State legislators are considering merging two bills with very different potential outcomes: one could significantly reduce prison crowding; the other might dramatically increase it.

Consolidation of House Bill 130 and Senate Bill 73 is being considered as the General Assembly works through a lame-duck session expected to last up to three more weeks. Because a new two-year session begins in January, any bills not approved by year's end will die.

The House bill, through a variety of changes, could help to reduce the prison population, which on Monday hit 51,261, near another all-time high.

Meanwhile, the Senate bill, as it stands, would increase the penalties for possession of powder cocaine, making them equivalent to those for possession of crack cocaine.

That could increase the prison population and, as a result, cost the state an additional $25 million annually, according to a state analysis.

Terry Collins, director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, has been nurturing the House bill since the beginning of the year on behalf of the Strickland administration. He does not want it to die.

"We believe and certainly hope that it will have hearings shortly during the lame-duck session," Collins said. "We continue to believe it's an important measure to make our re-entry programs more effective and to give judges more sentencing options."

Collins declined to comment on the prospect of consolidating the two bills.

However, sources indicate that Sen. Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati, and other legislators are working with the Strickland administration on a compromise to equalize the powder- and crack-cocaine penalties so the measure could be added as an amendment to the sentencing bill.

As passed 89-6 by the House this year, the sentencing bill would give judges latitude to divert nonviolent offenders, remove obstacles for released prisoners and allow former prisoners to use their prison ID cards to get state-issued identification so they can cash checks and get a driver's license.

It also would set up an agreement with county sheriffs to keep short-term prisoners in county jails, allow creation and expansion of "re-entry courts," and empower the governor to release older and medically incapacitated prisoners.

The bill is sponsored by state Reps. Tyrone K. Yates, D-Cincinnati, and John J. White, R-Kettering.

Sen. Ray Miller, D-Columbus, is the prime backer of the cocaine bill.

Over the past decade, black leaders frequently complained that state law is discriminatory because someone caught with powder cocaine faced lighter sentences than those arrested for possession of the same amount of crack. Powder cocaine users often are white; crack users are more likely to be black.

Instead of lowering the charges for crack, Miller's bill, as passed 32-0 by the Senate in October 2007, proposed increasing the penalties for powder cocaine, resulting in the higher state costs to handle additional prisoners.

Miller says current law "does not follow the spirit of equity in the law."

ajohnson@dispatch.com