David Rudovsky has been suing the city forever, trying to get an end put to the ridiculous prison overcrowding that results in three people being held in two-person cells and, because of the lack of adequate correctional staff, lockdowns 23 out of 24 hours a day.

A judge agreed in January all this is unconstitutional, and today the Inquirer's Robert Moran had a great rundown of the background to the overcrowding problem.

At base, the problem of overcrowding has two solutions: build new prison, or get rid of some of the prisoners. The article marshalls a lot of good evidence for the latter.

Some pretty important and startling facts. There is a record number of people in jail in Philadelphia:

On Aug. 6, the prison population hit 9,123, an all-time high that is more than double the average of 4,000 inmates held in the late 1980s.

It also exceeds by about 1,600 the number of inmates the city's six detention centers were designed to hold.

A disturbing, disgusting number of them are there because they simply can't afford to make bail. A Temple study found that nearly HALF of all city inmates are in prison for this reason. They haven't been convicted of anything at all yet, and a person with money in the exact same position would be out on the street, free.

I know that during my "tour" of the local prison system after being arrested at the 2000 Republican convention, the greatest shock (aside from the generosity of the women prisoners) was that we locked up pretrial inmates solely because they didn't have money for bail.

An even ridiculously higher proportion of those 9000+ inmates are there for nonviolent, mostly drug-related, offenses: 88%.

The study and the article conclude that these "subpopulations," a full 50 and 88% respectively, provide "productive areas" for "review and development of population-reduction strategies," like "alternative sentencing options" that we are just not using now.

And this isn't just liberal feel-good stuff: it seems that just as New York was cracking down on crime, it was reducing its prison population. "In the early 1990s, New York's jail population peaked at nearly 23,000. Now it is down to around 14,000." The article ascribes the drop to "management practices."

One area that deserves a lot of attention from the incoming mayor is the system for reentry, parole, and dealing with redecidivism. There have been cues that Nutter is concerned with this, and as he should be: the Urban Institute found last year that "of 106,849 people who were incarcerated in Philadelphia prisons from 1996 to 2003, half of them - 53,621 - had been jailed and released an average of 3.5 times during that period." That population is already identified; it is literally in the system. Jailing doesn't accomplish anything but temporary protection if it doesn't succeed--in some substantial proportion of cases--to rehabilitate.