If a Pew Center study has it right, there's good news and bad news about the explosive growth in the Pennsylvania prison population.

The bad news is Pennsylvania led the Northeast last year in new inmates, with about 1,600. The good news -- if one could call it that -- is that the state's total of new prisoners lagged behind Florida's and Georgia's, which were 4,447 and 2,413, respectively.

Still, the fact that Pennsylvania didn't add the most inmates by state in the country, despite a 3.7 percent increase between 2006 and 2007, is small comfort when the state's taxpayers spent $1.6 billion on prisons last year.

With more than 46,000 inmates to feed, clothe and house, Jeffrey Beard, head of the state Department of Corrections, has requested $600 million to build three new prisons to accommodate the anticipated overflow.

Even as Pennsylvania's general population shrinks, prison construction continues to be a reliable industry.

According to Pew's Public Safety Performance Project, more than one in 100 American adults is now incarcerated, the result of the rush to institute tougher drug laws and mandatory minimum sentences for the sake of political expedience. Mr. Beard believes parole violations and low-level drug offenders are fueling the growth in prisons.

Slowing the growth of the inmate population will require a renewed commitment to accessible drug rehabilitation as an alternative to jail time and revisiting the Draconian laws mandating prison sentences for drug offenses.

Once upon a time, politicians got elected on the basis of who could look the toughest on crime. With the cost of prison taking up an ever-increasing percentage of states' budgets, being smart about criminals is beginning to make a lot more sense.

Cutting prison time for nonviolent offenders, sending addicts to treatment instead of incarcerating them and returning sentencing discretion to judges would dramatically reduce the number of those behind bars and the pressure to build new prisons.

It will take political courage to go against the get-tough tide. But in the end, saving the taxpayers of Pennsylvania hundreds of millions of dollars a year in prison spending may be the smartest politics of all.