Last week, a man named Kevin Elders was sentenced to 10 years in prison for selling one-eighth of an ounce of cocaine to his best friend. It was Elders' first criminal offense. After the trial, the friend who turned him in committed suicide. This is a tremendous episode in the nation's stark-raving-mad love affair with jail cells for drug addicts. But it is far from the only one.

Yesterday, the president signed a bill that authorizes $8 billion for new prisons. There are enough people like Kevin Elders so that every new cell bought by this bill already is spoken for. We have doubled the number of people in jail since 1980, and nearly all of them are dope addicts and small-bore dealers and their friends. More people are in jails now than at any time in the history of the country. So much of it is a colossal waste of money and lives.

Among those occupying a cell at huge expense is Nicole Richardson, age 21.

One day, back when she was 18 and a senior in high school, she took a call from a drug agent, who was looking for her boyfriend, Jeff. The boyfriend dealt LSD. He had sold nine grams of LSD to the drug agents, and now the agents wanted to pay him. Nicole Richardson had nothing to do with drug dealing, other than dating a dealer. She told the man on the phone that Jeff wasn't home and gave out another phone number.

Of course, Jeff and Nicole both were arrested. Jeff bargained his way to five years because he knew many drug dealers and could tell the police about them. But Nicole only knew one drug dealer - her boyfriend, Jeff. The judge had to give her the minimum sentence that the Congress of the United States had enacted for selling nine grams of LSD, about a quarter-ounce:

Ten years in federal prison with no possibility of parole. Nicole Richardson is now incarcerated in West Virginia for answering a phone for her boyfriend Jeff when she was 18.

This is criminally insane. The nation has caused huge injury with drug laws that require a "mandatory minimum" sentence. These prevent judges from using common sense. It is sick.

In the crime bill that President Clinton signed yesterday, the Congress half-fixed the problem. From now on, people like Nicole - low-level nobodies, first offenders, nonviolent - would not have to be sentenced to 10 years. The judge could take real life into consideration. But at the last minute, Congress blew a chance to repair some of the damage to the Nicole Richardsons rotting away in prison. A sensible, decent reform was proposed to allow these nobodies to apply for a sentence reduction. It was backed by plenty of Republicans and Democrats.

But it was stopped dead at the last minute by a Republican congressman from Brightwaters, L.I., who threw his foolish body in front of it. When the committees were negotiating the final details, Rep. Rick Lazio demanded that they take out the language that would allow people such as Nicole Richardson to get a break in their sentences. Then he bragged about it in the House of Representatives. "The question I had to pose to myself was, do we care more about convicted drug dealers or the health and well-being of our children in our neighborhoods," said Lazio. He continued: "This revised bill strips the language that could have allowed the release of as many as 16,000 convicted crack dealers and drug offenders who would have been released into our communities under the original bill."

That happens to be Grade A baloney, neatly sliced. Of course he mentions crack dealers instead of cocaine dealers. A crack dealer is a black guy standing in front of a housing project in Brooklyn; a coke dealer is the guy with the long hair who stands near a jukebox in a Suffolk County bar.

Who do you think a Suffolk County congressman is going to pretend he is protecting people from - someone they see every day or one of Those People from the city?

Anyway, Lazio's numbers are wrong. The number of people who might get a break is not 16,000 - at most, it's 5,000, and probably not even that many.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission did a study of federal prisoners to figure out how many might be eligible for a break. The findings: "The proposal would definitely affect about 1,600 defendants . . . [with] another 3,400 possibly affected defendants."

And these 5,000 people wouldn't just stroll out of jail: their sentences would be cut, at most, from one to three years. This would have saved about $164 million, by the way.

Kevin Elders, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for selling an eighth of an ounce of cocaine, comes from Little Rock, Ark. That happens to be Bill Clinton's hometown. Elders' mother is Joycelyn Elders, the surgeon general of the United States. He will join a huge congregation of people going nowhere in a society running on a treadmill over drugs.

"We went from 2,700 prisoners in 1980 to about 8,600 today," said Alan Ables, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Correction.

"For the past 20 years, we in the United States have had the greatest increase in the rate of imprisonment in human history - four times as many prisoners," said Mark Mauer of the Sentencing Project in Washington. "One would question is this a good use of financial resources."

Of course not. But it does allow Congress members to keep people like Nicole Richardson locked up. Then they go home and make speeches about how they saved us from crack dealers.

They should be arrested for squandering fortunes and lives.