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Editorial The overall national cost of keeping such a large number of people behind bars is about $40 billion a year. The federal system can run on borrowing, at least for a while, but most states can't do that and most are teetering on bankruptcy. In some states, the financial crisis is already forcing officials into alternatives to the "lock 'em up" mentality of the '80s and '90s. Mandatory sentencing laws have been eased in Michigan and Ohio. Even Texas has joined such states as California and Kansas in mandating treatment instead of prison for nonviolent drug offenses. Nonviolent drug crimes now account for about 20 percent of state prisoners and over half of federal imprisonments. If the treatment and education strategies of a few states were adopted nationwide, along with decriminalization of marijuana, prison populations would drop significantly. Sensible and humane rehabilitation of nondangerous convicts may finally be forced on the state legislatures -- by economic necessity. Local economics has been a drag, however, on drug-law reform in some states. The struggle over revising the infamous Rockefeller drug laws in New York, which can result in long prison terms for penny-ante pot dealers, has been complicated by anti-reform upstate legislators whose local economies are almost entirely dependent on stuffing more and more people into area prison cells. Drug dealers and abusers become little more than fodder for the job market in down-at-the-heals rural towns. The Bush administration's lust for locking people up -- the federal increase in prisoners from 2001 to 2002 was 4.2 percent, compared to 2.4 for the states -- is driven less by economics than by ideology. The Justice Department recently ordered the Bureau of Prisons to stop putting so many nonviolent and white-collar convicts in halfway houses, which Justice officials contend lack deterrent effect. It's a dubious achievement for a free and democratic society, this vast domestic gulag of the very dangerous, the minimally dangerous, the addicted and the hapless. Something over half of those behind bars probably could be helped and rehabilitated outside of prison for a fraction of the cost. It's encouraging that some states are starting to figure this out Copyright: Berkshire Eagle
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