Growing prison population is growing
problem for cash-strapped states
By Curt
Anderson
ASSOCIATED PRESS
10:32 a.m.,
July 27, 2003
WASHINGTON – America's prison population grew again in
2002 despite a
declining crime rate, costing the federal government and
states an
estimated $40 billion a year at a time of rampant budget
shortfalls.
The inmate population in 2002 of more than 2.1 million
represented a 2.6
percent increase over 2001, according to a report released
Sunday by the
Bureau of Justice Statistics. Preliminary FBI statistics
showed a 0.2
percent drop in overall crime during the same
span.
Experts say mandatory sentences, especially for
nonviolent drug
offenders, are a major reason inmate populations have risen
for 30
years. About one of every 143 U.S. residents was in the
federal, state
or local custody at year's end.
"The nation needs to
break the chains of our addiction to prison, and
find less costly and more
effective policies like treatment," said Will
Harrell, executive director of
the Texas American Civil Liberties Union.
"We need to break the
cycle."
Others say tough sentencing laws, such as the "three strikes"
laws that
can put repeat offenders behind bars for life, are a chief reason
for
the drop in crime. The Justice Department, for example, this year
ordered Bureau of Prisons officials to stop sending so many white-collar
and nonviolent criminals to halfway houses.
"The prospect of prison,
more than any other sanction, is feared by
white-collar criminals and has a
powerful deterrent effect," Deputy
Attorney General Larry Thompson said in a
memo announcing the change.
Yet the cost of housing, feeding and caring
for a prison inmate is
roughly $20,000 per year, or about $40 billion
nationwide using 2002
figures, according to The Sentencing Project, a
nonprofit organization
that promotes alternatives to prison. Construction
costs are about
$100,000 per cell.
Even as these costs keeping
climbing, the federal government is tackling
a giant budget deficit and 31
states this year are cutting spending –
most often across all programs – to
deal with shortfalls, according to
the National Conference of State
Legislatures.
"The prison population and budget figures, taken together,
should be
setting off alarm bells in state capitols," said Jason Zeidenberg,
director of policy and research for the Justice Policy Institute, a
nonprofit organization focused on ending reliance on
incarceration.
Drug offenders now make up more than half of all federal
prisoners. The
federal penal system, which has tough sentencing policies for
drug
offenses, is now the nation's largest at more than 151,600 – an
increase
of 4.2 percent compared with 2001.
Over the same period,
state prison and jail populations grew just 2.4
percent. Prison alternative
advocates credit moves in some states to
divert drug offenders to treatment
programs and other innovations for
that lower growth rate.
Texas, for
example, recently passed a drug treatment alternative law and
saw its prison
population remain virtually unchanged from 2001 to 2002.
Ohio, which revised
its sentencing and parole guidelines in the late
1990s, had its prison and
jail population rise just 0.8 percent last
year compared with 1.9 percent
for the Midwest as a whole.
"The way to reduce prison spending is to
reduce the number of people in
prison and the number of prisons, like some
states across the country
have done," said Rose Braz, director of Critical
Resistance, a
California-based group opposed to prison expansion.
At
the same time, the Justice Department report found that 17 states
reported
increases of at least 5 percent year-to-year in their prison
populations,
with Maine's increasing by 11.5 percent and Rhode Island's
rising 8.6
percent. The federal prisons and almost all state corrections
systems are
over their capacities, with 71,000 offenders serving their
state or federal
sentences in local jails.
Other key points in the report:
–As of
last Dec. 31, there were 97,491 women in state or federal
prisons, or about
6.8 percent of all inmates and one in every 1,656
women. There were over 1.3
million male inmates, or about one in 110 men.
–About 10 percent of all
black men between 25 and 29 were incarcerated
last year, compared with 1.2
percent of white men and 2.4 percent of
Hispanic men. Overall, the 586,700
black men in prison outnumbered both
the 436,800 white males and 235,000
Hispanic males. Black males account
for about 45 percent of all inmates
serving a sentence longer than a year.
–Privately operated prisons held
93,771 inmates, about 5.8 percent of
state prisoners and 12.4 percent of
those in federal jurisdictions.
–At year's end 2002, the federal
government held 8,748 people at
immigration detention facilities, 2,377 at
military jails and 16,206 in
U.S. territorial
prisons.