REHABILITATION

It's possible to believe that the truly nasty lock-'em-up criminal justice
approach that pervaded the country and the states for the past several
decades is ebbing. A couple of reports, just released, give hope that
that's true, and that it's being pushed by a shift in public attitudes
about justice, crime and the usefulness of incarceration.

The Justice Policy Institute and the Sentencing Project have both studied
the movement of states to ease the strain on their budgets by re-examining
mandatory minimum sentences and the social carnage that the war on drugs
has produced.

Crime rates have slowed markedly over the past nine years - which
proponents of hard-nosed criminal justice can and do claim are the result
of exactly these Draconian policies. But it's generally true that it's as
impossible to establish a relationship between tough policies and less
criminal activity as it is to figure out why the public always thinks crime
is worse than it actually, statistically is.

Crime is down, but so are revenues and budgets, so states are pondering
whether they can trim the $38 billion they collectively spend on keeping
prisoners in jail - a cost up 5.2 percent in just the last year, according
to the National Association of State Budget Officers.

They also notice that the public, when polled, is increasingly in favor of
less stringent sentences and in favor of alternative sentencing in
low-level drug offenses - including treatment alternatives and drug courts.

Even prison wardens, polled on the policies they have to implement, favor
drug treatment alternatives to incarceration.

At least 10 states, the two reports note, are seeking to close prisons or
at least cut back on the galloping expansion of prison beds - which are far
more expensive per unit than even the poshest hotel rooms. The Associated
Press account of the two reports shows many states looking for alternatives
because they need to save money - an excellent reason, all taxpayers would
agree.

But the effects of the several decades of three-strikes-you're-out fever
and industrial-strength prison construction has been far worse for society
than just the taxpayer drain it represents. Readers of Vincent Hallinan's
truly shocking ``Going Up The River: Travels in a Prison Nation'' can
testify that for-profit prison construction and states' desperate need to
buy beds somewhere - anywhere - to house the prisoners produced by their
tough sentencing policies have brutalized a generation of men and women
(women are the fastest-growing prison population).

Polls indicate huge majorities see the rehabilitation prisons' reason for
being, but Hallinan's book found that rehabilitation was a forgotten corpse
left behind by the for-profit frenzy.

Of states seeking alternatives to more - and more expensive - cells,
Maryland barely makes the cut, largely because of the consistent drug
treatment emphasis in Baltimore, which a recent study said was paying off
in fewer addicts and lowered crime rates.

Drug courts and a renewed treatment emphasis would be welcome all around
the state. Careful examination of mandatory minimums and the value of
rehabilitation efforts would be welcome here, too. It's too bad that it
takes a recessionary budget to raise questions that simple humanity should
already have raised.