STATES THAT EXPORTED INMATES IN 1990S RETHINK PLANS AS CONVICT POOL PLATEAUS

MILWAUKEE, Wisc. -- In 1997, Wisconsin put Quovana Jones behind bars for
cocaine possession. But like many states whose tough sentencing policies
contributed to exploding inmate populations in the 1990s, Wisconsin didn't
have enough cells for everyone it was locking up.

So Ms. Jones, who faced up to five years, was shipped 700 miles to a prison
in West Virginia. She could no longer see her four children, who had
visited regularly when she was held in Wisconsin, because their father
couldn't afford the trip. The separation took a toll on her morale. Seeing
family, she says, had "kept me on my feet."

Exporting prisoners became common in at least a third of the states, as the
nation's state prison head count ballooned 75%, to more than 1.2 million,
from 1990 through 2000. Wisconsin dispersed more inmates than any other
state, sending them as far afield as Mississippi, Texas and Tennessee, in
addition to West Virginia.

Inmate-importing states collected millions of dollars for housing
out-of-state prisoners in excess public cells. For-profit prison companies
also cashed in on the coast-to-coast convict shuffle.

As a result, Hawaiian felons came to reside an ocean away from home in New
Mexico. Vermonters were shipped to Virginia. And inmates from the Pacific
Northwest ended up doing time in the Rocky Mountains.

But now there are signs that the inmate-export business may be thrown in
reverse. Wisconsin has had a change of heart, declaring that it plans to
bring all of its prisoners back home. Colorado has already taken back the
more than 1,400 inmates it shipped to other states in the 1990s. Other
states, such as Alaska and Connecticut, are debating whether to follow suit.

The main reason for what appears to be a nascent countertrend is the
leveling off of state inmate populations. Wisconsin's, for example, has
stabilized at about 20,000, after nearly tripling in a decade. Falling
crime rates and a recent softening of some especially harsh sentencing
statutes have contributed to similar plateaus around the country.

No longer panicked over where to put a swiftly growing pool of convicts,
state officials can focus on other concerns. Economic-development advocates
argue that state corrections dollars should be invested at home, where they
can generate local jobs. Colorado officials concluded that transportation
costs and the difficulty of supervising their inmates from afar outweighed
any expedience in sending excess prisoners away.

Beyond economics, corrections officials in Wisconsin, Colorado and other
states say that moving inmates such as Ms. Jones far from their families
and communities has a serious social consequence: It makes it less likely
that released prisoners will rejoin society as law-abiding, productive
citizens. "Family involvement adds to our rehabilitation efforts," says Jon
Litscher, Wisconsin's corrections secretary. "Shipping them out of state
cuts out a major component of that."

Pennsylvania had kept inmates within its borders in the 1990s but often
sent them to opposite ends of the state in hopes of disrupting drug and
gang ties. Officials there have concluded that this strategy made it harder
for inmates to readjust to life outside prison. Now Pennsylvania prison
administrators say they try to house convicts closer to their hometowns.
Wisconsin began exporting inmates in 1996, after its legislature toughened
criminal statutes. In 1998, the state parole board made it harder for even
well-behaved prisoners to get out early. Many Democratic state legislators
had opposed calls for a massive expansion of in-state prison capacity,
saying such a move would encourage even more draconian punishments.

The state's corrections department, seeing little choice, sent 700 inmates
to Texas county jails that had extra beds. But it proved costly to shuttle
the Wisconsin convicts around Texas as county beds opened.

So Wisconsin struck a deal with Corrections Corp. of America, the nation's
biggest private-prison operator. The state transferred its growing number
of exported inmates to Tennessee, CCA's home, paying the company $42 a day
per prisoner. By 1999, more than 1,500 Wisconsin inmates were living in a
CCA prison in Whiteville, Tenn., at an annual cost of about $23 million.

The politically potent union representing prison guards in Wisconsin
fretted that jobs were flowing to Tennessee. But the union agreed to go
along with the arrangement, in exchange for assurance from state
politicians that private-prison companies wouldn't be allowed to operate
lockups within Wisconsin -- something seen as an even bigger threat by the
public-employees union.

Wisconsin cut more deals with CCA, sending convicts to company facilities
in Oklahoma, Mississippi and Minnesota. The state separately paid the
federal government to house female convicts in a federal prison in West
Virginia. By 2000, more than 4,500 Wisconsin inmates -- 23% of the total --
resided outside of the state, at a cost of $74 million for the fiscal year
that ended in June. That amount was about a fifth of the money Wisconsin
spent to operate its adult prisons.

Voters had strongly supported the state's tough-on-crime push, but last
year they began to express qualms about sending so many people to prison
and so many prisoners to other states, according to Wisconsin politicians.
"All of this was driven by politics and polling," says state Senate
Majority Leader Chuck Chvala. In 2000, crime had faded as an issue, and
voters' appetite for punishment "had really started to wane," adds Mr.
Chvala, a Democrat who represents parts of Madison, the state capital, and
surrounding areas.

Some voters disapproved of what they perceived as the inferior treatment
Wisconsin inmates received in other states. A November 1999 riot at the
Whiteville prison in Tennessee generated headlines in Wisconsin. Just a few
weeks before, a Wisconsin circuit-court judge had ruled that four Wisconsin
convicts couldn't be forced to transfer to out-of-state facilities,
although the ruling later was overturned by a state appeals court.

Democratic state Sen. Gwendolynne Moore says bringing Wisconsin prisoners
home became "the No. 1 topic" for many voters in her urban-Milwaukee
district. Other Democrats representing similar districts say they, too,
felt such pressure, especially from minority communities that had seen
disproportionate numbers of their young people sent to prison during the 1990s.

Legislators from both parties who represented economically struggling rural
areas had their own concern: the prison-related jobs being exported along
with Wisconsin's inmates. Republican state Sen. David. A. Zien says his
Chippewa Valley district, hurt by dairy-farm consolidation and
manufacturing layoffs, "was dredging the bottom." He saw prison employment
as part of the solution.

Even as it was still shipping out inmates at a fast clip, the state
corrections department got new directions from the top. In 1999,
Wisconsin's then-Gov. Tommy Thompson, a Republican who now heads the Bush
administration's Health and Human Services Department, named Mr. Litscher
to run the state's prisons. The nominee lacked any corrections experience,
having worked as a school administrator and the state's
employment-relations secretary. At his confirmation hearing in March 1999,
Mr. Litscher announced he wanted to bring prisoners home.

In an interview, Mr. Litscher, 57 years old, says he has always thought
that rehabilitation should be a central purpose of corrections. Wisconsin's
criminals, he says, need "treatment and rehabilitation within the state,
based upon our philosophy, our culture, our people and programs," as
opposed to those of Tennessee or Oklahoma.

In Wisconsin, few people at first took seriously Mr. Litscher's pledge to
repatriate prisoners, largely because Wisconsin prisons remained badly
overcrowded. But the new corrections chief noticed that growth in the
prison population unexpectedly had begun to slow. When Gov. Thompson asked
how the state could capitalize on this development, Mr. Litscher says he
told him that as a start, "You should guarantee by the end of this year
you'll bring all the women home." Mr. Thompson did just that, declaring in
his 2000 state-of-the-state address that all of the roughly 300 female
prisoners would be back by Christmas.

One who returned was Ms. Jones. Her family began visiting her at the
Ellsworth Correctional Center, a short drive south of Milwaukee, where she
spent two months before being paroled after serving a total of about three
years. "Someone has a car, a little gas money, and all my kids were able to
come see me," says Ms. Jones. Her mother, brother and sister also came
regularly, giving her a sense of hope about the future. Now on probation,
the 24-year-old works as a customer-service representative at a department
store in Milwaukee.

There isn't much recent scholarship on the topic, but studies from the
1970s and earlier suggest that family contact reduces recidivism among
inmates. Criminal-justice experts say there is a common-sense consensus
that keeping prisoners connected in some way to their community helps. "The
great majority of people in prison are going to get out at some point, and
it's important that they get back into some kind of supportive network,"
says Alfred Blumstein, a criminal-justice scholar at Carnegie Mellon's
Heinz School of Public Policy.

Wisconsin met the deadline last Christmas for bringing home its female
convicts. This year, Mr. Litscher began to chip away at the male
out-of-state population. The result: CCA now houses about 1,000 fewer
Wisconsin inmates than it did at the peak in 2000.

A company spokesman says it isn't worried about a potential reversal of the
inmate-export policies of the 1990s. CCA recently signed contracts to
oversee prisoners from Kansas and Wyoming in a company facility in
Colorado. And private-prison contractors generally view the recession and
tightened state budgets as boons. "It is our belief that as states are
faced with difficult economic situations, the ability of CCA to provide
quality correctional services at a competitive cost will be a major
advantage," says Steve Owen, the CCA spokesman.

In Wisconsin, Mr. Litscher's move to repatriate prisoners hit a big
practical obstacle: the lack of space in the state's prisons. Mr. Zien, the
Republican state senator, and Dominion Venture Group, a development
company, proposed a partial solution.

Sen. Zien argued that opening a new state prison in his economically
troubled region would provide jobs, while also helping bring inmates home.
As it happened, in 1998, a unit of Dominion Venture had taken a gamble that
the state would need a new prison and broke ground on one in the Chippewa
Valley town of Stanley.

The company's speculative move irritated some lawmakers, who felt a prison
was being forced on the state. But Sen. Zien, who flies a "Don't Tread on
Me" flag from his Harley Davidson motorcycle, launched a lobbying effort to
have the state buy the prison and bring convicts to Stanley. Dominion
Venture helped by hiring John Matthews, former chief of staff to Gov.
Thompson, to lobby on its behalf. It didn't hurt that the same state Senate
committee that oversees prisons is also responsible for economic
development and that Sen. Zien serves on the panel.

The prison purchase received reluctant support from some of the urban
Democratic legislators concerned less about the Chippewa Valley economy
than about prisoners seeing their families. "I don't like the way the
Stanley prison came to be," says Antonio R. Riley, a Democratic state
Assembly member from Milwaukee. But "I thought it was just crazy for
Wisconsin to be shipping people out of state when they could be a little
closer to their loved ones."

With Mr. Litscher's support -- and the unlikely alliance of urban liberals
and development-minded Republicans -- the legislature in October approved
the purchase of the Stanley prison for $82.5 million.

Dominion, which is closely held and based in Edmond, Okla., says it has
successfully completed five such speculative prison projects since 1990.
But the one in Wisconsin will be the last, for now. Seeing
inmate-population growth leveling off, the company doesn't want to gamble
again on the corrections market. "There are ample beds in the [national]
system to support current demand," says Jim Hunter, Dominion's executive
vice president for development.

The prison in Stanley is expected to open next year and create 404 new
jobs. It should free up enough space elsewhere in the Wisconsin system to
permit about 1,000 additional prisoners to be brought back from other states.

The recession and Wisconsin's shrinking budget have delayed the openings of
two other new prisons in the state. But Mr. Litscher stands by his goal,
saying, "I honestly believe that, between 2003 and 2005, we will have all
our inmates back."