HARRISBURG – The state prison population grew by 44 percent over the past decade as Pennsylvania embraced mandatory sentencing and dramatically increased the number of violent criminals forced to serve their maximum sentence.

But the lock-'em-up approach to corrections – part of a national trend – has been accompanied by an ever-more-costly price tag and growing doubts about its effectiveness.

Last month, Pennsylvania quietly joined a growing number of states taking a step back from the stiffer sentencing policies of the 1990s. The Republican-controlled Legislature approved a bill that would get nonviolent drug and alcohol offenders out of prison more quickly and into treatment programs, and on Friday, Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell signed it.

The policy change is expected to save the state more than $20 million a year and reduce pressure on a prison system now housing nearly 41,000 convicts, up from 28,302 in 1994. Corrections officials say treatment also has been shown to reduce the chance the inmates will end up back in prison.

The typical inmate now spends about four years behind bars before being released. By one study, Pennsylvania keeps its inmates the longest of any state, more than twice the national average.

The costs have been staggering. The Department of Corrections has proposed a $1.34 billion budget for next year, an increase of 295 percent since fiscal year 1992-93, when the budget was just $453 million. It currently employs more than 15,000 people.

Nationally, more than half the states have loosened sentencing policies in the past three years, said Daniel F. Wilhelm, director of the State Sentencing and Corrections Project at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York.

Driving those changes are budget pressures, concerns about the fairness of sentencing, and falling public concern about crime as the crime rate has dropped, he said. The nation currently spends an estimated $40 billion annually on corrections.

Michigan abolished its mandatory sentencing scheme in December 2002. Kansas passed the nation's most comprehensive mandatory drug-treatment diversion act last year. Texas put more money into drug treatment. Other reforms were considered or passed in Washington, Hawaii and North Carolina.

"What's interesting to note is in a lot of these states, it's not the liberal Democrats who are championing reforms. It's Republicans who are at the forefront," Wilhelm said.

Big part of budget

In Pennsylvania, prison spending has grown faster than any other part of the budget, said Montgomery County Sen. Stewart J. Greenleaf, Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, "so I think we have to be smart in regard to how we incarcerate people."

Despite the changes in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, much of the harshest anti-crime legislation from the past decade remains on the books, and earlier this month California voters narrowly rejected a referendum to weaken its three-strikes law.

Pennsylvania's decision to pursue more treatment for inmates comes nearly a decade after tough anti-crime policies were pushed through a receptive Legislature by then-Gov. Tom Ridge, helped along by two highly publicized murder cases.

Ridge's 1995 campaign was in its final weeks when pardoned inmate Reginald McFadden killed two people; Ridge's Democratic opponent had voted to pardon him. And during the Republican governor's first year in office, a New Jersey police officer was murdered by parolee Robert "Mudman" Simon.

Almost immediately, inmates found it much harder to make parole and parole violators were increasingly sent back to complete their sentences.

Those changes were widely supported, and many experts believe tough sentencing laws help reduce crime by keeping habitual criminals off the streets.

But in Pennsylvania, new mandatory sentencing laws also fed an astronomical growth in the number of inmates convicted of drug offenses and other comparatively less serious crimes, so-called "Part 2" offenders. Their numbers are up 80 percent in the past seven years.

"I think that there are people that we're confining that we either don't need to confine for as long a period of time or we don't need to confine at all," said Corrections Secretary Jeffrey A. Beard. "There are Part 2 offenders we have in our system that don't need to stay as long as they're staying."

William DiMascio, executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, recalled the case of a young grandmother from Berks County with no prior record who was arrested for distributing a small amount of marijuana within a block or two of a school.

"So all of a sudden she had this horrendous mandatory imprisonment (the judge) had to give her," he said. "It happens almost every day. We have these ridiculous situations that serve no one's best interests."

Longer sentences don't necessarily lower the crime rate and can create problems of their own, said Ryan S. King, a research associate with the Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C., reform advocacy organization.

"You've got people that are being removed from families, social networks being disrupted, people losing connections to jobs, education. In essence – particularly when it's concentrated in communities of color – you have an overall impact that basically disrupts the community," King said.

The reforms that became law Friday will divert inmates with nonviolent convictions involving drugs or alcohol – even a theft conviction to support a drug habit would qualify – into an "intermediate punishment" program.

Inmates will first do at least seven months in prison, although Beard said 12 months will probably be more typical. After that, they will spend at least two months at a community-based therapeutic facility and the rest of the minimum 24-month sentence at a halfway house or group home while receiving addiction treatment.

The savings will come because they will spend less overall time in the system, and considerably less time in state correctional institutions, where it currently costs $28,000 annually per inmate.

Beard said he is hopeful there will be additional long-term savings as a result of an expected drop in recidivism and through an expansion of the program to other classes of inmates.

He said intensive drug or alcohol treatment, combined with aftercare, could cut in half recidivism rates from their current range of 50 percent to 60 percent. Through shorter sentences, less costly forms of incarceration and lower numbers of probation violators coming back in, the state expects to eventually save more than $20 million annually.