Crime might not pay, but it sure costs a lot.

Pennsylvania will spend $1.6 billion this year to incarcerate 46,000 inmates, about 4,400 more than its 27 prisons were meant to handle.

With the inmate population expected to reach 57,000 by 2012, you know what that means. We'll need new prisons, three of them, at a cost of $600 million. Keep in mind each new prison also adds $50 million in annual operating costs.

It's a money trap, and Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard is advising lawmakers that the only way out is to rethink punitive drug war policies that have made the United States the world leader in number of prisoners.

As long as incarceration remains the preferred response to crime, Beard recently told legislative committees, taxpayers will bear "substantial, increasing and unrelenting costs."

Beard said Pennsylvania's experience with tough-on-crime policies demonstrates "that what we have been doing, although costly, is not working."

Within three years of release, he said, 46 percent of Pennsylvania offenders are back in prison.

Motivating change

Beard urged legislators to consider the growing body of research showing that rehabilitation and alternatives to prisons for nonviolent offenders work better than long sentences in holding lawbreakers accountable, protecting the public and controlling costs.

It's a message that's getting through.

"Locking everybody up hasn't worked," state Rep. Katie True, an East Hempfield Township Republican known for a tough stance on illegal drugs, said. "When you hear from (Beard) that 70 percent of the people in our prison population are there because of substance abuse, you have to try something different."

True and every House member from Lancaster County last month did, in fact, support something different. The House voted 199-2 for a bill that would reduce the sentences of certain nonviolent offenders by 25 percent if they complete programs known to reduce recidivism.

It's a carrot-and-stick approach to motivate inmates to make lasting, positive changes.

If made eligible by a judge for what's known as a recidivism risk reduction credit, an offender serving a 3-to-6-year sentence for chronic shoplifting or street-level drug dealing, for example, may be paroled at 2 years and 3 months.

An inmate earns the credit by behaving himself or herself, completing drug-treatment and other programs and working with a parole agent to create a plan for housing, employment and treatment upon release.

"The point is, you don't have to take a drug offender and lock them away 10 years to have a positive impact," Catherine McVey, chairwoman of Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole, told me.

Record of success

She said research shows that rather than reform lawbreakers, long prison sentences turn small-time offenders into tough customers more likely to offend again.

"We want our prison beds for really bad guys," McVey said. "If a petty drug offender's main problem is being hooked on drugs, we should treat him and move him through the system."

She said New York and other states are finding that such efforts reduce recidivism and prison overcrowding.

The recidivism measure, now awaiting Senate action, is not everything reformers want.

"We would like to see (risk credits) expanded to more offenders," Ann Schwartzman, of The Pennsylvania Prison Society, said. "But the package still has enough teeth to make a big difference."

How big? Beard said risk credits and other changes the House approved would reduce the inmate population by 2,000, eliminate the need for one new prison and make Pennsylvanians safer.

For what are we waiting?

E-mail: jhawkes@lnpnews.com