Report: 1 Percent of Americans Incarcerated

WASHINGTON — For the first time in history more than 1 percent of adults in the United States are locked away in jail or prison, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts report.

By the close of 2007, one in every 99.1 adults — more than 2.3 million people — were held in federal and state detention facilities, according to the report produced by the Pew Center on the States’ Public Safety Performance Project.

During 2007, the U.S. prison population increased by more than 25,000 inmates to almost 1.6 million inmates, marking a 1.6 percent increase over the 2006 level, according to the report. The prison population experienced a 3.1 percent increase during 2006.

Local jails throughout the United States held 723,131 inmates at the end of 2007, according to the report. The United States leads the world in incarceration ahead of the more populous China, which has 1.5 million people incarcerated, and Russia, which holds 890,000 people behind bars.

The United States also leads the world in the number of inmates per capita, with 750 inmates per 100,000 residents, according to the report. Second-placed Russia is the leading European country in inmates per capita with 628 per 100,000 residents. In Germany, 93 people per 100,000 residents are incarcerated. 

The increasing inmate populations is “saddling cash-strapped states with soaring costs they can ill afford and failing to have a clear impact on recidivism or overall crime,” according to the report.

Since 1987, collective spending on state corrections systems has increased from less than $11 billion to more than $49 billion in fiscal year 2007, according to the report.

“For all the money spent on corrections, there hasn’t been a clear and convincing return for public safety,” says Adam Gelb, director of the Pew’s Public Safety Performance Project.

Approximately 67 percent of state inmates return to prison within three years of release, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
While state spending on corrections increased by 127 percent — in inflation-adjusted dollars — between 1987 and 2007, states expenditures on higher education increased by 21 percent, according to the report.

“States are paying a high cost for corrections, one that may not be buying them as much public safety as it should, and spending on prisons may be crowding out investments in other valuable programs that could enhance a state’s economic competitiveness,” says Susan Urahn, managing director of the Pew Center on the States.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons and 36 states reported increases in inmate population in 2007, according to the report. Of the seven states with prison populations of more than 50,000 inmates, Florida, Georgia and Ohio reported increases, while California, Michigan, New York and Texas reportedly held fewer inmates than in 2006.

Texas surpassed California as the state with the highest number of inmates, although both reported a decline — 326 inmates and 4,068 inmates, respectively.

Among the remaining states, 10 reported prison population increases of at least 5 percent, according to the report. Kentucky reported the highest percentage increase of 12 percent.

In the United States, there is no national standard used to tally the number of inmates at the state level, experts say.

“There are so many different methods states use to calculate prison populations that the figures in the report don’t necessarily line up with the numbers from state departments of correction,” Gelb says. “We aligned numbers with the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ counts and 2006 year-end reports from states and did the best we could.”

Increases in the rate of incarceration and the prison population do not correspond with parallel increases in crime or growth in the general population, Gelb says. More people are behind bars because of tougher sentencing laws and probation policies.

The number of individuals sentenced to incarceration and the terms of their release are the two primary factors that influence the size of the prison population, says James Austin, president of Washington-based nonprofit The JFA Institute. “We’ve seen that the most effective ways to reduce prison populations are through sentencing reform on the front end and through progressive parole boards on the back end,” Austin says.

Policy makers at the state and federal level are becoming increasingly aware of research-backed strategies for diversified sanctions and alternatives to incarceration — community corrections, electronic tracking and supervision, and diversion, rehabilitation and treatment programming — that can be applied to low-risk or nonviolent offenders to reduce recidivism and prison populations without jeopardizing public safety or fiscal health, according to the report.

In an effort to reduce recidivism, prison populations and corrections spending, lawmakers in Kansas and Texas are embracing an alternatives-to-incarceration strategy that blends diversified sanctions, community supervision and treatment programming in sentencing low-risk offenders and for technical violations of parole and probation, such as missing a counseling session, according to the report.

“The new approach, born of bipartisan leadership, is allowing the two states to ensure they have enough prison beds for violent offenders while helping less dangerous lawbreakers become productive, taxpaying citizens,” according to the report.

Between 1985 and 2005, Texas lawmakers invested $2.3 billion to build 108,000 beds as the state prison population increased by 300 percent, according to the report.

In 2007, the Legislature refused to spend more than $500 million on additional prison beds and instead moved to overhaul the state corrections system, expanding treatment and diversion beds, drug courts and instituting parole reforms.

“Growth in the [Texas] prison population is projected to remain flat over the next five years,” Gelb says.

Pew was assisted in collecting state prison counts by the Association of State Correctional Administrators and the JFA Institute. The report also relies on data published by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Association of State Budget Officers, and the U.S. Census Bureau.