(FORTUNE Magazine) – A PRISONER SHORTAGE

Our state and federal prison systems currently host some 1,100,000 badpersons, and most goodpersons view the figure as far too low. They observe that malefactors still abound on the streets, and they grasp the steely logic of Ben Wattenberg's dictum that "the thug in prison can't shoot your sister." The alternative view, more sympathetic to prisoners and long cloven to by the American Civil Liberties Union, is that the figure is too high: that penal punishment is a failure and the huge inmate totals a national disgrace. Alvin Bronstein, longtime head of the ACLU's National Prison Project, has opined that "locking up more people has no impact on crime rates." When the feds opened up their new high-tech prison in Florence, Colorado, Alvin was quoted as aghastly stating, "The Agriculture Department regulation for the housing of primates would not allow monkeys to be locked up in Florence." He could be right about the regs.

This brings us to a marvelous irony. The ACLU has made it possible to prove that higher levels of imprisonment mean lower crime rates.

How so? Begin with the fact that scholars trying to demonstrate this relationship have long been frustrated by the "simultaneity problem"--the problem being that high crime rates in an area rapidly translate into high imprisonment rates, so the two trend lines always seem to be moving together, which makes it hard to show that more hoosegow time leads to less crime.

A neat, ingenious solution to this problem was broached a while back by Harvard economist Steven Levitt. Writing in the May Quarterly Journal of Economics, he focused on 12 states that once had high levels of imprisonment but were forced by court orders to cut back. The orders typically reflected lawsuits brought by the ACLU against prison overcrowding. Nexis has 1,124 articles mentioning "prison," "overcrowding," and "ACLU."

Data for the 12 states show plainly that lower levels of imprisonment mean higher levels of crime. Levitt writes: "In the three years following the court's handing down a final decision, prison populations are estimated to grow a total of 13.7% to 19.7% more slowly than if there had been no litigation, while violent crime rates are 7.9% to 8.3% higher, and property crime rates are 5.7% to 6.2% higher." The typical guy in prison has committed 15 serious crimes a year. Putting away 1,000 extra bad guys for a year reduces the expected number of murders by four, rapes by 53, assaults by 1,200, robberies by 1,100, burglaries by 2,600, auto thefts by 700, and other larcenies by 9,200.

The economics of putting people away are attractive. Incarceration costs around $33,000 a year, while estimates of the monetary and quality-of-life costs of crime--admittedly tougher to calculate--average around $60,000. We need more prisoners.

How many more? Levitt's article does not squarely address this question, but his calculations indicate that we could raise the prison population to 1,350,000 before we would be putting away people whose crimes cost less than their incarceration.

The figure implies that we need a 23% boost in prisoner totals. To be sure, no such precision is really possible, given the inescapable wobbliness of the quality-of-life cost estimates. There is, however, no doubt that some increase is needed--maybe more than 23%, maybe less. Either way, your sister will be safer.

HYPHENISM

The four-hour PBS documentary on Teddy Roosevelt was viewed with above-average interest around our house, partly because of its marvelous film footage, e.g., of the Rough Riders, but also because we couldn't wait to see how politically correct (P.C.) public television would grapple with T.R.'s old-fashioned views about hyphens. Or, rather, "hyphenated Americanism," which he viewed as a major menace. In a famous speech to the Knights of Columbus, he identified it as "the one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all."

That was 1915, and Roosevelt--one of the most pro-immigration Presidents this country ever had--was forever promoting the idea of the "melting pot," in which one's separate ethnic identity was submerged and the composite American identity extolled. In 1996, diversity is what gets extolled, and hyphenism is on the march. In the recent vice presidential debate, Jack Kemp was unable to talk about the beneficiaries of tax reduction without identifying them as "African-American, Asian-Americans, Latino-Americans, and female-Americans." Please do not write in to ask how we know Jack was mentally hyphenating the femmes.

So how did PBS handle the hyphen issue? Alas, it ignored T.R.'s 1915 statement and his decades of commitment to the melting-pot ideal, and mentioned hyphens only in connection with his later (1917) wartime intolerance of immigrants suspected of siding with the enemy--stated to be part of his "dark and ugly side." About what one would expect from a P.C.-American network.

REPORTER ASSOCIATE Lixandra Urresta