State lawmakers received troubling news this week about this year's budget and an increasing problem for budgets for the next ten years, the state's rapidly growing inmate population that already exceeds the capacity of the prison system.

The latest monthly report from the General Assembly's Fiscal Research Division finds that state revenues through January were $35 million below projections even after the state received $272 million more than expected this year from a program of collecting past due corporate taxes.

House Speaker Joe Hackney continues to insist that lawmakers will not face a budget shortfall when the May legislative session begins because Governor Perdue has withheld enough money to fill any hole, but don't count on that yet given the latest report.

Even more disturbing was news this week that the state's prison population is growing faster than projected despite generally lower crime rates. The Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission now projects the state will have 42,776 inmates behind bars on June 30, the end of the fiscal year.

The commission says that the prison system will have room for only 33,682 inmates at the end of June under standard operating capacity and 39,332 at expanded capacity, which includes filling prison dorms with 130 percent of the number of inmates they were built to house, now the standard for determining prison space.

Things get worse every year after that. By the 2019, the prison population will reach 50,829 and the expanded capacity will be just 42,296. And that takes into account all the prisons that are already authorized to be built or expanded but not yet completed.

Lawmakers have generally responded to projections of inadequate prison space by issuing bonds to build more cells, but even that misguided policy may be almost impossible in the next few years.

State Treasurer Janet Cowell recently announced that the latest debt affordability study shows the state should not borrow more than $9 million a year for the next few years, which won't pay for much of anything.

It costs $136,500 to build one maximum security prison bed and just over $80,000 for a minimum security slot. And then the state has to pay the operating costs, which comes to an average of $27,000 a year per prisoner.

Maybe the blizzard of bad news will finally prod more lawmakers to finally realize that the state can never build its way out of the prison crisis and that it is time to take a look at other ways to address the problem.

There is a growing movement across the county to rethink the policies that send nonviolent offenders to prison, a large percentage of whom have addictions or mental health problems that have long been ignored.

Texas has made well-publicized progress reducing the growth of its prison population in the last few years by investing more money in treatment and community alternatives for nonviolent offenders and changing some of the state' probation procedures that had been sending people to prison for years for even small, technical violations of probation.

Maybe the most surprising information presented recently by the Sentencing Commission was that 42 percent of felony admissions to North Carolina prisons last year came from technical violations of probation, not new crimes. That was true of 57 percent of misdemeanor admissions.

Something is clearly not working in North Carolina's probation system, but that is hardly news. Neither is the lack of treatment programs and prison alternatives. The question is will the latest numbers about the growing prison crisis finally prompt lawmakers to do something about it.