A new report offers dramatic confirmation of a shameful trend: The number of Americans in jails and prisons is rising at an unacceptable rate.

The Pew Center on the States reports that for the first time in U.S. history, one out of every 99 adults is in jail or prison. That's 2.3 million people at the start of 2008, more than the world's most populous nation, China, which has 1.5 million locked up.

Clearly, it's irrational to continue on a steady course of constantly putting more people behind bars. The tough, inflexible sentencing laws that have increased the number and length of prison terms need to be reformed.

The financial cost alone — from less than $11 billion 20 years ago to more than $49 billion nationwide in 2007 — is a call for change.

This is money not being invested in education, the environment, infrastructure and other vital community needs.

Hawai'i has seen the same growth trend. The inmate population rose from 926 in 1980 to 6,045 in 2007.

Our prisons are so overcrowded that we've turned to shipping more than 2,000 of our inmates to Mainland facilities. At roughly $50 million a year, that solution is cheaper, and apparently more politically palatable, than building space for them at home.

To help solve this problem, policies need to be re-examined to divert more non-violent offenders away from prison. This should include more and better treatment options for drug offenders, providing more effective ways to integrate them back into the community.

The Community Safety Act of 2007 is a good start. It directs the Department of Public Safety to develop a system to help inmates prepare for a successful return to society.

To that end, it's also important to bring inmates home from the Mainland. Keeping them close to the support of family and friends can help ease the transition from prison and reduce recidivism.

While this may require another prison here, the goal should remain a reduction of the prison population overall.

The Pew report also points to another proven strategy to reduce prison populations: early childhood education, which can dramatically reduce a disadvantaged child's participation in juvenile and adult crime in later life.

Surely that's a better investment than another prison cell.