August is usually quiet in official Washington, with Congress out of session and everyone who can leave town having done so, but the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has been crunching numbers and cranking out reports on a near weekly basis this month. In its latest report, released Sunday, BJS announced that that nation's combined federal, state and local adult correctional population reached a new high of almost 6.5 million men and women in 2000, having grown by 126,400 during the past year. That means that 3.1% of the total adult population of the United States, or one in every 32 adults, is either in prison or jail, on parole or on probation.
On December 31, 2000, there were 3,839,532 men and women on probation, 725,527 on parole, 1,312,354 in prison and 621,149 in local jails. The figure represents a 2% increase over 1999 and a whopping 49% increase since 1990. But the increase last year was only half the average rate of increase for the decade as whole. Combined with a similar leveling-off in the prison population (http://www.drcnet.org/wol/199.html#prisonstats), the figures suggest that the country's decades-long incarceration binge may have reached a plateau.
"This could be the beginning of a peak," James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston, told the Associated Press.
With about one-third of those under correctional
August is usually quiet in official Washington,
with Congress out of session and everyone who can leave town having done
so, but the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has
been crunching numbers and cranking out reports on a near weekly basis
this month. In its latest report, released Sunday, BJS announced
that that nation's combined federal, state and local adult correctional
population reached a new high of almost 6.5 million men and women in 2000,
having grown by 126,400 during the past year. That means that 3.1%
of the total adult population of the United States, or one in every 32
adults, is either in prison or jail, on parole or on probation.
On December 31, 2000, there were 3,839,532
men and women on probation, 725,527 on parole, 1,312,354 in prison and
621,149 in local jails. The figure represents a 2% increase over
1999 and a whopping 49% increase since 1990. But the increase last
year was only half the average rate of increase for the decade as whole.
Combined with a similar leveling-off in the prison population (http://www.drcnet.org/wol/199.html#prisonstats),
the figures suggest that the country's decades-long incarceration binge
may have reached a plateau.
"This could be the beginning of a peak,"
James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University
in Boston, told the Associated Press.
With about one-third of those under correctional
supervision behind bars, some 4.6 million persons are on either probation
or parole. While the BJS figures do not provide a breakdown by criminal
offense, they do note that among probationers, drug offenses are the most
common charge. Drug offenders make up 24% of persons on probation,
with drunk driving infractions coming in second with 18%.
More people are out on parole now than
ever before -- some 725,000, up 36% since 1990 -- but not because parole
boards have become more lenient. In fact, the percentage of parolees
released because of parole board action declined over the past decade,
from 59% to 37%, BJS said. The rest were automatically paroled after
serving a portion of their sentences, as mandated by various state laws.
Instead, the increase in parolees can be attributed to the overall growth
in the number of prisoners in recent years. The increase in parolees
is even more striking when set against the number of states with large
declines in parolees because of "truth in sentencing" laws that have done
away with parole. States with large declines in parolees include
Massachusetts (-20.0%), Rhode Island (-11.1%), Kansas (-35.6%), Nebraska
(-16.7%), North Dakota (-23.7%), North Carolina (-23.7%), Virginia (-12.2%),
and Washington (-20.0%).
Parole population gains of 10 percent or
more were reported in 14 states and the District of Columbia, BJS said.
Connecticut and Arkansas led with a 22% increase in their parole populations
in 2000, followed by Vermont and Oklahoma (both up 20%).
Racial disparities in criminal justice
show up in probation and parole patterns. Blacks continue to be over-represented
among parolees and probationers, constituting 40% of the former and a third
of the latter. Interestingly, the over-representation of African-Americans
under state control is least for probation, the least serious criminal
justice sanction.
Georgetown University law professor David
Cole, author of "No Equal Justice," told the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour this
week that race and drug policy issues fueled the increase in the supervised
population. "The drug war has driven this increase," he said.
"It is driven by a lot of political rhetoric and by the fact that the costs
are not borne by the white majority, the folks who vote in all those 'three-strikes'
laws. The costs are being borne disproportionately by blacks and
Hispanics. If you saw the incarceration rate among whites where it
is among blacks, the politics of crime would be very different. You'd
be seeing calls for child care, education, prevention, not more prisons.
"We have an incarceration rate five times
higher than our nearest European competitor," Cole said. "This raises
serious questions about the meaning of freedom if the country that calls
itself the leader of the free world is the leader of the incarcerated world."
(Visit http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/ppus00.htm
to read the BJS report online.)
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