It is exceedingly difficult to moke people realize that an evil is an evil. For instance, we seize a man and deliberately do him a malicious injury: say, imprison him for years. One would not appear that it needed any exceptional cruelty. --George Bernard Shaw

THE NUMBER OF AMERICANS behind bars has doubled in the last decade. These are currently 663,000 people incarcerated in the nation's prison and the count is growing fast. Many prisons are grossly overcrowded with several inmates occupying cells designed for one or two people. More prisons are being built, but the cost is staggering--100 are currently under construction at a projected total cost of $3.5 billion. Operating prisons is also extremely expensive, ranging from $13,000 to as much as $10,000 a year for each inmate.

At a time when funds are bring cut from public education, nutrition programs, health programs, and public assistance, one must ask why we are spending so much money to collectively perpetrate acts of, in Shaw's words, "diabolical cruelty" on a large segment of our population.

There are several standard answers. The first says we must protect ourselves by removing dangerous individuals from circulation. This argument is sound, so long as we only look up people convicted of violent crimes whose individual cases indicate that they can not be rehabilitated or controlled through halfway houses, probation or other less severe measures. Yet in many places where the prison problem is worst, there has been stiff resistance to laws which would incarcerate only violent criminals. In staunchly liberal Washington, D.C., where inmate overcrowding has been a notorious problem for years, public pressure recently forced the city to abandon plans to stop locking up non-violent criminals in favor of building a new federal prison.

A second standard answer is that we simple must punish people who do wrong. Yet are we still so barbaric a nation to demand "an eye for an eye?" And if so, is it either just or useful to lock several human beings up in a small cage knowing that they very likely will be subject to physical, or even sexual, abuse in our overcrowded prisons? What constitutes cruet and unusual punishment?

OUR CURRENT SYSTEM punishes all of us with a huge financial burden and the lost potential of human beings committed to a system which will surely ruin them. There are many reasons people commit crimes besides being inherently evil, Poverty, lack of education, hunger and drug habits are just a few. Yet our overcrowded prisons seem aptly designed to ensure that, whatever they are when they are incarcerated, people emerge the anti-social beasts we have ourselves they are.

Which brings us to the third justification for imprisonment rehabilitation. But does locking people up in cages seem a good way to rehabilitate them? Certainly, it will score them, but we are operating from the promise that much of the reason that people commit crimes is that they either do not know better or cannot help themselves to be rehabilitation to be educated, to be given a chance adopt a new lifestyle.

Giving criminals another chance is not just a favor to them, it is a favor to all of us. Society as whole benefits when they no longer commit crimes and, instead of being a burden on the system, begin to contribute to the common weal. Is the beastial treatment we currently afford to prisoners the best way, or even any at all, to reform them?

Most people in prisons are repent offenders, in part because there in hardly enough room in the nation's prisons for first time criminals, but also because our society is developing an underclass of common criminally. The National Coalition for Jail Reform reports that, of the 500,000 women who spent time in jail during 1984, 58 percent had lived on less that $3000 a year and 92 percent had lived on less than $10,000 a year. Clearly, prostitution, drug use, mugging and petty crimes are associated with lack of economic opportunity and of social infrastructure. Without services like day-care, adequate public education, and food and nutrition programs there are many in our society for whom crime presents the only opportunity for self--advancement or even for survival.

Not only do those who argue for more prisons fail to address the social context of crime, their solution establishes a dangerous incentive for continuing high levels of imprisonment. If we spend billions of dollars building new prisons, they will surety be used. The baby-boom generation is rapidly aging. It seems likely that--provided levels of poverty in this country do not continue to grow and thereby feed crime--the number of criminals in the U.S. should soon decline along this demographic trend. The more prisons we build, the greater will be the temptation to imprison people for minor offenses or to neglect taking measures against the social causes of crime.

THE MOST FRIGHTENING proposal yet from those who advocate building more prisons is to contract eat their operation to private prison corporations. What better way to fuel the line and cry for draconian law and order than to give the business community a financial stake in increasing the number of prisoners? Although Texas and New Mexico have already passed legislation authorizing private prisons, no states are actually using them. However, private companies do operate alien detention centers (primarily for Haitians) for the federal government, and there have already been at least two instances of neglect and violence against prisoners that probably would have not have happened in state institutions.

Private prison companies charge by the inmate. They make a profit by spending less money per inmate than the state would in a state run institution. They neither train their workers as well nor pay them as well as the state. They have an inventive to do things more cheaply. The logic of profitability does not provide a basis for a just corrections system.

There are some simple and practical alternatives to the current emphasis imprisonment. Only there convicted of violent crimes should even be considered for imprisonment. Others can be fined, sentenced on probation or terms of public service (as John Zaccaro recently was), or sent to halfway houses or part-time center which both monitor convicts and provide support and counseling to set them on the right course. Such options, provide a sufficient deferent to crime--in the form of fines and of relative loss of freedom--but they also give criminals an option to reform, Moreover, they place less of a burden on the rest of society. For example, the American Justice Institute estimates that while locking up juveniles costs $61 a day, group home alternatives average only $14 to $17 a day.

Through there will certainly be some criminals who must be put behind bars, even some violent criminals might safely be dealt with through measures short of imprisonment, or at least through a combination of shorter prison sentences and other post-release measures. Finally, for those now imprison and those whose crimes are so serious that they require incarceration, "good time" laws can shorten the duration of prison sentences and encourage rehabilitation. Such laws provide early release on parole for good behavior in prison with the possibility of reimprisonment for violation of the terms of parole. They are by no means universal or sufficient in scope and should be enacted nation wide.

While high levels of crime and prison overcrowding are particularly acute in some urban areas, they are problems throughout the country-Their solution requires a national effort towards creative and constructive responses to crime. Imprisonment is a simple, but it is also stupid While it may be necessary in some cases often it only hardens, criminals and provides incentives to neglect the social bases of crime. Instead of spending it on program that can give people the opportunity to become productive, law-abiding citizens.