The Prisons Overflow

Louisiana's department of corrections is thinking of bringing a World War II troopship out of mothballs to serve as an auxiliary prison. The Florida State Prison at Starke has 646 inmates living in Army tents and converted warehouses. Georgia's maximum-security prison at Reidsville is so overcrowded that 119 prisoners are forced to double up in 8-ft. by 5-ft. cells. "It ain't pretty," says a prison guard. "But it's all we can do right now."

State prison systems around the country are backing up like flooded sewers, particularly in the South. To alleviate the glut in Georgia's prisons, Corrections Commissioner Allen Ault last month announced that no new inmates would be accepted in any of the state's 37 correctional facilities. Last week the state took an even more drastic step: it released 350 inmates, mainly first offenders with one year or less to serve.

Nationwide, the prison population is now more than 200,000, an all-time high. The Florida prison system is gaining nearly 100 inmates a week, swelling its population to 15,000 convicts, more than double the count ten years ago. The Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester is teeming with 1,300 convicts, more than triple its safe capacity of 400. In Iowa, the prison population has doubled in the past 18 months.

There is no one single reason why prisons have become so packed recently, but experts point to a number of factors: a skyrocketing crime rate, more efficient police departments, harsher sentences, tougher parole boards.

Some courts have tried to reduce the crowding, but without much success. In 1970, for example, a federal judge in Louisiana ruled that conditions in a New Orleans prison constituted cruel and unusual punishment and ordered the convict population cut from 1,200 to 450; it is still almost double that. Federal courts in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida have acted similarly, with similar results. Convicts for whom there is no room in state prisons languish in overcrowded county jails. A group of county sheriffs in Georgia has threatened to go to federal court because the 700 prisonbound convicts in their jails are "a threat to their communities."

One obvious solution would be to build more large prisons, but penologists do not believe that will work either. Says Georgia Commissioner Ault: "The more prisons you build, the more inmates you'll end up cramming inside."

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