Despite an overall drop in crime, the prison population both locally and nationally is rising due to stricter sentencing of nonviolent offenders.

There has been a 5 percent increase in prison populations in one-third of states. More than half of all federal prisoners are drug offenders, which is the result of tougher sentencing for drug offenses.

Mark Bergstrom, executive director of the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing, said the crime rate, as a whole, is generally stable or going down.

"That's not the area that we see contributing to the growth of the prison population," he said. "The situation we have is impacted more by the length of the sentences and parole violators."

On a local level, David Immel, warden at the Centre County Prison, said mandatory sentencing is one reason the prison population has increased in the past.

"It makes people stay here a little longer than they normally would. That means they are taking up bed space a lot more than we were used to in the past," Immel said.

But Bergstrom said Pennsylvania has a two-category system of implementing mandatory sentences intended to lessen their effect on the prison population.

One category includes automatic sentences given to offenders that allow for no discretion by those prosecuting the case. The others are applied only if a district attorney decides a sentence should apply if a guilty verdict is handed down.

The system makes mandatory sentencing more flexible, he added.

"Mandatories are used much less in Pennsylvania because that discretion is built into the system," Bergstrom said.

Because guidelines are set up this way, he said mandatory sentences are not as much an influence on the increasing prison population as longer sentences in general.

A tougher stance by the state legal system on violent and repeat offenders resulted from a special session of the Pennsylvania General Assembly in 1995 dealing with crime, Bergstrom said. Average sentence lengths have been increasing since that time, he added.

Judge Charles Brown of the Centre County Courthouse said he has not seen a significant increase in crime in the county. He agreed that more crimes carrying mandatory sentences lead to more prisoners.

However, Brown said the increase in inmates locally is also due to the increase in Centre County's general population.

"Population brings both good things and bad things, and crime is one of the bad things," he said.

The county recently reacted to the prison overpopulation problem by approving the construction of a 308-bed prison in Benner Township.

The current county prison, located in Bellefonte, houses a maximum of 78 inmates, said Gene Lauri, director of prison planning. The average inmate population is 173 daily, he said.

To alleviate the problem of overcrowding, the county has to buy space from the prison in Clinton County, which is 35 miles away and costs the county about $47 per day per inmate, Lauri said.

Immel said the prison would pay about $1.2 million this year to house inmates in Clinton County.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.