The man in charge of Pennsylvania's prison system says we are putting too many people in jail.
"Locking up more and more people isn't going to solve our crime problem," said Joseph D. Lehman, commissioner of the state's corrections department.
Lehman added: "There is no relationship between incarceration rates and crime rates."
Lehman spoke yesterday at the 205th annual meeting of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, the nation's oldest prison reform group, at the Society Hill Sheraton.
He joined an array of speakers, including State Sen. Stewart J. Greenleaf (R., Montgomery), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who urged that major steps be taken to promote alternatives to incarceration.
As commissioner the last two years, Lehman has been in charge of an unprecedented expansion of the state prison system, in which seven 1,000-bed prisons are to be built by 1995. The system is holding 24,000 inmates in facilities designed for 16,250.
Lehman said that the enormous costs of building and maintaining prisons are hurting the state's ability to pay for education and health programs and other efforts that might, in the long run, do more to fight crime than the ''overutilization of incarceration."
Between 1980 and 1990, the state budget for education increased 56 percent; that for health rose 66 percent; that for transportation rose 85 percent - while the state budget for corrections soared 263 percent, Lehman said.
Pennsylvania's prison population increased 171 percent in the decade, nearly twice the rate of the prison population nationally, according to the Department of Corrections. In the same period, reported crime in the state rose by just 6 percent.
Lehman said the dramatic increase in imprisonment is mainly due not to worsening crime, but to increases in mandatory sentences, the drug war and other "policy decisions" that mandate ever-longer prison sentences, no matter the offense or the nature of the offender.
Lehman's words signaled a growing effort to promote alternatives to imprisonment such as intensive supervision, residential drug and alcohol treatment, halfway houses, restitution and work release. The proposals are aimed at nonviolent offenders.
