Local editorial for March 3

A new report on incarceration and corrections spending in the United States offers good food for thought for Oregon residents, who will be voting this fall on two competing anti-crime measures that could put thousands more people in state prisons and cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

According to a study conducted by the Pew Center on the States, more than one of every 100 adults in America was in jail or prison at the end of 2007, giving the United States the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. And, the Pew report said, the 50 states spent a combined $49 billion on corrections last year - up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier.

Oregon, which as of the first of this year had a prison population of 13,855, spends an astonishing $1.66 billion per legislative biennium on the state corrections system. That's 10.9 percent of the state's general fund dollars - a larger percentage than any other state. That's also $174 million more than Oregon spends to educate the 438,000 students enrolled in the state's universities and community colleges.

The steadily growing inmate population "is saddling cash-strapped states with soaring costs they can ill afford and failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime," said the Pew report, which urges states to curtail corrections spending by placing fewer low-risk offenders behind bars.

Here in Oregon, however, we'll be voting in November on two ballot measures that would do just the opposite.

One comes to us courtesy of Kevin Mannix, the former state lawmaker and repeat gubernatorial candidate from Salem. Back in 1994, Mannix was the sponsor of Measure 11, a get-tough-on-crime law that expanded mandatory minimum sentences for many convicts. Since Measure 11 took effect, the state's prison population has nearly doubled.

A get-even-tougher-on-crime initiative that Mannix has succeeded in placing on this November's ballot would mandate longer sentences for a host of drug and property crimes. The Oregon Criminal Justice Commission estimates that the latest Mannix proposal could put up to 6,000 more Oregonians behind bars at an additional cost of $400 million every two years.

The other ballot item came out of the just-concluded supplemental legislative session as a less-punitive and less-expensive alternative to the Mannix measure. The Legislature's version would cost an additional $120 million every two years, according to state analysts' estimates.

If Oregon voters were to pass either one of these ballot measures or, heaven forbid, both of them, the state that already devotes a larger share of its budget to corrections than any other would be spending much more tax money to keep people locked up.

The state budget is essentially a zero-sum game. Education, human services and public safety, including the Department of Corrections, account for 93 percent of state spending. Without big tax increases, more money for prisons will mean less for everything else.

We're hoping that between now and November Oregon's voters will mull the findings of the Pew study and give some serious thought to whether such a huge investment in prisons - especially at the expense of public education and human services -

really reflects our state's needs and values.