The cost of combating crime in the United States, for police, prisons and courts, was $147 billion in 1999, the last year for which figures are available, according to a study released Sunday by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

That is more than four times the $36 billion spent on the criminal justice system in 1982. Federal, state and local expenditures for police, prisons and courts continued to increase every year in the 1990s, even as crime fell during the decade.

Nearly 2.2 million people work in the criminal justice system, including 1 million police officers, 717,000 prison and jail guards and 455,000 people in the courts, the report said. The expenditures amount to 7.7 percent of all state and local government spending and are about the same as government spending on hospitals and health care.

The report did not directly address the question of how effective the spending has been. But it did find that in general, crime rates and spending on criminal justice were related, though not in the sense that many people believe.

"States with high crime rates tend to have higher than average expenditures and employment'' devoted to criminal justice, the report said, while states with the lowest crime rates tend to have the lowest spending and employment.

Three of the top four states in spending on criminal justice per capita were the District of Columbia, Alaska and California, all with high crime rates, the report said. But the five states with the lowest spending per capita on criminal justice were South Dakota, Maine, Vermont, North Dakota and West Virginia, which have long been among the states with the lowest crime rates.

"You can't assume that because you spend more money that you are going to drive down crime,'' said Michael Jacobson, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former corrections and probation commissioner and deputy budget director for New York City. "That is a simplistic assumption.''

The question now, Jacobson said, is whether the fiscal crisis facing almost all states will force policy-makers to confront the costs of using prisons to lock up an ever increasing number of people.

"In the 1990s, when states were flush with cash, they could do everything,'' Jacobson said. They could cut taxes and build more prisons, he said, and in fact prisons were the fastest-growing item in state budgets during the past decade. "But now they must make hard choices, and with crime already going down, they must put a price on prisons.''

Several states, including Ohio and Michigan, have already closed prisons in the past few months as a result of budget shortfalls, and some other states, including Washington, are considering reversing tough sentencing laws passed in the 1990s, so that inmates will serve shorter terms and the pressure for prison bed space will be reduced.

Jeremy Travis, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and a former director of the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Justice Department, suggested that the report's finding about the huge costs of criminal justice might lead some states to consider a new strategy for dealing with crime.

"The question is whether spending all that money on investments in the local community, where crime is taking place, would end up costing less money,'' Travis said. The money might be more effectively spent on job training, education and family services in poor neighborhoods with high crime rates rather than "exporting those funds to prisons, courts and police officers outside of the community,'' he said.

In many states, including New York and California, most prisons are in rural areas, shifting jobs and resources far from the cities where the majority of criminals come from.

The report also highlights the federal government's increased role in the last two decades in criminal justice, which before then had been regarded more as a local or state function, said Alfred Blumstein, a professor of criminal justice at Carnegie Mellon University.

Federal expenditures on criminal justice jumped to $27.4 billion in 1999, up from $4.5 billion in 1982, the report found. That is a greater increase than those in state and local spending. The biggest proportion of the increase in federal spending was for prisons, as Congress moved to make more crimes federal crimes, particularly drug offenses, and imposed longer sentences.