Pubdate: Mon, 28 Jul 2003
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Copyright: 2003 San Jose Mercury News
Contact:  http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/390
Author: Fox Butterfield

U.S. PRISON ROLLS GROW BY 2.6 PERCENT

The nation's prison population grew 2.6 percent last year, the largest 
increase since 1999, according to a study by the Justice Department.

The jump came despite a small decline in serious crime in 2002. It also 
came at a time when a growing number of states facing large budget deficits 
have begun trying to reduce prison costs by easing tough sentencing laws 
passed in the 1990s, thereby decreasing the number of inmates.

``The key finding in the report is this growth, which is somewhat 
surprising in its size after several years of relative stability in the 
prison population,'' said Allen J. Beck, an author of the report. Beck is 
the chief prison demographer for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the 
statistical arm of the Justice Department, which puts out an annual study 
of the number of people incarcerated in the United States.

At the end of 2002, there were 2,166,260 Americans in local jails, state 
and federal prisons and juvenile detention facilities, the report found.

Another important finding in the report was that 10.4 percent of all black 
men ages 25 to 29, or 442,300 people, were in prison last year. By 
comparison, 2.4 percent of Latino men and 1.2 percent of white men in the 
same age group were in prison.

The report, which was released Sunday, found that this large racial 
disparity had not increased in the past decade. But Marc Mauer, the 
assistant director of the Sentencing Project, a prison reform research and 
advocacy group, said that with the number of black men in prison remaining 
so high, ``the ripple effect on their communities, and on the next 
generation of kids growing up with their fathers in prison, will certainly 
be with us for at least a generation.''

Beck and Mauer and other experts said the growth in the prison population 
last year, despite the efforts by some states to reduce the number of 
inmates, was a result of the continuing effect of draconian sentencing laws 
passed in the 1990s when the states could afford to build more prisons and 
politicians competed to sound tough on crime.

Beck said increases in inmates in several of the largest states contributed 
to most of the national increase. Those states included California, 
Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania, he said. In Florida, he said, local 
judges used their discretion under the tougher laws to sentence more people 
convicted of felonies to prison rather than probation or other programs.

Alfred Blumstein, a leading criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University, 
said it was not illogical for the prison population to go up even when the 
crime rate goes down.

For one thing, Blumstein said, some crimes considered victimless are not 
counted in the FBI's annual report on the crime rate, including drug 
crimes, gun possession crimes and immigration offenses.

Another reason, Blumstein said, was that it has become increasingly clear 
from statistical research that ``there is no reason that the prison count 
and the crime rate have to be consistent.'' The crime rate measures the 
amount of crime people are suffering from, he said, while the prison count 
is a measure of how severely society chooses to deal with crime, which 
varies from time to time.

Beck said he did not believe the sizable increase in the prison population 
last year was the start of a trend back to the big increases of the 1980s 
and 1990s, when the number of incarcerated Americans quadrupled. States do 
not have the money to build more prisons now, he said.

If You're Interested

Visit the Bureau of Justice Statistics Web site (www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs).
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens