The city needs to do a better job of supplying drug treatment, job training, health care, and other social services to prison inmates when they are released, a coalition led by former Mayor W. Wilson Goode said yesterday.

The Consensus Group on Reintegration and Reentry of Adjudicated Offenders estimated that about two-thirds of the 35,000 people who leave Philadelphia prisons each year are rearrested within three years, often because they lack job skills and have substance-abuse or health problems.

Just cutting the number of repeat offenders by 10 percent could save about $7 million each year in prison costs alone, the group said.

Inmates will move back to their communities after being released "whether we like it or not," said Goode, who formed the group that included a broad spectrum of religious, social-service, and government leaders.

"They're coming back to joblessness, homelessness. They're coming back with health problems, and mostly they're coming back without family or community support," Goode added.

Group members, who have been studying the issue since last March, include District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham; Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson; Frederica Massiah-Jackson, president judge of Common Pleas Court; Ellen Greenlee, chief public defender; and William DiMascio, director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society. Search for Common Ground, a Washington-based organization that specializes in leading diverse groups to a consensus, helped run the project.

Mayor Street endorsed the group's recommendations and said he would appoint a member of his administration to consider them.

"We have to create a better system for working with the people who are coming in and out of our prison system," he said.

But Street also said no new money was available in the proposed fiscal 2004 budget for inmate programs. He said the city could focus on initiatives that did not cost money and could apply for grant funding for others. He suggested some money could be "carved out" of workforce-development funds and be dedicated to inmates.

The city is already pursuing low-cost solutions, such as a program that sends clergy members to contact all prisoners within 24 hours of their release, Street said.

Philadelphia has provided some social programs for prisoners since the early 1990s, when prison overcrowding led officials to seek new ways to keep people out of jail.

Even so, the city's average daily prison population has grown from about 5,300 in the mid-1990s to about 7,500 today.

The size of the prison population depends on many factors, including police policy. Arrests dramatically increased under former Police Commissioner John F. Timoney, when elite teams began cracking down in crime-ridden neighborhoods with Operation Sunrise. The average daily prison population zoomed as high as 7,800 during 2001.

Operation Safe Streets, the policy created by the Street administration, attempts to drive criminals off the streets without arresting them. Arrests dropped 13 percent between 2001 and 2002 - from 78,612 to 68,666. The effect on the prison population remains to be seen.

In the meantime, advocates for prisoners say the city could save money and become safer if it focuses on keeping people out of trouble in the first place.

"Employment alone" changes things, said Byron Cotter, director of alternative sentencing at the Defender Association of Philadelphia. "If a client is employed, he is much less likely to return."

Cotter, who runs a project that offers early parole to prisoners who enroll in a six-month drug treatment program, said eight out of 10 participants stay out of jail for at least two years.

But to reach more people, the city will need more money, he said.

About 1,300 participants are enrolled in the drug treatment program, with 500 waiting to be evaluated. Some have been waiting since November because the program needs more evaluators, Cotter said.

The city always could use more state-funded employment counselors for prisoners, he said.

"We have been successful to some extent," Cotter said. "However, we can do so much more... . The ones who don't come back are probably ones who we've touched."