Our Bulging Prisons

By Richard Lacayo

In Georgia, one of 42 states where prisons are under court order to reduce overcrowding, correctional officials resort to a kind of risky triage, releasing less dangerous inmates to make room for muggers, rapists and other violent criminals. Sometimes their judgment goes awry. Ronnie Fisher was sprung from Fulton County Jail last month while awaiting trial on car-theft and drug charges. Barely an hour after he was set free, police caught him apparently trying to rob a man on an Atlanta street. Georgia still plans to release 3,000 inmates by July 1.

There are no screaming sirens, no darting searchlights, but a huge prison break is going on all across the country. After a decade of tough, mandatory sentences and soaring drug arrests, U.S. prisons are overstuffed with inmates. Nearly 628,000 convicted criminals, more than the population of Milwaukee, are bursting the seams of federal and state lockups. An additional 150,000 languish in local jails, sometimes for months, awaiting trial. Some prisons are so crowded that in many states authorities have no choice but to let inmates loose just to accommodate the stream of new arrivals.

In Los Angeles County, where some 22,000 prisoners are shoehorned into facilities built for 13,000, more than 100,000 prisoners have been freed in the past year before completing their terms. In Oregon, whose prisons are bulging with 5,000 convicts jammed into cells designed for 3,000, one inmate is released for each new one taken in. At Chicago's Cook County jail, many prisoners bed down on floors and in hallways. Says William Currie, spokesman for the Cook County sheriff's department: "The whole criminal-justice system is like sausage in a sausage machine. Somehow everything's gotten stuck."

The sad paradox is that while prisons are filled beyond their capacity, there has been little discernible reduction in crime. Though rates of serious offenses dipped for a time during the 1980s, they have been climbing again, fueled by an influx of drugs. Prison gates have become more like revolving doors: nearly two-thirds of all convicts are rearrested within three years of their release.

It was against this dismaying backdrop that George Bush last week outlined a $1.2 billion federal anticrime package he promised would help put a dent in the rampant crime rate. Speaking in a driving rainstorm in Washington to an audience of uniformed police and the families of slain officers, he ticked off a series of tough-sounding proposals:

-- Building federal prison facilities over the next four years that will house 24,000 additional inmates at a cost of at least $1 billion.

-- Hiring 1,600 federal prosecutors.

-- Adding 825 new agents to the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; and the U.S. Marshals Service.

-- Seeking the death penalty for anyone convicted of such federal crimes as murder for hire and killing a foreign-government official.

-- Doubling to ten years the maximum sentence for those convicted of using a semiautomatic firearm in the commission of a kidnaping or felony drug deal.

Though the President vowed that his proposals would help "take back the streets by taking criminals off the streets," they stand as much chance of curbing crime as a schoolmarm pleading with Jesse James to just say no to bank robbery. For starters, Bush backed away from converting a temporary ban on the importation of assault-style rifles into a prohibition on the domestic manufacture of such weapons. Three-quarters of these lethal firearms are made in the U.S. Instead, Bush would outlaw only the manufacture of magazines that hold 15 or more rounds. Gun-control advocates and many police organizations argue that Bush's program falls far short of what is needed to keep lethal semiautomatics out of the hands of trigger-happy dope dealers and other criminals.

More important, the President's proposals would have virtually no impact on the kinds of crimes that Americans most fear: assault, robbery and rape, as ! well as virtually all murders and most drug offenses. Fighting those crimes is almost exclusively a state and local responsibility. A mere 118 of the 47,700 inmates held in federal penitentiaries have been convicted of murder. More than 83% of federal prisoners are serving time for such offenses as counterfeiting, embezzlement, tax evasion and nonviolent drug offenses.

Administration officials contend that an expansion of federal prisons, as well as recent changes in the law, will ease the burden on hard-pressed state and local officials by making it easier to charge drug offenders under federal statutes. Federal prosecutors are instructed to avoid offering plea bargains in such cases, making a prison term harder to dodge. Says White House aide Roger Porter, who helped design the package: "The people who are committing these crimes are not dumb. They know what the chances are of getting caught and getting sent to prison, and as we increase those odds, we can change their behavior."

But the cavernous gap between the number of crimes committed and the space available to lock up criminals makes it almost impossible to budge those odds. According to Justice Department estimates, by the time the cells Bush wants to build are ready, the federal convict population will have grown to 84,000, which is 17,000 more than the expanded system is designed to accommodate. Study after study has shown that only a fraction of all reported crimes result in arrest, and only a fraction of those people arrested are sent to prison. During the past three decades, there have never been more than six imprisonments for every 100 reported crimes. Even doubling the current prison population, which would cost more than $43 billion, would leave the chance of a prospective criminal's facing imprisonment at no more than 10%.

As judges have shaved sentences to help make room for more prisoners, the length of the average prison term has declined from 18 months to one year. Criminals, quickly recycled back to the streets, bring the deadly code of prison conduct with them. "Prison works to reduce crime only if you don't let the inmates out -- ever," says Jerry Miller, a former corrections official who directs the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives in Arlington, Va.

Many law-enforcement experts point to the drug war as an example of the hopelessness of curing crime by locking up an ever larger number of criminals. In September, New York City unleashed a tactical narcotics team to make | undercover drug buys, allowing police to slap dealers with felony charges for selling narcotics. The result: a 30% upswing in drug arrests. And the ripple effect: severe overcrowding at the city's squalid holding pen on Rikers Island. Prisoners often sleep on the floor in receiving areas where 90 men may share a single toilet.

Now the city is under court order to remedy the situation, but New York prison authorities are forbidden by law to resort to a simple release of surplus prisoners to alleviate overcrowding. Instead, the city is scrambling to speed up inmate processing, so that accused criminals awaiting trial can be released on bail, while it is also spilling inmates into the overcrowded state system.

At a time when money is desperately needed for crumbling roads and declining schools, the fastest-growing sector of state spending is prison construction. Legislatures across the country are considering outlays of $10 billion over the next six years. In 1983 Texas spent $288 million on prison construction and operation. By last year the figure was $500 million. Yet the system is still so crowded that Texas has already closed its prison doors to new inmates six times this year. "Corrections used to be a trivial amount of a state's budget," says Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a San Francisco-based advocacy group. "Now states are facing severe choices between more prisons or schools and public services."

Illinois is one of several states where "prison-impact statements" are attached to any proposed legislation that might lead to more arrests or longer sentences. One such report was connected to a recent bill that would have added ten years to the sentence for any crime committed with a firearm. It estimated that if the law were passed, so many new convicts would be sentenced to longer terms that it would cost $63.5 million to construct and operate the required prison facilities. A committee of the legislature tabled the bill.

Concerns about the bottom line have been getting through to legislators, who know that crime-weary voters are also taxpayers. "I have a real aversion to the idea that justice should depend on some monetary figures," says Illinois legislator Thomas J. Homer, a former prosecutor. "But there is a correlation between getting tough on crime and the revenue of the state."

Financial reality is forcing officials to consider alternatives to imprisonment for most nonviolent offenders. Twenty-two states are experimenting with electronic surveillance, in which offenders stay at home wearing a high-tech ankle bracelet that emits a signal telling probation officers where their charges are. A number of states have adopted some form of intensive-supervision probation. In that system, an offender lives at home but must check in with probation officers a number of times each day while also holding a job, often in community service. This approach requires the hiring of more probation officers, but it nevertheless winds up costing only a fraction of the $14,000-to-$30,000 annual expense of keeping an inmate in a cell.

Following the example of a pioneering Minnesota program, the state of Washington has been sending most of its nonviolent offenders to work programs and "community supervision" projects overseen by probation officers who handle no more than 100 offenders each. (An officer in New York City typically contends with 300 or more.) The effect has been to reduce Washington's prison population about 18%. Now the state is earning $26 million a year by renting out its empty cells to prisoners from other jurisdictions. The good news is that while Washington's crime rate has not declined, it also has not noticeably risen. In the frustrating world of crime fighting, holding the line counts as a victory.

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CREDIT: [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: FBI Uniform Crime Report}]CAPTION: Crime Rate

With reporting by Jonathan Beaty and Dan Cray/Los Angeles and Dan Goodgame/Washington