Two months ago, I wrote: "The unwritten motto for education policy makers is: If it didn't work last year, or the year before that, or the year before that, then, by all means, let's do it again next year. And let's do more of it!"

But education policy wonks don't have a monopoly on inert ideas. No where is the if-it-didn't-work-last-year-let's-do-it-again mantra more closely followed than in the crime- control industry - that's right, industry. I-N-D-U-S-T-R why?

Some of what follows is boringly familiar. But any discussion about how we can increase the justice half of the criminal justice equation must begin with a hard look at some telling facts.

That these facts are largely ignored by our "liberal" media and most politicians speaks volumes about the deplorable state of American political science today, which is why I find it laughable that the moralistic zealots of my parent's generation have the nerve to call Generation X "slackers." We've had some excellent role models in that regard.

Evidently, to be "tough on crime" is to be soft on thinking. The work of University of Nevada-Las Vegas criminal justice professor, Randall G. Shelden, is helpful here.

"We have witnessed in the 20th century the emergence of a 'criminal justice industrial complex.' The police, the courts and the prison system have become huge, self-serving and self-perpetuating bureaucracies with a vested interest in keeping crime at a certain level. They need victims, they need criminals, even if they have to invent them, as they have throughout the 'war on drugs' and 'war on gangs'," Shelden wrote in an unpublished paper he sent me a few months back.

Strong words with a solid basis. The American prison system in the "land of the free" is beginning to resemble Gulags, he observes. Like the Gulags of the former Soviet Union, prisons are popping up in every corner of the country, especially in isolated rural areas. Also, there's a great deal of human rights abuses in our prisons, which are increasingly becoming forced labor camps.

Over the past 20 years, Shelden discovered, expenditures on crime control have increased twice as fast as military spending. With no more commies around, state capitalism needs a new enemy. With such banal predictability, "terrorism" and "the war on drugs" has become the fear-mongering focus. It all adds up to a war on the domestic population. Police and military officials are not engaging in urban warfare training just for the hell of it.

The most recent estimates put crime control costs somewhere around $100 billion annually. And despite the Republican rhetoric of less government, the largest increases in crime "fighting" budgets have been at the federal level, with total expenditures increasing by 317 percent over the last two decades.

From 1982 to 1993, law enforcement employment went up 20 percent, while court employee rolls shot up 52 percent. Corrections led the way with a 96 percent increase. This is a big reason why it costs between $20,000 and $40,000 a year to house one inmate in our prison system. Don't you feel so safe?

Now read my lips. In the state of Texas, where "compassionate (fiscal) conservatism" reigns, one of every 25 state residents are behind bars. The Texas prison system alone employs more than 42,000 people. What a jobs program!

Of course, farming is big business in the Lone Star state, with 134,000 acres in the hands of Texas prison administrators. They also operate 42 factories and run the largest horse and cattle herds in the entire state.

There's no doubt that the exploding rates of incarceration in this country, which ranks second only to Russia and exceeds even China, are a direct result of the "war on drugs." Convictions for drug offenses accounted for almost one half of the increase in state prison inmates from the 1980s to the early 1990s.

Furthermore, current criminal justice policies are (if not intentionally) effectively racist. The sentencing disparities between powder cocaine and crack-cocaine offenders is a well-known example. Although the U.S. Public Health Service reports that 76 percent of all illicit drug users are white, blacks make up 35 percent of all drug arrests!

And it's not that blacks commit more crimes than do whites, as many conservatives fantasize. Blacks are given more severe sentences than are whites convicted of the exact same offense. In 1992, the average sentence length for a black drug offender was 107 months, compared to 74 months for white drug offenders.

Most importantly, Shelden's work makes a correlation between the rise of the crime-control industry and the emergence of a "surplus population" - made up almost exclusively of poor folks, disproportionately the black poor. Shelden concludes that whereas the welfare system once patronized the poor, now it just punishes them. Oh, say can you seeeeeeee....