
DATE: Thursday, October 2, 1997             TAG: 9710020469

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A4   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Focus 

SOURCE: BY FOX BUTTERFIELD, NEW YORK TIMES 

                                            LENGTH:  149 lines

FOCUS: FULL PRISONS CRIME KEEPS ON FALLING ACROSS AMERICA, BUT PRISONS KEEP ON FILLING. THIS, CRIMINOLOGISTS PREDICT, MEANS AN ENORMOUS BURDEN ON STATES IN THE FUTURE.

It has become a comforting story: for five straight years, crime has been falling, led by a drop in murder.

So why is the number of inmates in prisons and jails around the nation still going up? Last year, it reached almost 1.7 million, up about 7 percent a year since 1990.

The question is not merely a trick quiz, because the costs of running America's constantly expanding prison system - now more than $30 billion a year - have begun to impose an enormous burden on state governments.

Already, California and Florida spend more to incarcerate people than to educate their college-age populations. In California, where the number of prisoners has grown from 19,000 two decades ago to 150,000 today, the state now faces a crisis because it is caught between voters' refusal to approve more money for prison construction and an expected influx of inmates over the next few years as more and more tough sentencing laws take effect.

It's estimated that Virginia currently houses about 25,200 prison inmates, compared with 17,000 four years ago.

The California Department of Corrections has projected that it will run out of space in barely more than two years. The North Carolina legislature recently adopted sentencing guidelines for judges based on a computer model showing how much bed space is available in the state's prisons, much like a hotel reservation system.

Some poor towns, from Tupper Lake, N.Y., in the Adirondacks to Edgefield, S.C., are cashing in on the prison boom, having successfully competed to be the sites of new prisons, with all the jobs they bring, just as states have dueled with each other for new German or Japanese automobile factories. Since 1990 alone, the number of prison and jail guards nationwide has increased by about 30 percent, to more than 600,000.

Of course, the huge increase in the number of inmates has helped lower the crime rate by incapacitating more criminals behind bars, though there is no generally accepted way to measure the impact; crime rose sharply in the mid- and late 1980s, for example, even as the rate of imprisonment rose much faster.

But a growing number of criminologists say they are troubled by evidence that the spiraling growth of prisons also is causing unintended consequences that may contribute to increased crime while it undermines families and inner-city neighborhoods.

Foremost among these developments, the experts say, is that the prison boom has created its own growth dynamic. The larger the number of prisoners, the bigger the number of people who will someday be released, and then, either because of their own criminal propensities or their experience behind bars, will be likely to commit new crimes and to be rearrested. A growing number of these former inmates are being reincarcerated for parole or probation violations, often a result of failing a urine test for drugs.

The number of criminals being sent to prison for the second or more time has increased steadily, rising to 35 percent of the total number of admissions in 1995 from 18 percent in 1980, said Allen J. Beck, chief of corrections statistics at the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the statistical branch of the Justice Department.

As the number of prisoners continues to grow, some neighborhoods and cities feel dramatic effects. A study of Washington, D.C., issued in August found that half the black men there between the ages of 18 and 35 are under the control of the criminal justice system on any given day, either in prison or jail, on probation or parole.

``This suggests to me that we are weakening the role of the criminal justice system,'' said Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University. That is because, he said, the criminal justice system was meant to deter crime by stigmatizing people with the threat of imprisonment. ``But we have now locked up so many people that we have lost the stigmatizing effect.''

At the same time, Blumstein said, by imprisoning such a large number of people, especially young black males, ``we have disrupted families and built up strong connections between criminal groups in prison and on the street.''

``All this contributes to high rates of crime in inner-city communities,'' Blumstein said.

There are several reasons why the prison population is continuing to surge even as crime rates around the nation have fallen, but at their heart is an often misunderstood truth, said Franklin Zimring, director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute at the University of California at Berkeley.

``The change in the number of inmates tells us more about our feelings about crime and criminals'' and about changes in sentencing laws than it does about crime rates, Zimring said.

Sometimes the disparities in rates of imprisonment have no more apparent explanation. North Dakota and South Dakota, for instance, are similar in their social, economic and racial makeup and have similar crime rates. But while North Dakota has a prison incarceration rate of only 90 per 100,000 people, South Dakota imprisons 279 per 100,000.

The prison population also continues to grow because sentences have increased for many crimes and parole boards also have become much more sensitive to the public's demand for harsher treatment of criminals. As a result, release rates of those prisoners eligible for parole have declined to 31.2 percent in 1995 from 37 percent in 1990, and inmates therefore are spending more of their sentences behind bars, Beck said.

Another key factor is that drug arrests are not counted in the FBI's annual crime report. It includes crimes from murder to burglary, but not drug offenses, because they are not considered to have victims or likely to be reported to the police.

While other crimes have been declining, Beck said, the number of those arrested for drug offenses jumped 27 percent between 1990 and 1995. In fact, Blumstein said, criminals sentenced for drug offenses account for about half the growth in the prison population over the past 15 years.

John DiIulio Jr., a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University, said that in the past he believed most of those sentenced for drug offenses also had committed other crimes, often violent crimes, but new research he has conducted in New York state suggests that at least 25 percent of new inmates now are ``drug-only offenders,'' people who have never been charged with any other type of crime.

``I think what we are seeing is an increase in drug-only offenders, and this is unfortunate,'' DiIulio said.

California, with the largest number of prisoners, is facing the biggest challenge. In the past 20 years, California has built 21 new prisons but added only one university to what was once hailed as the world's best public university system.

And while the share of the state budget going to the university system has fallen to 8 percent from 12.5 percent in 1990, the proportion for corrections has risen to 9.4 percent, up 4.5 percent, an amount that educators point out is identical to the loss in their funds. In the meantime, California's universities have had to lay off 10,000 employees, many of them professors, while in the same period the number of state prison guards has increased by 10,000.

``This is a crisis,'' said Barry Munitz, the chancellor of the California State University system. ``And the reason it is a crisis is that in California we capped government revenue with Prop 13, so every decision about spending is a tradeoff.''

Proposition 13, approved by California voters in a 1978 referendum, called for a $7 billion reduction in state property taxes.

``To me, you pay now for college, or you pay dramatically more later for prisons,'' for people who don't get an education and wind up committing crimes, said Munitz. ``The state sends us $6,000 per student,'' he pointed out, ``but it pays $34,000 a year for a prison inmate.''

Virginia spends $4,485 per college student, but about $16,300 per prison inmate. ILLUSTRATION: CRIME REPORT

GRAPHIC

[For a copy of the graphic, see microfilm for this date.]

File photo

Correctional officers inspect a unit in the new prison north of

Elizabeth City, N.C. About 1.7 million people were in prisons and

jails in the nation last year.

File photo

The new women's correctional facility in Zion Crossroads, Va., cost

$53 million. Virginia spends $4,485 per college student; $16,300 per

inmate.