La Incarceation Comments

Based on the U.S. Justice Department's most recent data, 461 of every 100,000 Americans are now serving a prison sentence of at least one year. California, though home to the largest total prison population, is about average per capita, with 483 inmates per 100,000 residents. In Louisiana, the rate is 794, tops in the nation - a symbol of resolve for some, a badge of shame for others. "I think there's a lot of people who should be in the penitentiary and who don't always go," said Harry Connick, Sr., the former New Orleans district attorney. "But I also think there's some who do go who perhaps shouldn't be there.

Louisiana obviously has an ineffective policy when it comes to incarceration because, if all of this incarceration was making our streets safer, then it might make sense. But, the data indicates that there is no direct connection between the increase in the incarceration rates and decreased crime. In Louisiana, as well as the rest of the nation, the crime rate has been steadily decreasing since the mid-1990's, while the incarceration rate has increased. A question must be asked of our elected officials, if this expensive policy of locking up more and more people is not making us safer, why don't we abandon it and find a more effective one.

During the period from 1991 to 1998, violent crime declined by 18 percent in Louisiana. According to "Diminishing Returns: Crime and Incarceration in the 1990s," a report by the Washington, D.C.-based group The Sentencing Project, our incarceration rate increased by 59 percent during that same seven-year period. To make matters even worse, we are spending an increasing amount of our state budget on this failing policy. Between 1985 and 2001, spending on corrections in Louisiana jumped 104 percent. On the national stage United States appears deeply ambivalent about what it has sown. While a plummeting crime rate stands as vindication for many, a growing number of critics - not just liberals but also fiscal conservatives and anti-government independents - are beginning to question the costs, both economic and social, of keeping so many people locked up.

A major problem is that drug offenders account for the greatest percentage of new inmates, yet hardly anyone believes the drug war is closer to being won. Sentences everywhere have become longer and sterner, but each year 500,000 ex-convicts still return to society, often less equipped to function than before. Racial disparities are so extreme - blacks are nearly seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites - that many African Americans consider the prison system nothing short of a modern-day slave plantation.

As crime rates continue to drop, even the more conservative, law and order individuals have begun to wonder if the $40 billion that taxpayers pony up annually for incarceration could not be better spent. "There are some who think we ought to keep everybody in jail and throw away the key "I know, because I was one of them," said John Hainkel, president of the Louisiana state Senate. But that was before the New Orleans Republican took over as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Now, four years later, he has come to the conclusion that the state's swelling correctional budget is undermining another of his priorities - improving Louisiana's dismal investment in public schools. "It's no great mystery," said Hainkel, a believer in education's crime-fighting virtues. "The State of Minnesota has the highest rate of college graduates and the lowest rate of individuals in prison."

Not wanting to appear "soft" on crime, politicians have spent decades preaching punishment over prevention. Some of the rhetoric has been opportunistic. But some also has been driven by a genuine sense of despair - that our culture grants too much discretion and demands