Stiff Drug Laws Cited for Record Incarceration Rate : Crime: Sentencing report says 60% of federal prisoners and 25% of state inmates serve time for narcotics. California tops rate for people behind bars.

The percentage of Americans who were locked behind bars reached an all-time high last year, thanks largely to stiffer anti-drug laws enacted during the 1980s, according to a report released Monday that analyzes sentencing patterns.

About 519 of every 100,000 persons in the United States were in prison or jail last year, a rate 22% higher than in 1989, said the Sentencing Project, a liberal, nonprofit group. The incarceration rate in the United States is five to eight times higher than in most industrial nations, the report said, and is second only to that of Russia.

California has an even higher rate of imprisonment: 626 per 100,000, according to a separate report.

“If California were a nation, it would be world’s leader in incarceration,” said Vincent Schiraldi of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco.

While vicious attacks perpetrated by career criminals have fueled the demand for the tougher sentencing laws in Washington and in Sacramento, the authors of the national and California reports say the prisons are being filled by those who sell and use illegal drugs.

This year, more than 60% of all federal inmates, and 25% of state prisoners, are there on drug charges.

During the 1980s, Congress enacted a series of new laws that set stiff mandatory-minimum prison terms for persons convicted of selling or possessing narcotics. Most states enacted similar measures.

In general, these new anti-drug laws do not allow convicts to be paroled early.

Over the decade, these measures have brought about a dramatic change in the prison population. In 1983, about 7% of state inmates were there for drug charges. Last year, the figure had risen to 25%.

In the federal system, the percentage of inmates serving time for drug offenses rose from 27% in 1983 to 61% last year. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons estimates that 70% of its inmates will be serving time for drug crimes by 1997.

Experts disagree on whether the increase in prison population has had the effect of reducing the crime rate.

Officials of the Sentencing Project say that incarceration is expensive--more than $20,000 per inmate per year--and has not succeeded in reducing crime.

From 1986 to 1991, imprisonment rose 51%, and violent crime increased 15%. “Clearly, no cause-and-effect relationship can be discerned here,” says the report, “Americans Behind Bars.”

In California, the “explosive growth” in the state’s prison system “has been an expensive failure,” charge the authors of the state sentencing report.

Since 1970, the state’s prison population has nearly tripled, while the rate of violent crime has more than doubled, Schiraldi said. State taxpayers are paying to imprison 75,000 nonviolent criminals, he said, at the expense of the state’s higher education system.

“In the last decade, we have added 19 new prisons and 26,000 corrections officers and lost 8,000 employees in higher education,” he said. “Ten years ago, the higher-education budget was two and half times the corrections budget. This year, they are about even.”

But others argue that crime could have been even worse had not more burglars, rapists and murderers been sentenced to long prison terms.

UCLA Prof. James Q. Wilson, an expert on crime, pointed out that rates for many crimes, such as robbery, have dropped since 1980.

“By 1986, there were 55,000 more robbers in prison than there had been in 1974. Assume that each imprisoned robber would commit five such offenses per year if free on the street. This means that in 1986 there were 275,000 fewer robberies in America than there would have been had these 55,000 men been left on the street,” Wilson writes in the September issue of “Commentary” magazine.