SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 2A; Politics

LENGTH: 954 words

HEADLINE: 1.8M reasons for criminal-justice reform

BYLINE: Walter Shapiro

DATELINE: NEW YORK

BODY:
NEW YORK -- This is a column about a number: 1.8 million. When
I saw that figure in a front-page headline in Monday's USA TODAY,
this simple statistic reverberated through my brain. If I had
my druthers, that figure would become as familiar as the digits
that graced Michael Jordan's uniform or Mark McGwire's home-run
total.


That's 1.8 million people, roughly the population of Houston.
But that figure refers to the number of Americans who wake up
every morning behind bars in federal and state prisons and local
jails. At a time when everything seems right with America, there
is something chillingly wrong with our criminal justice system
when our rate of incarceration rivals that of Russia.


As a New Yorker, I see the tangible benefits of the dramatic reduction
in the crime rate. When I first moved to the Upper West Side of
Manhattan in the mid-1980s, stocking-capped entrepreneurs were
dealing crack on the block behind my apartment building. Many
a morning I set out carrying an armload of dirty shirts and was
greeted by the whispered invitation, "Crack?" I would reply,
"No, Chinese laundry," and then move on.


The crack dealers have long disappeared from my neighborhood,
and our relationship, while frequent, was never personal enough
for me to spend much time wondering what had become of them. Most,
I assume, migrated upstate to some of the 18 prisons that New
York has built since the early 1980s near the Canadian border.


As a living memorial to former governor Nelson Rockefeller, New
York boasts the nation's most inflexible drug laws. It mandates
a minimum 15-year sentence for cocaine or heroin possession.


New York, like most states, now faces the budgetary drain of paying
for this burgeoning prison population. A recent study by the Justice
Policy Institute and the Correctional Association of New York
found that the state had increased spending for its inmates by
$ 761 million in the 1990s, while cutting higher-education funding
by $ 615 million. The once liberal Empire State now spends more
on its prisons ($ 1.6 billion) than on public colleges and universities
($ 1.3 billion).


Gov. George Pataki, who is virtually alone in envisioning himself
on the GOP national ticket in 2000, has hinted in the past that
he might revamp the state's draconian drug laws. But Pataki squandered
the historic opportunity to become the first Republican governor
to move beyond primitive lock-them-up policies by recently proposing
small-bore changes in the Rockefeller laws.


Ever since Richard Nixon made "law and order" the centerpiece
of the 1970 congressional campaign, crime has been the most consistently
reliable hot-button GOP issue. Republicans joined by scads of
skittish Democrats on the state and federal levels have approved
get-tough nostrums with colorful monikers such as "three strikes
and you're out" and "truth in sentencing." The result is an
ironclad legal system in which judges are as superfluous as William
Rehnquist was during the impeachment trial, stripped of discretion
in sentencing even first-time nonviolent offenders.


But now with crime beginning to recede as a political issue, two
bedrock conservative principles are on a collision course. Sooner
or later, governors like Pataki will be forced to choose between
punitive sentencing and the budgetary restraint that makes tax
cuts possible. Only the current flush economy has allowed governors
to maintain the illusion that they can afford both prison bars
and butter.


Why am I treating the question of what to do about the nation's
1.8 million prisoners -- and the thousands who will soon join
them in lockup unless current laws are modified -- as an internal
GOP issue? With the exception of California's, every major state
house is occupied by a Republican governor. Moreover, after three
decades of being portrayed as "soft on crime," Democrats would
sooner discuss Bill Clinton's sex life than prison reform.


No major Republican politician has publicly admitted to second
thoughts on the merits of throw-away-the-key policies. But a few
conservative intellectuals have begun to advance a revisionist
view of the punishing orthodoxies of criminal justice.


John DiIulio, a Princeton University professor of public policy,
argued last week in an op-ed article in The Wall Street
Journal that "it's time for policy makers to change focus,
aiming for zero prison growth." Not only did DiIulio reiterate
his opposition to the Rockefeller drug laws, but he also cited
a forthcoming study that found that one quarter of new prisoners
in the New York state system have been convicted of low-level,
nonviolent drug offenses.


The federal government deserves its share of the blame for the
prison crisis. Christopher Swope points out in the upcoming issue
of Governing magazine that in low-income states such as
Mississippi, "prison spending is growing faster than spending
on education."


The reason: At the behest of Washington, Mississippi adopted a
truth-in-sentencing law requiring felons to serve 85% of their
terms. States such as Mississippi that strictly limit parole,
qualify for a dollop of extra federal funding for prison construction.
But that carrot is scant consolation for Mississippi, which has
been forced to build three new prisons to hold its rapidly increasing
inmate population.


So remember that number: 1.8 million. Unless our timorous political
leaders abandon their self-defeating, prisons-first philosophy,
you'll be feeling the bite from 1.8 million inmates every April
15.


Walter Shapiro's column appears Wednesdays and Fridays. Past columns
on USATODAY.com


LOAD-DATE: March 17, 1999