Life behind bars.

• Position: Rising prison population - Editorial

The public schools can go begging. So can the health-care system and providers of social services. But hard-pressed state governments everywhere keep managing to find the money to build prisons. Construction firms that used to build hospitals and college dorms and government office buildings--especially in the South--can't find work like that anymore. Instead, they build prisons. As former Governor Bob Martinez, a Florida Republican, said on the campaign trail in his 1990 re-election bid--a losing one--"We have to build prisons. . . . It's not just putting away prisoners. It creates employment."

At a recent Tampa gathering of criminal-justice professionals, Todd Clear of Rutgers University said, "Since 1971, we have embarked on the largest social experiment in punishment in the history of the world." The rate of imprisonment has more than quadrupled in that time, he continued, but no drop in the crime rate has accompanied it.

Florida has the highest incarceration rate--and one of the highest crime rates. It nearly doubled its prison population in the second half of the 1980s under Martinez's leadership. Its current capacity is more than 50,000, and prison officials want more than 100,000 beds by 1998. Governor Lawton Chiles, who campaigned against Martinez saying that he would promote alternatives to incarceration, skipped the Tampa meeting because he is holding an emergency legislative session to raise taxes to construct 21,000 new prison cells. The figures for other states, if not so extreme, are part of the same trend. The number of people locked up in state and Federal prisons has climbed from about 200,000 in 1970 to more than 800,000 today.

This is insane, and the rest of the world knows it. When a U.N. Congress on crime prevention and treatment of offenders passed a resolution a few years ago, recommending that member states reduce the size of their prison populations and intensify the search for noncustodial sanctions, the United States voted "No" and went blithely on its way, implementing new Federal sentencing guidelines that have had the opposite effect.

This is especially disgraceful in the day-in-day-out practice of imprisonment in this country. Let's take just one issue of Prison Legal News, a newsletter edited by inmates at Washington State Penitentiary to report the outcomes of various legislative and court actions that affect the conditions of confinement. Among the thirty-odd cases discussed in the current issue are these:

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