Your money or your lifestyle: privatizing the prison system.

As the crime bill swung into its second round this summer, vacationers with whom I was sharing Cape Cod tended to grow nostalgic about the relatively crime-free times of their youth. I, too, thought fondly of the days when we put the key on the ledge over the front door--if we locked the door at all--and the only crimes that fretted our parents were kids swiping melons from nearby farmers' fields or, once or twice, some petty embezzlement by a hard-pressed employee in one of the town's businesses.

Oh, we were aware of big crime. In his time Jesse James and his gang had robbed a bank in a town not far away and, during my adolescence, Al Capone reigned in Chicago and often popped up in the headlines. But in Minnesota we did not live with crime as an inescapable fact of life.

Now, living as I do in Washington, D.C., where homicide is commonplace and teen-agers carry assault weapons as ordinary gear, I take crime as a given. I suppose it speaks to the adaptability of human nature. I am, I realize, fortunate that I have known personally only one person who was shot--and that not fatally, although the intent to kill was there. (She had failed to let go her purse easily when it was grabbed.)

But threatening incidents are commonplace. For example, a neighbor was attacked and pursued at dusk on the way from her parking space to our building--right past two supposedly guarded embassies. And someone jumped out of the shubbery and waylaid a passing woman, holding her at knife-point on our front steps until she yielded her wallet, bank card, and pin number. (Our sentimental doorman said that he assumed that they were lovers!) And things like this happen on an almost weekly basis.

When I go out to take a walk or to go down the street to the dentist or the bookstore I automatically de-mug myself. I put my keys, one credit card, some cash, and my driver's license (for identification) in a pocket--an inside one, if possible. I carry a purse with some money in it to mollify any purse-snatcher who might be enraged to find it empty. I also keep several quarters in one hand to placate the more aggressive panhandlers who wave paper cups under my nose. (On the same principle a friend of mine keeps a purse with money visible in her front hall.) I walk fast looking straight ahead. Eye contact, I have read, is often interpreted as "dissing" or showing disrespect to young gang members. Lest readers get the wrong idea, I hasten to add that I find this necessary in one of the best sections of our capital city.

Should I and my friends not then rejoice in the passage of a crime bill that is intended to take our potential assailants off the street, increase the number of police and prisons, and make certain that repeating violent offenders will spend their lives behind bars? Not really.

First of all, hard as it may be for my frightened contemporaries to believe, we older women are the least likely victims of violent crime despite the prevalence of incidents like those I have described above. A poll taken this summer by Money magazine established that fact and the correlative one that the most likely victims are African-American males between the ages of twelve and nineteen. What will make us safer and release us more surely from the prison of fear are the rehabilitation of those young and violent who are now offenders, and measures to prevent others from joining them. It seems that the building of the additional prisons for which the crime bill will provide the money will do little or nothing for either deterrence or rehabilitation.

First of all, prisons, once built, must be staffed and maintained. Local jurisdictions simply do not have the money to do more than they are now doing for their overcrowded facilities. Secondly, most states have a sorry record in the administration of prisons. Take only one lurid example. In a state as supposedly enlightened as Massachusetts a woman prisoner named Joan Andrade died this month because the infectious pneumonia from which she was suffering went undiagnosed and untreated for ten days. Three other inmates of the same women's prison died under similar circumstances in 1992. According to the Boston Globe the State Department of Correction's supervision of the health provider had been shockingly inadequate. Less shocking than death by neglect but also an indictment of prison administration is that it is almost taken for granted that a young man entering prison is entering a school for crime. "I am a career criminal," said Ernest Anderson, talking to Anthony Ramirez of the New York Times (August 14) and detailing a decade of his life spent in five different prisons.

But in Ernest Anderson's story there is a ray of hope emanating from an unlikely source: privately run prisons. In the facility in which he is now held, the Metro-Davidson Facility in Nashville, Tennessee, Anderson says he has been able to turn his life around. "The private prison industry has no shortage of critics," writes Ramirez, "from public sector unions out to protect their jobs to civil liberty advocates who warn that company-run prisons are less accountable." Yet in the thirteen states in which privately run prisons are allowed, the larger correction services are demonstrating that providing ample prison services cuts costs and is productive of rehabilitation for the inmates.

Private correction officials and wardens say that the gain for the companies comes from changing the unhealthy environment found in so many prisons. "At Corrections Corporation prisons you don't have the atmosphere of impending violence that you have in a state prison," says William C. La Rowe, director of a Texas prisoners' rights group. Part of the formula used to improve the prison atmosphere is to keep potentially quarrelsome prisoners like Ernest Anderson so busy with drug rehabilitation, recreational and educational programs that trouble will not tempt them. At Metro-Davidson inmates can get a high school equivalency degree and attend programs that teach marketable skills as well as take a six-month psychological counseling course designed to bring brooding loners out of isolation.

Perhaps there is a rich irony in the fact that the profit motive makes better rehabilitation than does state social policy. The welfare and safety of prisoners turn out to be good business. It is possible that, until there is another crime bill with strong preventive programs, prevention of crime will also become the province of far-sighted entrepreneurs. And hopeless youths will have futures and our communities will be safe once again.