Pubdate: 3 Apr 1999
Source: Fresno Bee, The (CA)
Copyright: 1999 The Fresno Bee
Contact:  http://www.fresnobee.com/

ENOUGH PRISONS?

Over the last two decades we Americans showed our disgust with crime in a
very American way: We threw money at the problem, most notably by turning
prisons and jails into a growth industry. Now, with the crime rate falling
and the number of Americans behind bars at 1.8 million, more than the
combined populations of Alaska, North Dakota and Wyoming, there's a budding
sense on both left and right that the law, of diminishing returns applies
as much to imprisonment as other human endeavors.

The raw outline of the imprisonment boom are by now familiar. Since 1978
the number of prison and jail inmates has tripled; in states like
California, it's grown sixfold. Likewise, the total annual bill for prisons
and jails has grown about sixfold, to $31 billion, pushing costs in state
budgets to levels that rival spending for higher education.

But some facts are less well known. As the liberal Justice Policy Institute
reported in a study last month, 1 million prisoners, more than half of the
total, are behind bars for offenses that involved neither harm, nor threat
of harm, to someone else. Twenty years ago, 57% of prisoners were being
held for violent offenses; today violent criminals are in a minority in
jails. A disproportionate share of the prison growth has been nonviolent
inmates convicted of drug offenses.

Few Americans can be proud of the waste of human and economic potential
represented by soaring prison populations, but there's widespread
agreement, and considerable evidence, that jailing more violent and repeat
criminals has contributed to the sharp drop in crime against both persons
and property.

But as John J. Dilulio Jr., a leading conservative criminologist, pointed
out recently, the same evidence suggests that we've now reached the point
where jailing more offenders, particularly nonviolent ones, draws dollars
away from more promising and efficient crime-control spending: drug
treatment, policing, improved probation and parole and programs aimed at
preventing juvenile crime.

The hard part of changing our criminal justice policy is not knowing what
to do. As Dilulio and others point out, research has shown the potential of
programs that can change destructive behavior at less cost and with less
harm to families and communities.

The tough task will be changing our political dialogue. The language of
politics on crime is still stuck in the early 1980s, when a politician was
"tough" for pushing prisons and "soft on crime" for opposing longer
sentences for more and more crimes.

Having learned to deploy that language in ways that appealed to voters,
politicians face the risky challenge of backing away from the words when
they no longer fit the policy facts. As hard as that will be, it's an
essential job for the state's and nation's leaders if we are to stop
throwing money in the wrong place. 
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