. . . and Throw Away the Key

By Jill Smolowe

FOR YEARS, TONYA DRAKE STRUGGLED FROM ONE WELfare check to the next, juggling the cost of diapers, food and housing for her four small children, all under age eight. So when Drake, 30, was handed a $100 bill by a man she barely knew in June 1990 and was told she could keep the change if she posted a package for him, she readily agreed. For her effort, Drake received $47.70 and assumed that would be the end of it. But unknown to Drake, the package contained 232 grams of crack cocaine. Although she had neither a prior criminal record nor any history of drug use, the judge was forced under federal mandatory- sentencing guidelines to impose a 10-year prison term. At the sentencing, District Judge Richard Gadbois Jr. lamented, "That's just crazy, but there's nothing I can do about it."

Now, while Drake serves her time in a federal prison in Dublin, California, at a cost to taxpayers of about $25,000 a year, her children must live with her family 320 miles south in Inglewood. "How are you going to teach her a lesson by sending her to prison for 10 years?" demands her attorney, Robert Campbell III. "What danger is she to society?" Penologists have a ready answer: the danger is that while Drake monopolizes a scarce federal-prison bed, she enables a more dangerous criminal to roam free. To them, Drake's case is a textbook example of the myopia that blinds Americans to the long-term consequences of short-term solutions.

The disturbing truth is that although three decades of lock-'em-up fever have made America the world's No. 1 jailer, there still aren't nearly enough cells to go around. The '80s zeal for harsh drug penalties has pushed the U.S. incarceration rate to 455 per 100,000 citizens and has run up an unprecedented annual tab of $21 billion for the construction of prisons and maintenance of inmates. As the nation's inmate population swells toward 1.4 million, prison officials must release career criminals to make room for first-time drug offenders. The growing public outcry against violent crime is prompting politicians to call for even stiffer, tighter and costlier sanctions. But more prisons and longer sentences likely point in only two directions: larger inmate rosters and a higher crime rate. Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, warns, "Building more prisons to address crime is like building more graveyards to address a fatal disease."

Americans' impatience for quick-fix remedies resembles the frustration that drives inner-city youths to seize on illegal get-rich schemes: they want to cut corners, produce high yields and not pay a price. But grim experience indicates that, as with crime, hard time doesn't always pay the anticipated dividends. When money is poured into building another prison cell at the expense of rebuilding a prisoner's self-image, it is often just a prelude to more -- and worse -- crime. "They start as drug offenders, they eventually become property-crime offenders, and then they commit crimes against people," ( says Michael Sheahan, the sheriff of Cook County, Illinois. "They learn this trade as they go through the prison system."

America has already been trying to jail its way out of the crime problem -- with discouraging results. Over the past two decades, the U.S. has hosted the biggest prison-construction boom in history, laying out $37 billion, with $5 billion more in the pipeline. Yet the pool of street criminals keeps rising. In the past decade, the number of federal and state inmates has doubled, to 925,000, while the local jail population has nearly tripled, to 450,000. State by state, the outlook is bleak. Washington, for instance, has witnessed a 79% increase in its jail population and an 86% increase in prison capacity, though the state population has grown just 18%. "At that rate," says Governor Mike Lowry, "everyone in Washington State will be working in -- or in -- prison by 2056."

THE PRISON BUILDUP HAS NOT come cheaply. The average annual cost per inmate is now $23,500. The average cost per bed in maximum-security facilities is $74,862. "You don't lock them up and throw away the key," says Howard Peters, Illinois' director of corrections. "You lock them up and spend thousands of dollars on them."

But to what end? The politically popular War on Drugs of the '80s has given rise to the far less sexy Cell Crunch of the '90s. Mandatory minimum sentences for minor drug crimes have stuffed the prisons to bursting with nonviolent offenders. By 1990 almost 40 states were under court order to relieve overcrowding by releasing prisoners -- even habitual offenders. Today narcotics offenders occupy 61% of the beds in federal prisons. Meanwhile, 1 in 7 state facilities continues to operate beyond capacity. Ohio leads the pack with a stunning 182% of capacity.

Such pressures require creative reshuffling. In North Carolina, where a net gain of 200 new inmates each week has made a mockery of the statutory limit of 21,400, Governor James Hunt Jr. will present a new crime-fighting package to the legislature next week. His proposals include rushing the opening of two of the 12 new prisons currently under construction and leasing space in county jails. Meanwhile, North Carolina is trying to ship 1,000 inmates over state lines. To date, Oklahoma and Rhode Island have contracted to house temporarily a total of 226 inmates. Even so, unless Hunt can persuade legislators to raise the statutory cap by March 15, he will be forced to release 3,400 inmates. And therein lies the rub. The mandatory sentences that keep drug offenders in push violent criminals out. In Florida drug sentences of, on average, four years have cut time dramatically for other inmates. The average prisoner serves just 41% of his time; serious thugs do half. Although the standard sentence for robbery is 8.6 years and almost 22 years for murder, the average prison stay is just 16 months. Harry Singletary, who heads the state's department of corrections, dryly calls himself the "Secretary of Release." He might just as well call himself the "Secretary of Readmission." Since 1991, some 43,000 convicts who were released early because of overcrowding have been rearrested. That makes for a recidivism rate of 34%, well in line with the national average of 35%.

That disheartening statistic applies only to those who actually go to prison. Overcrowding has enabled countless more repeat offenders to elude incarceration or do snooze time in a county jail. According to Marc Mauer of the Washington-based Sentencing Project, for each crime committed, an offender stands a 1-in-20 chance of serving time. "People ignore the gun laws because there are no stiff penalties," says Antoine McClarn, 22, who sits in the Cook County Jail on charges of armed robbery. "Guys are charged and then released, and it's like a cycle to them, almost fun. People used to be scared to come here, but now it's a game or a joke."

THE UPSHOT IS THAT WHILE JAILS and prisons still incapacitate, incarcerate and punish, they no longer -- if they ever did -- deter crime. Indeed, in many inner-city neighborhoods, young men regard prison time as more a rite of passage than a deterrent. "Their father's been in prison, their brother's been in prison," says Lieut. Robert Losack, 30, who has served as a Texas prison guard for nine years. "It's socially acceptable; it's part of growing up." Once back on the street, these youths enjoy an enhanced status. They also pose a greater threat. "Prison culture becomes the model for street society," warns Jerome Miller, president of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives in Washington. "Young black men take onto the streets the ethics, morals and rules of the maximum-security prison."

Or they return with new wiles learned in local cells. Until he turned his life around 18 months ago in a drug-rehabilitation program, Lorenzo Woodley, 35, spent most of his time getting into -- and out of -- jail. Since age 19, Woodley has been arrested 14 times, all on felonies ranging from burglary to selling cocaine. Yet the longest stretch he ever spent locked up was six months in Miami's Dade County Jail. He has yet to see the inside of a prison. "I was a very manipulative person," he says with a smile. "You tell a judge you got a drug problem. Judges get soft. They know what drugs do to people. They send you to a drug-rehab program instead of prison." Jail suited Woodley just fine. "You get healthy, you sleep good, you eat good, you get cable TV." Then you get out. "They don't rehab you at all. They don't teach you anything," he says. "So these guys come out and do the same thing all over again."

That revolving door helps explain why 80% of all crimes are committed by about 20% of the criminals. It also helps to make sense of the seeming contradiction that many states with high incarceration rates also have high violent crime rates. Florida has the 12th highest lock-up rate among states, and it ranks first in violent crime. Conversely, 12 of the 15 states with the lowest incarceration rates also score low on violent crime. Minnesota, for instance, has the nation's second lowest incarceration rate, jailing just 90 people per 100,000, and is ranked 37th for violent crime. It is probably no coincidence that Minnesota is one of the most progressive states on punishment. Prisoners who are functionally illiterate -- 35% of the inmates -- must take a reading course before they can join other classes. Some 90% of those inmates have enrolled.

Such results have convinced people who spend most of their waking hours in and around prisons -- commissioners, wardens, guards, not to mention inmates -- that if prisons only punish, and offer no inducements or opportunities for rehabilitation, they simply produce tougher criminals. When prisoners have no constructive way to spend their time, they often fill the hours building a reservoir of resentment, not to mention a grab bag of criminal tricks, that -- count on it -- they will take back to the streets. "All we do," says Dr. John May, one of the 10 doctors who service the 9,000 inmates at Chicago's Cook County Jail, "is produce someone meaner and angrier and more disillusioned with himself and society."

A MINORITY COUNTERS THAT PRISons serve a valuable function beyond safeguarding citizens from criminals. "How can you say ((prisons)) have no impact on crime rates?" challenges Charlie Parsons, who heads the FBI's Los Angeles Regional Office. He points to an FBI effort to curb bank robberies that slashed such incidents in Southern California by 37% in a year. "The bottom line is that if you catch somebody after their first bank robbery or after their tenth, you are going to have an impact," he says. Director Peters of Illinois also sees benefit in stiff time. "For many of the inmates, prison is the first time they have ever had order in their lives," he says. "The average inmate leaves prison either the same or a little better than when he came in."

THE FAR MORE PREVALENT VIEW, though, is that the revolving door puts seasoned criminals back onto the streets to make room for nonviolent offenders, who make up half the prison population. "Prison systems are 'criminogenic': they create criminals," says University of Miami criminologist Paul Cromwell, who served as a commissioner on the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. The chronic beatings, stabbings, rapes and isolation ignite fury. "Just about everyone I talk to says that when they get out they will do something bad," says Larry Jobe, 32, who is imprisoned at a supermax facility in Oak Park Heights, Minnesota. "They are so blind with rage that they can't think about the consequences." Jobe, a former accountant who is serving life for a murder he insists he did not commit, knows the risk of long sentences: "After so many years, they have nothing to lose."

Even the softest inmates can turn into violent thugs. There is no telling yet if Randy Blackburn, 31, will become such a person, but he is worried he might. Blackburn has been in Cook County Jail for the past 13 months, awaiting trial on sexual assault. "I almost felt like a baby," he says of his first days in lockup. "I really didn't know what cocaine was until I got here." Now, Blackburn says, the temptation to become "hard" is constant. "Every night in the dorm, you hear the guys talk about how many people they have shot and how much drugs they've sold and women they've had. It can lead you into that."

Sheer boredom also stokes the rage. Jails, which are designed for short-term incarceration, provide few educational or work opportunities. Prisons do better. Most offer some courses, though tight budgets have forced cutbacks in recent years; 2 out of 3 prison inmates have work assignments. Even so, a quarter of all prisoners have neither jobs nor classes to engage their time and pent-up energies.

Corrections officials know there are no quick fixes. But they -- like many inmates -- argue that the prison system would function more effectively if justice were served more swiftly, sentences imposed more reliably and space allocated more rationally. The lag of months, sometimes years, between the crime and the punishment is counterproductive. Says Marcus Felson, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California: "((An electric)) plug that shocks you a year later or once in a thousand times isn't going to deter you."

Neither are sentences that telescope years into months. "That six months I served, that was a slap on the wrist," says Woodley, who turned himself around without going to prison. "If you get three years, you should do three years." At the same time, the jailers know that prisoners need incentives for good behavior. Florida's Singletary favors 75% sentences for those of the 53,000 prisoners in his system who "work off" days by doing construction work, cleaning parks and performing other outside tasks. It not only lessens tension within the prison but also addresses the problem of idleness.

Work programs can benefit inmates and taxpayers alike. Minnesota's Sentencing to Service program has been putting nonviolent offenders to work in communities throughout the state since 1986. So far, it has logged 530,000 man-hours, and when program costs are offset against earnings and reductions in prison costs, the effort comes up $6 million in the black. "In work programs, inmates feel like they're paying back society," says Charles Colson, who established the Prison Fellowship after serving seven highly publicized months in prison. "Work restores their sense of dignity -- and it's useful to society."

Precious prison space must also be allocated more judiciously. Penologists say that means not only finding alternative penalties for nonviolent offenders, but offering parole to rehabilitated old-timers. Often the hotheads who enter the system while still in their teens and 20s chill out by their 30s and 40s. Life-means-life sentences do a disservice on several fronts. Taxpayers pay ever steeper costs for aging inmates, who require more medical care; wardens are stripped of the ability to motivate these prisoners; and the lifers sink into a hopelessness that can be dangerous.

Most important, the problems connected with crime -- inadequate schooling, unemployment, drugs, unstable families -- must be addressed as part of America's prison crisis. "Look, I'm not a bleeding-heart liberal; I'm a realist," says Singletary. "But the cure for our crime is not prison beds and juvenile boot camps. We need to do something about juveniles at the school level before they get here."

President Clinton sounded the same alarm last week in his State of the Union Address. "I ask you to remember that even as we say no to crime, we must give people, especially our young people, something to say yes to." The question is whether America was listening.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: FBI, Bureau of Justice Statistics, The Sentencing Project}]TIME Graphic by Steve Hart

CAPTION: Crime and Punishment

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington, Cathy Booth/Miami, Jon D. Hull/Chicago, Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles and Lisa H. Towle/Raleigh