Pubdate: Thu, 11 Apr 2002
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2002 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Eric Lichtblau, Times Staff Writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/prison.htm (Incarceration)

U.S. PRISON RANKS SURGE, STATES' SLOW

Crime: the Gap is Likely to Widen As Federal Officials Broaden Their Reach. 
California and Others Opt For Treatment Rather Than Jail For Drug Offenders.

WASHINGTON -- With convictions for drugs, guns and immigration offenses on 
the rise, the size of the federal inmate population is swelling in record 
numbers, as California and many other states are locking up fewer people, 
according to a new federal study released Wednesday.

The split between the federal and state systems is likely to grow even 
wider in years ahead because of changing strategies in law enforcement: 
Federal officials are broadening their reach to lock up criminals once 
outside their domain, but states such as California are opting to send many 
drug offenders to treatment programs rather than prison.

The result is that the federal prison population added an average of more 
than 200 prisoners a week in the first half of 2001--the biggest increase 
since statisticians began tracking data in 1977--while state prison 
populations increased at their slowest rate in 28 years. In California, the 
state prison population even decreased slightly after a decade-long boom in 
the 1990s. "The federal system continues to grow, and grow quickly, but the 
state systems in the aggregate are slowing down--and slowing down rapidly," 
Allen J. Beck, co-author of the Justice Department study, said in an interview.

L.A. County Keeps Title of Biggest Local System

Los Angeles County held on to its unenviable title as the biggest local 
jail system in the country, with an average daily population of more than 
19,300 inmates, the study showed. That far eclipsed New York City, with an 
average of 14,490 inmates, and Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago, 
with 10,212.

Nationwide, 1 in every 145 U.S. residents--1.97 million--was locked up in 
local, state or federal prisons on the day in mid-2001 that the figures 
were tracked by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Other highlights from the report:

* Privately run prisons, an increasingly popular alternative for 
overburdened governments in recent years, saw inmate populations increase 
nearly 5% nationwide, to about 95,000 inmates.

* The prison populations for the largest state systems decreased for the 
one-year period ending June 30, 2001. Texas was down 3,661 inmates, 
California down 525 and New York down 2,553. For California, the 0.3% 
decrease brought the number of prisoners down to 163,965 inmates, with 468 
people per 100,000 serving sentences of more than one year.

* Men continued to be locked up in prisons and local jails at far higher 
rates than women, with 1,318 male inmates per 100,000 men in the population 
at large. There were 113 female inmates per 100,000 women.

* Racial and ethnic differences persisted. For men in their 20s and early 
30s, an estimated 12% of blacks, 4% of Latinos and 1.8% of whites were in 
prison or jail. Incarceration rates for female inmates revealed similar 
disparities, the study found.

The most dramatic changes in the data occurred in the federal system, where 
the number of prisoners grew to nearly 153,000, a 7.2% increase over the 
previous year. The increase of about 7,400 prisoners over six months 
earlier represented the single biggest jump in the federal system since the 
Justice Department began tracking such data 25 years ago, Beck said.

Driving the trend, he said, are rapid increases in the last five years in 
the number of people locked up for drug-related crimes--a group that makes 
up about 60% of the federal prison population--along with inmates convicted 
on weapon offenses and immigration violations. The numbers do not include 
the more than 1,000 people taken into custody on immigration offenses in 
the post-Sept. 11 crackdown on terrorism.

The federal government has moved aggressively in the last several years to 
implement pilot programs for prosecuting felons caught with guns, imposing 
stiff prison terms in cases that previously might have generated lesser 
sentences if tried in state courts.

Congress has also continued to add new crimes to the federal books, a trend 
that even Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has spoken out against as a 
threat to the criminal justice system.

The surge in federal prisoners "is another manifestation of the growing 
presence of the federal government in crime control," said Carnegie Mellon 
University criminologist Alfred Blumstein.

"It's of significant concern, because crime control has always been a state 
and local function, and over the last decade or so it's been moving to the 
federal system as they've passed a whole variety of new laws," Blumstein 
said in an interview.

Experts Differ on Causes of States' Trend

In state prison systems, meanwhile, the reversal of many years of rising 
prison populations reflects the declining crime rates of the 1990s, most 
analysts agree. But experts differ over what other factors may be causing 
the trend.

Jason Ziedenberg, associate director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal 
Justice, a Washington group that supports alternatives to incarceration, 
pointed to liberalized drug laws. He noted that judges, lawmakers and 
voters in states around the country are beginning to send more drug 
offenders to treatment centers instead of prison. Measures such as 
Proposition 36, implemented by California voters last year, are likely to 
intensify the trend, he and other legal analysts said.

"We know that some people are now being diverted to treatment who weren't 
being diverted before. Time will tell how many people that ultimately 
affects," he said.

However, Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal 
Foundation, a victims' rights group in Sacramento, said he believes that 
the stabilization of state prison numbers has been driven not by new 
lenient sentencing policies, but by the wave of tougher measures 
implemented years earlier, such as California's three-strikes law.

Scheidegger said it is too early to judge the effect of drug treatment 
sentencing measures. What is clear, he maintained, is that get-tough 
measures are deterring crime.

When California first passed its three-strikes law in 1994, analysts "made 
the assumption that if you toughen sentencing, you'll have these huge 
prison populations. That hasn't happened," he said. "The fact of the matter 
is, when crooks fear that additional crimes will have severe consequences, 
they curtail their illegal behavior."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom