Having failed to get an $11 billion prison-building package past the legislature; then, more recently, having been thwarted by a Superior Court judge in his efforts to start shipping inmates to private prisons out-of-state, Schwarzenegger has been reduced to floating the politician's last resort: proposing to let a few prisoners -- those he has deemed "the old, feeble and sick" -- out the back door early.

Whether this latest scheme will meet the fate of the governor's previous proposals remains to be seen, but the desperation it reflects is not limited to California. A newly released study by the Pew Charitable Trusts predicts that the U.S. prison population -- which grew 700 percent over the last quarter century, and already tops any country on the planet, at any period in history -- will increase another 13 percent over the next five years, costing states an additional to $27.5 billion.

Michael Jacobson is the director of New York's Vera Institute of Justice, the former New York City Commission of Probation and of Corrections and the author of "Downsizing Prisons," which argues that shrinking the prison population, rather than runaway growth, would have economic and public safety benefits. "If you look at the research, the consensus is that we're already so huge that adding on to our hugeness gets you very little" in terms of public safety, Jacobson says. "We've always locked up dangerous criminals for a really long time -- always. So all the growth we've seen in recent years has come from locking up more marginal people, who pose less and less threat to public safety -- i.e., drug offenders -- and from incarcerating people for longer and longer periods. This gets you next to nothing in terms of public safety."

Even before California passed the Three Strikes law that has fueled the current overcrowding crisis, Jacobson observes, "if you committed a third felony you were already going to go to prison for quite a long time. A 37-year-old with a third felony would have gotten out of prison at about 56. Now he dies in prison. Those extra decades of incarceration are the years when, statistically, he poses no public safety threat."

In California, Jacobson adds, prison growth is driven particularly hard by recidivism numbers -- the rate at which released prisoners are sent back to prison -- that are far above the rest of the nation. According to Jacobson, 70 percent of those who leave California's prisons are sent back for "technical violations" of their parole -- a dirty drug test, or missing an appointment with a parole officer -- compared to about 7 percent in Texas, a state that is certainly not known for being "soft on crime."

"No one has the failure rate that California does," Jacobson says. "It really is California, and everyone else."

Researchers Dina Rose and Todd Clear have found evidence that very high incarceration rates can actually make the neighborhoods most impacted by them more crime-ridden, by breaking up families, destabilizing communities and damaging the credibility of the law and its enforcers. "As you take more and more young people out of these communities," Jacobson elaborates, "you cause more social problems and get less public safety by spending money that could otherwise be used to buy you public safety, via things like health care, education, transportation. You can almost see the money moving from the schools to the prisons, but no one ever puts it that way to the public: 'We're going to have to shove 45 kids into a kindergarten class -- do you still want to build this prison?'

What the Pew report forebodes, Jacobson warns, is "a world with less money for education, for health care to strengthen the communities these folks come from and go back to. The less you invest in poorer communities, the more you'll have people from those communities going to prison. It's a horrible cycle that feeds on itself."

The most positive proposal the Schwarzenegger administration has floated in recent months, says Ryan King, a policy analyst with Washington, D.C.'s Sentencing Project, is a sentencing commission that would review the state's sentencing structure and make recommendations for reform. As it stands, California's sentencing laws -- like those of many other states -- are skewed by politicians' need to make each round of penalties appear tougher than the last. As a result, King says, "people are going away longer for drug offenses than for murder, which has been punished forever. We've built our sentencing structure like a house without a blueprint -- the bathroom is larger than the living room. There is no proportionality."

Elizabeth Gaynes, who runs New York's Osborne Association, which serves prisoners and their families, was introduced to prison issues as a young lawyer defending prisoners who were accused of participating in the 1971 uprising at Attica Prison in New York. In the aftermath of those events, she points out, the McKay Commission, which was tasked by the state with reporting on the implications of those events, cited overcrowding as a precipitating factor.

"Talk about not learning a lesson," Gaynes says. "There has been literature on the effects of prison overcrowding for 25 years. People need a certain amount of space, and when you invade that space, they become aggressive. "

Dangerously overcrowded prisons, Gaynes points out, are not some sort of price we need to pay in return for safer streets. New York state has had both the largest drop in crime and the largest drop in the prison population of any state in the nation over the past decade.

The ripple effects of the kind of prison growth we have seen nationally over the past two decades, and the further escalation the Pew researchers foresee, will be felt far beyond prison walls, Gaynes predicts. A society that uses incarceration as its primary means of addressing social problems, she observes, is one that "presumes we don't have any rational way of solving conflict between human beings besides, 'Go to your room -- and never come out.'"

"Before long," warns Gaynes, "there will be no one left who doesn't know someone who is in prison. Children will grow up thinking that you can't come back -- that there is no return. What this will teach them will be in direct conflict with the fundamental tenets of a supposedly Christian country -- grace, mercy, redemption. Prisons affect the humanity of everybody who works and visits and lives them. It starts there, but it affects everybody, because it becomes driven into the culture. Eventually, you get the Donner party -- people will eat their neighbors."

This is the nightmare scenario that advocates fear and researchers predict. More and more potentially redeemable citizens hear the prison gate slam shut behind them and face the teeming masses inside. Civil society ends -- not with a whimper but a clang.