If the state were a country, it would have the world's highest

According to the institute's study, Texas also has the nation's largest populations of probationers and parolees.

The report confirms statistics that have long been known to state criminal justice policy analysts, and several proponents of tough sanctions for lawbreakers said the numbers represent the sentiments of most Texans.

"We didn't have this prison building boom by happenstance," said Dianne Clements, president of the crime-victims advocacy group, Justice for All. "It happened because the citizens and taxpayers who live here every day determined that they would no longer abide a revolving-door prison system. We realize there is a cost, and we are ready to foot the bill."

That cost was high and will probably get higher. In the early 1990s, Texas voters authorized spending $1.7 billion in bonds to triple the size of the state's prison system, which now exceeds 150,000 beds.

When lawmakers return to Austin in January, they will be asked to send a $500 million bond package to the voters for the construction of three maximum-security units.

In all, 163,190 state inmates are in custody in Texas, compared with 163,107 in California, according to the institute, which supports alternatives to prison.

Tony Fabelo, who heads the Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council, which assesses prison needs for state lawmakers, said the institute's figures include inmates housed in low-risk substance-abuse treatment facilities and those in county jails awaiting transfer to state facilities.

Other significant findings:

* The Texas prison population's average annual increase of 11.8 percent during the 1990s was not only the highest growth in the nation, but was almost twice the average annual growth of the other states.

* If Texas were a country, it would have the highest incarceration rate in the world, easily surpassing that of the United States and Russia, the next two finishers, and would be seven times that of the next biggest prison system in China.

* Blacks in Texas are incarcerated at seven times the rate of whites, and nearly one in three young African-American men in Texas is under some form of criminal justice control.

The institute is a think tank of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, and the study was paid for with a grant from the Center on Crime, Communities and Culture. The groups provide programs for families of inmates and look for other solutions to criminal behavior beyond prisons, such as substance abuse treatment.

The institute determined that Texas added 98,000 inmates to its prison system in the '90s, which is almost 25,000 more inmates than the population of New York's entire system. Yet, since 1995, New York's decline in crime was four times greater than that of Texas, the study found.

New York and Texas have almost the same population.

According to the study, the crime rate declined much more slowly in Texas than it did in other large states. From 1993 to 1998, crime in the Lone Star State fell 5.1 percent, half the national average, and the least of any of the nation's five largest states.

"If locking more people up really reduced crime, Texas should have the lowest crime rate in the country," said Jason Ziedenberg, another co-author of the study. "The cost of having one in three young black men under criminal justice control is a steep price to pay for the states' lackluster crime declines."

But a spokesman for Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican presidential nominee, defended the state's criminal justice policies as tough but fair.

"Clearly Texas was right to develop strong laws for dealing with criminal activities and strong laws covering juvenile crime to let them know that there are consequences for their behavior," said Bush press aide Mike Jones.

"What the authors of that study might not understand is that Texas also has been very aggressive in using rehabilitation efforts and faith-based organizations to change people's hearts. The bottom line to all these efforts is that, under Gov. Bush, Texas has the lowest violent crime rate in 26 years and the lowest murder rate since the 1950s."

But state Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, said Texas should be receptive to critical assessments of its institutions and open to suggestions of policy changes.

"I think it is helpful that groups such as this force us to take a look at impact of our policies," Ellis said. "I firmly believe in punishing those who break the law, but these are some pretty graphic statistics.

"We have to realize that our 'lock them up and throw away the key' mentality is costing us a lot of money. Maybe there is too much emphasis on dealing with criminal justice issues on the back end of life rather than on the front end."

This report contains material from The Associated Press.