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WASHINGTON--Sadly, America's first blue-rib- bon prison panel in 30 years failed to tackle, head-on, the root causes of our lock-'em-up culture and to find ways to reduce the number of people behind bars in Virginia and elsewhere.

Formed last year, the privately sponsored Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons brought together 20 civic leaders, scholars, prison officials, and a former prisoner.

Based on many public hearings, interviews and research, the panel's recent report, "Confronting Confinement," is a how-to manual to help wardens cope with overcrowded prisons that breed violence, disease, and recidivism.

What is really needed, however, is a road map to drastically shrink Virginia's prison population--and, at the same time, save state taxpayers a lot of money.

The commission frankly admits, "It was beyond the scope of our inquiry to explore how states and the federal government might sensibly reduce prisoner populations," but then added, "Yet all that we studied is touched by, indeed in the grip of, America's unprecedented reliance on incarceration. We incarcerate more people at a higher rate than any country in the world."

While the study rightly pins responsibility for our overcrowded prisons on tough-on-crime laws passed by state and federal legislators, it does not look for ways to downsize America's booming prison industry that adds more than 1,000 new inmates per week, costs more than $60 billion a year, and employs about 750,000 workers to watch over 2.2 million inmates--almost double the 1990 prison population.

The commission never asked this question: Why pay room and board to put someone like Martha Stewart, or a pot smoker, or a car thief, behind bars, when modern electronic tracking devices can easily keep tabs on these nonviolent criminals at a fraction of the cost?

Virginians are not immune to these concerns. Virginia taxpayers shelled out about $696 million in 2003 to hire 21,284 state and local corrections employees to watch over 56,000 inmates. That's about $12,430 per year, per inmate.

Nationally, about one-half of all state prisoners have been convicted of violent crimes, including murder and assault. The other half--in the case of Virginia, about 28,000 inmates--are nonviolent, many of them convicted of possession or sale of small quantities of drugs.