- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The
United States saw its prison and jail population increase again in 2003,
the Justice Department reported on Thursday.
-
- The number of people held in U.S. federal and state prisons
and jails on June 30, 2003, was 2,078,570 -- almost 41,000 more than the
previous year and the biggest increase in four years.
-
- The Justice Department reported earlier this month that
the annual cost of the U.S. prison system was around $57 billion.
-
- Women inmates passed the 100,000 level for the first
time ever. The number of women incarcerated rose by 5 percent, almost double
the rate of increase among males.
-
- Attorney General John Ashcroft said the report shows
that the United States was succeeding in taking "hard core criminals"
off the streets.
-
- "It is no accident that violent crime is at a 30-year
low while prison population is up," Ashcroft said in a statement.
-
- The rise in the prison population comes despite a decade
of falling crime rates. But with recidivism as high as 66 percent, fewer
crimes has not translated into fewer inmates.
-
- Over the past 25 years, the U.S. prison system has more
than quadrupled in size, as the nation adopted policies to get tough on
crime. Among those incarcerated are hundreds of thousands of people sentenced
to long terms for relatively minor crimes like drug possession, the majority
of them black or Hispanic.
-
- "Mandatory sentences are filling federal prisons
with low-level offenders instead of the kingpins they were supposed to
catch," said Julie Stewart, president of Families Against Mandatory
Minimums.
-
- However, recently many states have been looking for ways
to cut their prison populations to reduce fiscal problems, by releasing
non-violent offenders early and by diverting drug offenders to treatment
programs.
-
- The fact that the prison population continued to increase
despite such steps showed more drastic measures were needed, prison reformers
said.
-
- "These new figures demonstrate that modest reforms
will not be sufficient to control the explosive growth of the prison system,"
said Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project, a Washington think-tank that
advocates for a smaller prison system.
-
- "Comprehensive change is necessary to address the
range of sentencing policies that have produced this situation," he
said.
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- The United States incarcerates people at a rate six to
10 times higher than most other democracies. For example, the U.S. incarceration
rate of 715 per 100,000 residents compares to rates of 114 for Australia,
116 for Canada, 95 for France and 96 for Germany.
-
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