U.S. Prisons At Record Population

U.S. prisons and jails now hold a record 1.8 million Americans and may hold 2 million by the end of 2001, according to new Justice Department statistics.

That means 1 in 147 Americans are behind bars, a national rate of incarceration second only to Russia, and a source of concern to those worried about how much it will cost to keep that many inmates locked up.

According to The Sentencing Project, an advocacy group for corrections issues, the U.S. rate is five to eight times higher than other industrialized democracies.

The report, Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 1999, surveyed federal, state, county and municipal jails and found that together they held 1,860,520 inmates on June 30, 1999, an increase of 58,333 from a year earlier.

During the same period, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reports, violent crime went down 10 percent nationwide.

Since 1990, the behind-bars population grew by almost 712,000 inmates.

State prisons held 1,136,582 inmates and federal prisons held 117,995, a jump of 3.1 percent for the states and 9.9 percent for the federal system.

The increase in state prison population was smaller that it had been earlier in the 1990s, but the federal boost was the largest one-year gain ever, comprising 10,614 new inmates.

Nationwide, local jails increased slightly, from just over 590,000 in 1998 to 605,943 in 1999.

Louisiana, Texas and Georgia posted the highest incarceration rates: Louisiana had locked up 1,025 of every 100,000 people. Vermont, Maine, Minnesota, North Dakota and Hawaii had the least jailed.

But the largest increase was in Vermont, up 14.9 percent.

Rhode Island’s incarcerated population fell 11.2 percent. Eight other states also saw their population decrease.

Some of the states where the population fell, such as North Carolina, had instituted changes in sentencing laws to control jail population growth, The Sentencing Project reported.

According to estimates in the report, "11 percent of black males, 4 percent of Hispanic males and 1.5 percent of white males in their twenties and early thirties were in prison or jail."

"Overall, black men and women were at least seven times more likely than whites and two times more likely than Hispanics to have been in prison or jail on June 30, 1999," a Bureau of Justice Statistics summary of the report read.

Local jailers were responsible for a total of 687,973 offenders, but 12 percent were in alternative programs and not locked up.

Despite the increase in inmates, jails still created prison space faster than they used it, adding 39,500 beds.

The current figures make the U.S. incarceration rate 682 per 100,000, just behind Russia’s 685 per 100,000.

According to the Sentencing Project, the federal prison population has increased 64 percent since Bill Clinton became president, and the state population has grown 46 percent in the same period. Sixty percent of federal inmates are jailed on dru offenses, the organization says.

The president’s 2001 budget asks for over $1.9 billion to plan or build 17 new federal prison facilities between 2001 and 2003.

By JARRETT MURPHY