Sentencing policies endanger public safety.

• Author: Kopel, David B.

Mandatory sentences enacted in the 1980s have led to early release of violent criminals to make room in prison for nonviolent, often first-time, drug offenders.

The amount of money that taxpayers spend on prisons never has been greater, and the percentage of the population incarcerated has tripled during the last 15 years, as has national prison capacity. Yet, the expected punishment of violent criminals has declined, and crime flourishes at intolerably high levels. The seeming paradox of more prisons and less punishment for violent criminals, which means less public safety, is explained by the war on drugs, which gravely has undermined the ability of penal institutions to protect the public. As prisons are filled beyond capacity with nonviolent "drug criminals"--many of them first offenders--violent repeat offenders are pushed out the prison doors early, or never imprisoned in the first place.

As prison crowding worsens, many public officials are embracing alternatives to incarceration, such as electronic home monitoring, boot camps, and intensive supervised probation. Although those alternatives have their place, their benefits frequently have been overstated.

The most effective reform would be to return prisons to their primary mission of incapacitating violent criminals. Revision or repeal of mandatory minimum sentences for consensual offenses, tighter parole standards, and tougher laws aimed at repeat violent offenders can help the state and Federal criminal justice systems get back to their basic duty--protecting innocent people.

Since the 1980s, the U.S. has been engaged in the largest imprisonment program ever attempted by a democratic society. The number of persons incarcerated has soared to levels unknown in American history. In addition to the nearly 1,000,000 individuals in state and Federal prisons and the more than 400,000 in city and county jails, there are over 2,000,000 persons on probation and more than 500,000 on parole. The Federal prison population stood at about 24,000 in 1980, soared to over 90,000 by 1993, and is expected to reach 130,000 by the turn of the century.

The drastic growth of the combined state and Federal prison population mainly is the result not of demographics, but of policy changes. Population growth accounted for almost eight percent of the increase in prison inmates; increased crime, about 19%; and more arrests, slightly more than five percent. The great bulk of the surge--around 61%--was the result of decisions to send to prison offenders who otherwise would have been given an alternative sentence. An additional seven percent resulted from an increase in time served.

There are no signs of the surge's abating. State prison populations are up almost 60% in the 1990s. At the rate prisoners are being added to the state and Federal systems, the U.S. needs more than 1,100 new prison beds each week.

The average American prison system now operates at about 15% over capacity. Forty states, two territories, and the District of Columbia are under court orders as a result of prison overcrowding. The Federal prison system is almost 40% over capacity.

Prison violence also has increased. Inmate assaults on guards have risen tenfold in the 1990s. Overcrowding also contributes to attacks on other prisoners, as two persons with histories of violent assault often are placed in a cell designed for one.

The number of state and Federal prisoners per 100,000 population tripled in the last two decades, and the U.S. now leads the world in the percentage of its population it keeps behind bars, with an incarceration rate of around 350 adults per 100,000 population. In contrast, the Australian imprisonment rate is about 90.

Paralleling the explosion of the numbers in prisons has been a surge in the jail population. (Prisons are state or Federal facilities that hold convicted criminals. Jails are city and county facilities that hold persons sentenced to shorter terms, typically under a year. Persons arrested and not released on bail pending trial also are held in jail. Thus, at any given time, about half of a jail's population will be people who have not been convicted of a crime.) The number of jail inmates per capita in the U.S. has more than doubled since 1978 and now exceeds the total incarceration rate (jail plus prison) of most other democracies.

Total operating costs of state and Federal prisons are approximately $13,000,000,000 a year. Adding in prison construction and the costs of city and county jails, the national incarceration budget is about $25,000,000,000.

California spends more than $2,000,000,000 annually operating its prison system. Pennsylvania saw its corrections budget soar from $126,000,000 to $453,000,000 in 10 years. In the Federal system, spending per prisoner per year is more than $20,000. In New York City, the figure is $58,000.

Expensive as prisons can be, the incarceration of violent criminals is a tremendous bargain. At large, they can cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage each year. When harder to measure costs, such as the pain and suffering of victims, are considered along with the more quantifiable expenses (medical care of...