editorial comment In Jail We Trust!

The U.S. penal system, the world's largest, maintained its steady growth in 2004, the Department of Justice reported on Sunday.

The latest official half-yearly figures found the nation's prison and jail population at 2,131,180 in the middle of last year, an increase of 2.3 percent over 2003.

The United States has incarcerated 726 people per 100,000 of its population, seven to 10 times as many as most other democracies. The rate for England is 142 per 100,000, for France 91 and for Japan 58.

The figures issued by the department's statistical unit showed that 12.6 percent of black males in their late twenties were behind bars. The comparable rate for Hispanic males was 3.6 percent and for whites 1.7 percent.

"Unless we promote alternatives to prison, the nation will continue to lead the world in imprisonment," said Jason Ziedenberg, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, a think-tank that studies prison issues.

According to the Justice Department, violent crime in the United States fell by over 33 percent from 1994 to 2003 and property crimes fell by 23 percent.

Yet the prison population has continued to climb, increasing an annual average of 3.5 percent since 1995, partly due to high recidivism. Within three years of their release, two of every three prisoners are back behind bars.

Criminologists attribute the growth in the prison population to "get tough on crime" policies that have subjected hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug and property offenders to long mandatory sentences.

"We have to be concerned about an overloaded system which sentences many offenders quickly and is not dong a good job of sorting out people who should be incarcerated from people for whom other responses would produce better, less expensive results," said Malcolm Young, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington think-tank.

The rise in the prison population varies by state. Since 1998, 12 states experienced stable or declining incarceration rates but crime rates in those states declined at the same rate as in the other 38.

Texas, with 704 per 100,000 people in state prisons, incarcerates almost seven times as many as Maine, at 149 per 100,000.

It costs around $22,000 to lock up one person for a year. The United States spends about $57 billion annually on its prison and jail system.

Women remain the fastest-growing segment of the prison population, increasing by 2.9 percent over the year to over 103,000. In 1980, the United States imprisoned 12,000 women.

In addition, the United States jails around 283,000 people with serious mental illnesses and almost 92,000 foreigners.

back | to top | full article >>