Wednesday, June 09, 2010
(photo: California Department of Corrections and Rehabiliatation)
Incarceration levels in U.S. jails and prisons are in decline, with state penitentiaries recording their first year-to-year reduction since 1972. But even with the shrinking numbers in jail and prison populations, the country still has more Americans locked up than there are people in some U.S. states.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, the total number of those confined in county and city jails from 2008 to 2009 shrunk by nearly 18,000 inmates. The size of this incarcerated population was still 767,620—which is more than the population of Alaska (698,000).
Of those serving time in jails as of midyear 2009, 42.5% were white, 39.2% were black, and 16.2% were Hispanic.
As for state prisons, the number held in these facilities as of January 2010 was 1.4 million—which represented a 0.3% drop from the previous year, according to the Public Safety Performance Project of the Pew Center on the States. Although the change was slight, it nonetheless represented the first drop from one year to the next in nearly 40 years.
The 1.4 million confined in state prisons was larger than the populations of New Hampshire (1.32 million), Maine (1.32 million) and Hawaii (1.3 million).
Even with the overall drop in state prisons, nearly half of the states (24) still recorded increases in their inmate populations. Some of the largest (5% or more) were recorded in Indiana, West Virginia and Vermont.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Jail Inmates at Midyear 2009–Statistical Tables (Bureau of Justice Statistics) (pdf)
Prison Count 2010 (Pew Center on the States) (pdf)
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