TIGHT BUDGETS FORCE STATES TO RECONSIDER CRIME AND PENALTIES

After three decades of building more prisons and passing tougher
sentencing laws, many states are being forced by budget deficits to
close some prisons, lay off guards and consider shortening sentences.

In the last month, Ohio, Michigan and Illinois have each moved to
close a prison, laying off guards in the process, prison officials
say.

Washington State is considering a proposal by Gov. Gary Locke to
shorten sentences for nonviolent crimes and drug offenses and to make
it easier for inmates to win early release, saving money by shrinking
the prison population. Colorado and Illinois are delaying building
prisons, and Illinois is cutting education for 25,000 inmates.

California, which led the nation's prison building boom, will close
five small, privately operated minimum security prisons when their
contracts expire this year.

Budget pressures are also adding momentum to a push to put a proposal
on the California ballot in November that would reduce the number of
criminals subject to the state's three-strikes sentencing law.

"I don't know of a correctional system in the country that isn't
facing some of this," said Chase Riveland, a former director of
Washington State prisons, now a consultant.

Steven Ickes, an assistant director of the Oregon Department of
Corrections, said, "My sense is that budget problems are making people
ask fundamental questions about whether we can afford to keep on doing
what we've been doing," locking up ever more criminals for longer periods.

"We are going to have to make some tough choices about prisons versus
schools, and about getting a better investment return on how we run
our prisons so we don't have so many prisoners reoffending and being
sent back."

Since the early 1970's, the number of state prisoners has increased
500 percent, growing each year in the 1990's even as crime fell. In
that time, prisons were the fastest-growing item in state budgets --
often the only growing item. More than two million inmates were in
state and federal prisons and local jails, which cost more than $30
billion a year to run, Allen J. Beck, of the Bureau of Justice
Statistics, said.

In those years, said Franklin Zimring, director of the Earl Warren
Legal Institute at the University of California, public pressure to
get tough on crime made prison budgets virtually untouchable. But with
crime having dropped or leveled off in the last nine years, this
political pressure has abated, and with the economy in a decline, many
states are having to cut spending to balance their budgets.

"This means that prisons must now compete by everybody else's rules
for scarce budget resources," Professor Zimring said.

But whether fiscal restraints will lead to a decline in the number of
people in prison is less clear, Mr. Beck said. In the second half of
2000, he said, the number of inmates fell for the first time since
1972.

"My best guess," Mr. Beck said, "is that the economic restraints are
going to be offset by the rigidities of the sentencing laws of the
1990's, which required longer sentences.

"What we may have is stability, with the prison population continuing
to grow, but slowly, in keeping with the population of the United States."

The biggest change in response to the tight budgets has come in the
three states that have moved to close prisons: Ohio, Michigan and Illinois.

Reginald Wilkinson, the director of the Ohio Department of
Rehabilitation and Correction, said he had been ordered to cut his
budget by 1.5 percent, or $19 million. At first, Mr. Wilkinson said,
he feared he would have to close two prisons but found he could
achieve the savings by closing one, the old Orient Correctional
Institution, a maximum security prison in Columbus with 1,700 inmates.
They are being transferred to 10 other prisons in Ohio. Some guards
will also be transferred, but about 200 employees will be laid off,
Mr. Wilkinson said. He is offering other guards incentives for early
retirement. Guards account for about 80 percent of the cost of prisons.

In Michigan, where the prison department had to save $50 million, it
closed a medium security prison in Jackson, 70 miles west of Detroit,
along with a halfway house and a work camp. The prison agency also
laid off 97 guards who worked in Jackson and cut 161 positions for
sergeants, unit managers and assistant deputy wardens at other
prisons, said Matt Davis, a spokesman.

To reduce costs further, Michigan is moving 250 to 300 prisoners who
were temporarily housed in county jails back into prisons so more
state guards do not have to be laid off, Mr. Davis said. But Wayne
Kangas, the sheriff of Clinton County, where some of the state
prisoners were housed, said the state's action would cost his county
from $500,000 to $600,000 in lost revenues.

"This will be a major problem for us," Sheriff Kangas said. "It's a
real shock."

Illinois is closing the Joliet Correctional Center, an old prison that
once held George Nelson, known as Baby Face, and is saving $5.4
million by eliminating classes for inmates beyond courses to pass a
high school equivalency test, said Sergio Molina, a prisons spokesman.
Illinois is also looking to save money with a new food program for
inmates, Mr. Molina said.

In Washington, Governor Locke is asking the legislature to reduce
sentences for nonviolent crimes and drug offenses and to release such
prisoners faster for good behavior. Don Arlow, the budget and
strategic planning chief for the Washington Department of Corrections,
said these measures would reduce the number of inmates by 122 in a
year.

Governor Locke has also proposed to exempt inmates judged least likely
to commit new crimes from supervision after they are released.

California will not renew licenses for five small private prisons for
minimum-security inmates later this year, said Stephen Green, a
spokesman for the California Youth and Adult Correctional Agency. The
state can do this because the number of inmates fell to 156,000, from
162,000, in 1999, Mr. Green said, and his agency expects a further
drop of 3.1 percent this year. Inmates in the five private prisons
will be transferred to regular state prisons.

California has 6,700 inmates serving sentences of 25 years to life
under the state's three-strikes law. Besides complaints that the law
is overly punitive, there has long been criticism that it is an
expensive way to combat crime, keeping people locked up long after
their prime years for committing crime. As long as the California
economy was doing well, this criticism was blunted.

But Mr. Green said the budget deficit was making some legislators
change their views, and he said he expected a proposal to require that
the third strike be for a violent offense to be on the ballot this
fall.