By Bryan Mitchell

CLEVELAND, Ohio, April 17, 2009 (AFP) - With the recession eating away at government budgets, several US states are reconsidering tough-on-crime policies that have led to swollen jail populations and spiraling costs.

Ohio is the latest state to propose early release for non-violent offenders and increasing community-based probation programs.

"I'm a firm believer, if you do the crime, do the time. But I am also a firm believer that we're talking about low-level non-violent offenders," Collins said.

"They are going to come home anyway. They just might come home a few days earlier."

Inmates and their rising costs are no small issue in the United States, which is the world leader in jailing its residents.

A recent report by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States found that 1 in every 100 Americans is behind bars while another 1 out of 31 is on probation or parole.

The country's 2.3 million inmates cost state and federal governments roughly 55 billion dollars a year and the Pew Center predicts continued prisoner growth will cost states an extra 28 billion dollars by 2011.

The US experiment with "mass incarceration" has failed because the costs are simply unsustainable, said Pat Nolan, vice president of Prison Fellowship, a religious group focused on prison reform.

"It hasn't made the public safer, but it makes the states broke."

Kentucky has already released thousands from its state prisons - despite a lawsuit from the state's attorney general.

In Virginia, Governor Tim Kaine recently proposed an early release program.

New York officials are reconsidering the Rockefeller Drug Laws that served as the precursor to mandatory minimum sentences.

And California's failure to build enough prisons prompted a federal court to rule earlier this year that it must release 55,000 prisoners due to overcrowding.

"The policies that are being discussed now are nothing new," said Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a Washington-based organization advocating alternatives to prison sentences.

"Many people have been calling for things like this for 20 years," he told AFP.

"The political climate was not one in which many governors felt comfortable taking on these things. Now they don't have a choice."

But the early release proposals have come up against strong opposition.

"They are a short-term solution and ignore the high cost of victimisation," said Thomas W. Sneddon Jr., executive director of the Virginia-based National District Attorneys Association.

"There is not a good time to do this."

Sneddon, formerly a prosecutor in Southern California, said the sagging economy makes the prospects of early release programs all the more dangerous because getting a job is critical to successful reentry.

The Virginia legislature apparently agreed when it voted down in December the governor's plan to increase early release from 30 to 90 days for some inmates.

"These are people that are going to be released early anyway, all they did was release them earlier still," said Gordon Hickey, a spokesman for Governor Tim Kaine.

"But they decided they didn't want to save 5 million dollars."

Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway filed a lawsuit to stop the state's early release program, which he charged was haphazardly managed and releasing violent offenders early.

More than 3,000 Kentucky convicts have been released from prison or taken off parole in the past year in the southern state.

"People were put back on the street pretty quickly," Conway said.

Kentucky spends about 450 million dollars a year to hold approximately 22,000 inmates, but Conway said releasing rapists and violent offenders early was no way to cut the budget.

Instead, he said stiff mandatory sentencing needs to be reexamined so that drug dealers are punished while drug addicts are given opportunities for treatment instead of jail time.

"Persistent felony offenders need to be locked away, but we have to update our laws," Conway said.

His lawsuit is making its way through the courts while Kentucky's early release program continues.