- WASHINGTON - The number of American adults imprisoned has more than doubled
over the past 12 years, reaching its highest level ever last year, the
Justice Department said Sunday. The United States soon may surpass Russia
as the country with the highest rate of incarceration.
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- At mid-1998, jails and prisons held an
estimated 1.8 million people, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics
report. At the end of 1985, the figure was 744,208.
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- Viewed another way, there were 668 inmates
for every 100,000 U.S. residents as of June 1998, compared with 313 inmates
per 100,000 people in 1985.
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- In Russia, 685 people out of every 100,000
are behind bars, according to The Sentencing Project, a U.S. group critical
of the general trend toward harsher sentencing of American criminals.
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- A planned amnesty of 100,000 prisoners
in Russia and the expectation of continued increases in the U.S. inmate
population means the United States probably will become the world's leading
jailer "in a year or two," said Jenni Gainsborough, a Sentencing
Project spokeswoman.
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- The number of people imprisoned in the
United States has grown for more than a quarter century, helped by increased
drug prosecutions and a general get-tough policy on all classes of offenders.
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- More criminals serving longer sentences
led the inmate population to top 1 million in 1990; it has continued to
rise.
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- About two-thirds of the nation's inmates
are in state and federal prisons; the remaining one-third are in local
jails.
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- Prisons generally hold convicted criminals
sentenced to terms longer than one year, while jails typically keep those
awaiting trial and those sentenced to 12 months or less.
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- In the June 1998 Justice Department survey,
1.2 million people were held in prisons, while local jails held about 600,000
men and women. Local jails also supervised more than 72,000 people under
various outside work, treatment or home detention programs.
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- The survey showed the total number of
people behind bars grew by 4.4 percent from June 1997.
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- Between the end of 1990 and mid-1998,
the incarcerated population grew an average 6.2 percent annually, said
the report's author, statistician Darrell Gilliard.
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- Although the total growth rate was slower
last year, Gilliard said the difference is not statistically significant.
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- "The numbers have been pretty steady
throughout the 1990s, with a pretty steady increase every year," he
said.
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- Gilliard's report showed the number of
inmates in state prisons grew 4.1 percent last year; the number in federal
prisons grew 8.3 percent; and the number in local jails grew 4.5 percent.
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- The figures closely track numbers released
last summer that showed a 5.2 percent growth rate in federal and state
prison inmates by the end of 1997.
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