Alabama prisoners are older, sicker and costlier than ever.

Though violent crime sits at its lowest level since the 1970s, the state's pricey prison population is fast approaching a record high. A new Department of Justice report found Alabama has the country's fifth-highest incarceration rate, locking up nearly six of every 1,000 residents, a rate 35 percent higher than the national average.

Emergency paroles for nonviolent offenders failed to stem the growth, and strict sentencing laws mean many graying inmates are stuck behind bars for the long haul.

One result is clear: Taxpayers are stuck with the steepest bills in the state's history. Prison budgets have doubled to more than $300 million in the past decade, $67 for every man, woman and child. More state dollars go to the Department of Corrections than to all junior colleges combined, or to Auburn University.

The reasons, however, are complex and surprising at times. An analysis of the prison population shows:

The average inmate today is 36 years old, up from 32 in 1990.

The fastest-growing segment of the prison population is white women, whose numbers have soared 150 percent in a decade.

The vast majority of convicts, 75 percent, are sentenced for drug and property crimes, many cycling through on short stints with their addictions left untreated.

Of inmates currently in prison, 22 percent are serving time for drug crimes and 20 percent for property crimes, both of which mirror national averages. Alabama has more inmates locked up for violent crimes, 57 percent of the state's prison population compared with 50.5 percent of the inmate population nationally.

Alabama spends $32 a day to keep each inmate locked in prison. That is the lowest per-prisoner cost in the country, according to the Criminal Justice Institute, despite its having increased from $25 a day in 1995.

In 1995, the state locked up 19,000 people. Now it's more than 28,000.

Policy makers and political leaders from both parties agree the corrections system is broken. Discussions have begun to focus on proposed overhauls that center on investments in rehabilitation, re-entry into society and alternatives to prison.

"If you don't have a strong rehabilitative effort, all we're doing is warehousing. That doesn't work and it's not anything that any of us wants," said Chief Assistant Attorney General Rosa Davis, a member of the Alabama Sentencing Commission, a group of experts working to stem prison growth and improve public safety.

Prosecutors frequently talk about "a subculture that expects to come in and occupy those (prison) beds," Davis said. "For that to be true, something is not working."

Following the trend:

The growth in inmates, as well as their advancing age, has been the result of longer sentences as the state shifted toward a punitive system and away from a rehabilitative one, a trend that mirrors what's happened nationwide.

"Back in the'50s,'60s,'70s, the emphasis was on rehabilitation programs; prisoners were getting college degrees," said UAB criminologist John Sloan. "Then politicians decided that didn't work, so it was `get tough.'"

In Alabama, that has meant a tripling in the number of prisoners serving enhanced sentences under the Habitual Felony Offender Act. The state's Sentencing Commission estimates that about 30 percent of prisoners are serving longer sentences because of the law, the largest chunk of those for property crimes such as theft and burglary.

As an example of the law's reach, on a mid-range crime, called a class-B felony, the sentence jumps from the two- to 20-year range to a mandatory 10 years to life for repeat offenders. Courts have tweaked the law to allow parole for nonviolent repeat offenders, some of whom previously were serving life without parole for drug crimes.

Slowly, policymakers nationwide are moving away from these sorts of three-strikes-you're-out laws, in part because of research that suggests they are not a wise use of scant resources.

Alabama has had a much larger proportion of inmates serving long sentences than the national average, according to the Criminal Justice Institute's Corrections Yearbook for 2002. That year, 40.3 percent of Alabama prisoners were serving sentences of 20 years or more. Nationally, only 20.4 percent were.

Though the state's violent crime rate has sunk along with the rest of the country's, experts say the drop has more to do with economics and demographics than with long incarcerations. "I haven't heard anyone with the appropriate level of rigor convince me violent crime is down because we're incarcerating more people," said Nancy La Vigne, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.

The costs of aging:

Long sentences create older inmates - and more expensive health care.

Many inmates come from impoverished backgrounds, and the environment in prison speeds their decline. Corrections officials say age 35 in prison is comparable to 45 or 50 on the outside.

In the mid-1990s, half the inmates in state prisons were 28 or younger. Now, half are 37 or older.

"That's pretty significant," Sloan said. "What is likely happening is you've got this big group, and you've kept them in, and they're collectively growing old together. It's not that you have older offenders who are coming into the system."

The state had to start spending more money on health care after a series of federal class-action lawsuits uncovered deadly conditions in several prisons. Raising prison health care to constitutional standards at the same time as the prison population exploded was expensive.

In the mid-'90s, the state paid a private company about $20 million a year to care for prisoners. That bill has grown 150 percent, to more than $50 million a year. Add $10 million in mental health services - also required after a federal settlement - and health care swallows one-fifth of the system's budget.

Women and drugs:

Get-tough policies have also meant soaring numbers of female prisoners, swept up in the "war on drugs."

That black men disproportionately fill state lockups has remained consistent; they currently make up 56 percent of all prisoners. The sea change is in the number of white women. It jumped from 480 to 1,200 in a decade, a 150 percent increase during a period that the overall population rose 40 percent.

During the same period, the number of black female prisoners dipped slightly, from 797 to 774.

Overall, the state's female incarceration rate is slightly above the national average. It's lower than the average for the South, but states including Mississippi and Texas have such high rates of female imprisonment, they drive up the average.

Most of the white women in Alabama prisons are drug abusers. They may arrive with convictions for prescription forgery, fraud or theft, all related to addiction.

The percentage of female inmates who are locked up for drug crimes is much higher than the percentage of male inmates who are. In 2004, 36 percent of white female prisoners were serving time for drugs, mainly possession and prescription forgery, at a cost to taxpayers of $5.7 million.

"It seems they became the casualty of the war on drugs," said Celia Lo, head of the criminology department at the University of Alabama.

Lo, who has visited Tutwiler Prison for Women and observed drug classes in the corners of loud, crowded dorms, says prison is often counterproductive for addicted women. "A lot of these women are not violent, and locking them up with the other people who might be going to prison because of their engagement in violent crimes is not going to be good for these women," she said. "We can do a lot better."

UAB's Sloan says prison is a waste for many drug offenders. "The problem with the drug laws is they treat everybody the same and they're not the same."

'Everyone gets out':

The idea that long prison terms might not be the best approach to dealing with criminals is gathering steam nationwide. This is because of what Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and former director of the National Institute of Justice, calls the "iron law of the criminal justice system - everyone gets out."

Alabama's Department of Corrections released about 5,500 people a year in the late 1980s. By 2004, that number had more than doubled to 11,739.

Parole or probation officers oversee thousands of these inmates. But many remain in prison until the end of their sentences and then are released with no supervision - 22,800 since 1999, according to an analysis by the Alabama Sentencing Commission.

"If we're releasing people who are not prepared to work, whose health problems haven't been attended to, their level of addiction has not been dealt with, who are not staying in touch with their families - all of these factors are increasing their risk that when they come out they are going to return to a life of crime," Travis said.

And it's violent offenders who are most likely to be denied early release, thus going home with no supervision, the commission found; 43 percent more violent offenders than nonviolent offenders are released from prison this way.

Corrections officials are trying to turn the trend around, with the goal to reduce the risks of convicts committing new crimes by reconnecting them to work, family, church and civic life.

Otherwise, inmates are released straight to Alabama's neighborhoods.

"That's pretty shortsighted, isn't it?" Travis said. "To say, we've done our job, now go forth and sin no more."

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