for which figures
are available, according to a study released Sunday by the federal
Bureau of Justice Statistics.

That is more than four times the $36 billion spent on the criminal
justice system in 1982. Federal, state and local spending for police,
prisons and courts continued to increase every year in the 1990s, even
as crime fell.

Nearly 2.2 million people now work in the criminal justice system,
including 1 million police officers, 717,000 prison and jail guards
and 455,000 people in the courts, the report said. The spending
amounts to 7.7 percent of all state and local government spending and
are about the same as government spending on hospitals and health care.

The report did not address the question of how effective the spending
has been. But it did find that, in general, crime rates and spending
on criminal justice were related, though not in the way many people
believe.

"States with high crime rates tend to have higher than average
expenditures and employment" devoted to criminal justice, the report
said, while states with the lowest crime rates tend to have the lowest
spending and employment.

Three of the top four areas in spending on criminal justice per capita
were California, the District of Columbia and Alaska, all with high
crime rates, the report said. But the five states with the lowest
spending per capita on criminal justice were South Dakota, Maine,
Vermont, North Dakota and West Virginia, which are among the states
with the lowest crime rates.

"You can't assume that because you spend more money that you are
going to drive down crime," said Michael Jacobson, a professor at
John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former corrections and
probation commissioner and deputy budget director for New York City.
"That is a simplistic assumption."

The question now, Jacobson said, is whether the fiscal crisis facing
almost all states will force policymakers to confront the costs of
using prisons to lock up an ever increasing number of people.

"In the 1990s, when states were flush with cash, they could do
everything," Jacobson said. They could cut taxes and build more
prisons, he said, adding that prisons have been the fastest-growing
item in state budgets. "But now they must make hard choices, and with
crime already going down, they must put a price on prisons."

Several states, including Ohio and Michigan, have already closed
prisons in the past few months as a result of budget shortfalls, and
some other states, including Washington, are considering reversing
tough sentencing laws passed in the 1990s, so that inmates will serve
shorter terms and the pressure for prison bed space will be reduced.

The report also highlights the federal government's increased role in
the last two decades in criminal justice, which before then had been
regarded more as a local or state function, said Alfred Blumstein, a
professor of criminal justice at Carnegie Mellon University.

Federal spending on criminal justice jumped to $27.4 billion in 1999,
up from $4.5 billion in 1982, the report found. That is a greater
increase than those in state and local spending. The biggest
proportion of the increase in federal spending was for prisons, as
Congress moved to make more crimes federal crimes, particularly drug
offenses, and lengthened sentences.