U.S. Incarceration Rate

U.S. Incarceration Rate

P11 [724] "[B]etween 1972 and 1997, the number of state and federal inmates rose from 196,000 to 1,159,000 -- a nearly sixfold increase. In the next decade, the number behind bars nearly doubled again, and now exceeds two million."

D14 "Between 1970 and the most recent statistics [as of 2005], the per capita prison population has grown almost threefold. Growth continued despite the decline in crime during the 1990s."

F9 [143] "[O]ver the last fifty years, we have witnessed an unprecedented increase in prosecutions, convictions, and imprisonment rates. [from FN79:] The total number of people in American prisons or jails has skyrocketed from fewer than 213,000 in 1960 to nearly 2.2 million in 2005...Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Dep't of Justice, One in Every 32 Adults Was in Prison, Jail, on Probation, or on Parole at the End of 2005."

G5 [242] "President [Clinton] stuck to a tough line [on crime], signing into law a long list of punitive bills and presiding over such spectacular growth in the prison population that the United States passed Russia as the nation with the world's highest incarceration rate. He may have regretted it, though. Mandatory minimum sentences are 'unconscionable' and 'we really need an examination of our entire prison policy,' Clinton told a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine -- two weeks before he left office."

[243] "[T]ougher sentences became such a fixture of American politics in the 1980s and 1990s that the prison population soared from 400,000 in 1980 to 2.1 million by 2000."

Throughout this site, for purposes of brevity sources are abbreviated ('A1' etc.). However the titles of some are so good, that they bear repeating outside of the 'Bibliography' itself. The following is one of them:

"Too Many Laws, Too Many Prisoners: Never in the Civilized World Have So Many Been Locked Up for So Little"

E2 "In all, the number of prisoners in state lock-ups fell by 0.3% in 2009, the first fall since 1972. But the total number of Americans behind bars still rose slightly, because the number of federal prisoners climbed by 3.4%."

N3 "This country puts too many people behind bars for too long. Most elected officials, afraid of being tarred as soft on crime, ignore these problems. Sen. Jim Webb, a Democrat of Virginia, is now courageously stepping into the void, calling for a national commission to re-assess criminal justice policy...The United States has the world's highest reported incarceration rate. Although it has less than 5 percent of the world's population, it has almost one-quarter of the world's prisoners. And for the first time in history, more than 1 in 100 American adults are now behind bars. Many inmates are serving long sentences for nonviolent crimes."

P11 [724] "Our rate of incarceration -- approximately one out of every 150 Americans -- is the highest in the Western World by at least a factor of five, and has even surpassed the world's previous leader, Russia. It is estimated that the United States has a quarter of the entire world's prison population."

S23 [364] "The rate of incarceration in this country is six to ten times higher than that of other comparable industrialized nations, such as England, France, Germany, and Switzerland."

L2 "[I]n one area, America is growing from strength to strength -- the incarceration of its population. America has less than 5% of the world's people but almost 25% of its prisoners. It imprisons 756 people per 100,000 residents, a rate nearly five times the world average. About one in every 31 adults is either in prison or on parole. Black men have a one-in-three chance of being imprisoned at some point in their lives. 'A Leviathan unmatched in human history,' is how Glenn Loury, professor of social studies at Brown University, characterizes America's prison system. Conditions in the Leviathan's belly can be brutal. More than 20% of inmates report that they have been sexually assaulted by guards or fellow inmates...There are four times as many mentally ill people in prisons as in mental hospitals...The punishment extends to prisoners' families, too. America's 1.7 [million] 'prison orphans' are six times more likely than their peers to end up in prison themselves...America's incarceration habit is a disgrace, wasting resources at home and damaging the country abroad...For most of the 20th century America imprisoned roughly the same proportion of its population as many other countries -- a hundred people for every 100,000 citizens. But while other countries stayed where they were, the American incarceration rate then took off -- to 313 per 100,000 in 1985 and 648 in 1997...The prison-industrial complex...employs thousands of people and armies of lobbyists...Some signs suggest that the tide is turning...Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003. Barack Obama's Justice Department has hinted that it wants to do something about the disparity in sentencing between blacks and whites for drug crimes. Support for both the death penalty and the war on drugs is softening: a dozen states have legalized the use of marijuana for medical purposes."

Throughout this site, for purposes of brevity sources are abbreviated ('A1' etc.). However the titles of some are so good, they bear repeating outside of the 'Bibliography' itself. The following is one of them:

"Rough Justice: America Locks Up Too Many People, Some for Acts That Should Not Even Be Criminal"

E1 "America is different from the rest of the world in lots of was, many of them good. One of the bad ones is its willingness to lock up its citizens...One American adult in 100 festers behind bars (with the rate rising to one in nine for young black men). Its imprisoned population, at 2.3 [million], exceeds that of 15 of its states. No other rich country is nearly as punitive as the Land of the Free. The rate of incarceration is a fifth of America's level in Britain, a ninth in Germany and a twelfth in Japan...[L]awmakers who wish to sound tough must propose laws tougher than the ones the last chap who wanted to sound tough proposed. When the crime rate falls, tough sentences are hailed as the cause, even when demography or other factors may matter more: when the rate rises tough sentences are demanded to solve the problem. As a result, America's incarceration rate has quadrupled since 1970. Similar things have happened elsewhere...But the turn has been sharper in America than in most of the rich world, and the disparity has grown. It is explained neither by a difference in criminality...nor by the success of the policy: America's violent-crime rate is no higher than it was 40 years ago...[T]he extreme toughness of American laws, especially the ever broader classes of 'criminals' affected by them, seems increasingly counterproductive...Some parts of America are bucking the national trend. New York cut its incarceration rate by 15% between 1997 and 2007, while reducing violent crime by 40%...It seems odd that a country that rejoices in limiting the power of the state should give so many draconian powers to its government."

E2 "The system has three big flaws, say criminologists. First, it puts too many people away for too long."

E4 "By European standards, England and Wales imprison a large proportion of their population...154 per 100,000 people, compared with just 87 in Germany and 96 in France. (America jails the greatest proportion of its people of any country in the world, on figures from Kings College London: 753 per 100,000.)"

W16 [142] "Contemporary American criminal justice is characterized by...penalties that are extraordinarily harsh by the standards of the advanced industrialized world."

[148] "[I]t is of fundamental importance that American criminal punishment has become, over the last thirty years, uniquely harsh...[W]e make use of imprisonment as our ordinary sanction, where fines or other lesser punishments have become the ordinary sanctions almost everywhere else in the advanced industrial world. Americans go to prison, where offenders elsewhere pay fines, do public service, or suffer some suspension of social privileges."

K7 [563] "The German criminal system is generally less punitive than that of the United States...The German approach to imprisonment reflects the view that 'the imposition of a term of imprisonment often does more harm than good both to the perpetrator and to society as a whole and that the 'main aim is to resocialize the offender.'...Sentences of indefinite imprisonment are impermissible. There is also a strong principle of proportionality in German law."

K22 [959] "German law provides for sentences of ten years or longer, but they are exceedingly rare. The German penal code...establish[es] fifteen years as the maximum allowable sentence for all crimes (including repeat offenders), except aggravated murder, for which a life sentence without the possibility of parole is available."

[1036] "[The U.S.] criminal system says to serious offenders, 'You are forever outside and beneath this community. You are ruined people.' A society can afford to say that to a few people. It cannot afford to say that to large portions of the population. Punishment in America has essentially gotten some dangerous people off the street at the cost of creating a permanent underclass and a massive breakdown in social solidarity. There is a tragedy and irony in this. Crime is supposed to be antisocial; punishment should be prosocial. But American punishment has morphed into its own enemy: it has become antisocial itself." [Emphases original.]

'The Economist World in Figures 2011'

[101] Prisoners

Total prison pop., Per 100,000 pop.,

latest available year latest available year

1 United States 2,304,115 1 United States 753

2 China 1,565,771 2 Russia 660

3 Russia 862,300 3 Rwanda 593

4 Brazil 469,546 4 Virgin Islands (US) 561

5 India 376,396 5 Cuba 531

6 Mexico 224,749 6 British Virgin Islands 488

7 Thailand 212,058 7 Georgia 483

8 Iran 166,979 8 Belize 449

9 South Africa 164,526 9 Bermuda 394

10 Ukraine 144,380 10 Belarus 385

11 Indonesia 140,740 11 Kazakhstan 382

12 Turkey 118,929 12 Bahamas 376

13 Philippines 102,267 13 El Salvador 370

14 Pakistan 95,016 14 French Guiana 365

15 United Kingdom 94,258 15 Suriname 356

16 Vietnam 92,153 16 Cayman Islands 346

17 Poland 85,530 17 Maldives 343

18 Bangladesh 83,000 18 South Africa 331

19 Japan 80,523 19 Antigua and Barbuda 329

20 Ethiopia 80,487 20 Barbados 326

21 Spain 76,753 21 Israel 325

22 Colombia 76,500 22 Latvia 319

23 Germany 72,043 23 Netherlands Antilles 319

24 Myanmar 64,930 24 Ukraine 314

[Therefore, the United States had more people in prison than any other country in the world, both in raw numbers as well as on a per-capita basis. It had more than China, with its 1.3 billion people. In fact, it had nearly as many as Russia and China combined , both of which are repressive states, though in perhaps different ways. In per-capita terms, the U.S. had 27% more people in jail than did Rwanda, whose figures presumably reflected the genocide that country endured in 1994. We had 42% more than Cuba, that ostensibly communist country; 96% more than Belarus, which many experts regarded as the most totalitarian country in the world at the time, and 104% more than El Salvador, which endued a brutal civil war in the 1980s.]

'The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2021,' Skyhorse

[149] U.S. Prison Population, 1925-2018

Source: National Prisoner Statistics Program, Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), U.S. Dept. of Justice

"The imprisonment rate has declined since its high of 506 prisoners per 100,000 residents in 2008."

Year 2018 -- latest included: 431 per 100,000

[150] Prisoners and Incarceration Rates in Selected Countries, 2005-2018

Source: UN Survey on Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems, United Nations (UN) Office on Drugs and Crime

"The U.S. prison population is the largest of any nation, and its incarceration rate is the world's highest."

for 2017 -- most recent year for which U.S. incarceration rate available; rate per 100,000

1 United States 662.5

2 El Salvador 621.8

3 Thailand 538.9

4 Turkmenistan 528.9

5 Rwanda 509.1

6 Palau 483.3

7 Seychelles 440.6

8 St. Vinc./Grenad. 426.4

9 St. Kitts/Nevis 423.1

10 Russia 413.8

11 Grenada 398.2

12 Panama 393.4

13 Maldives 373.4

14 Belarus 363.6

15 Belize 344.9

16 Brazil 337.0

17 Uruguay 322.3

18 Antigua/Barbuda 321.1

19 Barbados 309.4

20 St. Lucia 291.2

21 Turkey 287.8

22 Iran 285.1

[Now to analyze the above 2017 figures, as well as compare/contrast them with the 2011 (or earlier) figures: The U.S. still #1, although the rate has declined from 753 to 662.5, about a 12% per capita drop (though the Economist and Almanac figures are not directly comparable). El Salvador has now jumped to #2, or about 6% less than the U.S. (El Salvador has one of the highest murder rates on the planet.) Rwanda's and Belarus's rates have gone down a bit, while Russia's rate has gone way down. Now comparing countries for the year 2017: Look at the U.S. (662.5) vs. Iran (285.1): the former has more than 2.3 times more prisoners per capita than the latter. Iran is one of the most repressive countries in the world .

[726] "This obsession with cracking down on crime [exists] despite empirical evidence both that crime rates are not that high, and that 'tough on crime' policies are not responsible for making them lower. Our overall crime rates are not that different from other Western countries, undercutting the argument that we need more prisons because we have more criminals to deal with."

L2 "As well as being brutal, prisons are ineffective. They may keep offenders off the streets, but they fail to discourage them from offending. Two-thirds of ex-prisoners are rearrested within three years of being released."

E1 "Mandatory minimum laws should be repealed, or replaced with guidelines."

E2 [27] "Jim Feldman, a defense lawyer in Tampa, Florida, says America is conducting 'an experiment in imprisoning first-time non-violent offenders for periods of time previously reserved for those who killed someone...Faced with such penalties, he says, the incentive to cooperate, which means to say things that are helpful to the prosecution, is overwhelming. And this, he believes, 'warps the truth-seeking function' of justice. Innocent defendants may plead guilty in return for a shorter sentence to avoid the risk of a much larger one..."

[29] "Bert Useem of Purdue University and Anne Piehl of Rutgers University estimate that a 10% increase in the number of people behind bars would reduce crime by only 0.5%. In the states that currently lock up the most people, imprisoning more would actually increase crime, they believe. Some inmates emerge from prison more accomplished criminals...A less punitive system could work better, argues Mark Kleiman of the University of California, Los Angeles. Swift and certain penalties deter more than harsh ones...'Just by making effective use of things we already know how to do, we could reasonably expect to have half as much crime and half as many people behind bars ten years from now,' says Mr. Kleiman. 'There are a thousand excuses for failing to make that effort, but not one good reason.'"

T8 [1] "Criminal justice policy and research in the United States have mostly marched in different directions since the mid-1970s. Sizable bodies of high-quality research have accumulated on many subjects on which policy making in a rational world would be evidence based, but only a few have had substantial influence. Policy making on some subjects has occurred mostly in an evidence-free zone."

[5] "Large, sophisticated literatures have developed on...[the] deterrent effects of sanctions. There is strong evidence that...making sanctions more severe has either no discernible crime-prevention effects or effects that are so highly context specific as not to be salient to setting general policies. In each case, the evidence documents failures of current policies and massive undesirable consequences. The evidence has almost entirely been ignored."

P11 [726] "There is no general demonstrable connection between increasing the severity of criminal penalties and the reduction of overall crime rates."

B25 [957] "[C]ertainty of punishment is a greater factor than severity in deterring criminals."

W16 [from FN62:] "('A consistent finding of empirical studies of deterrence is that increases in the certainty of punishment have a greater deterrent effect than increases in the severity of punishment.')" *

M29 [2] "As noted on Pennsylvania's Department of Corrections website: 'Research demonstrates that public safety is enhanced when. . .offenders complete evidence-based programs. . .and follow the rules during incarceration. . .Such offenders are less likely to victimize someone else after they are released. Research further tells us that the longer these. . .offenders remain in prison the greater the chance that they will recidivate. The certainty of punishment -- not the severity or a lengthy punishment -- is the key to success.'"

[This bears emphasizing: To dissuade people from committing crimes, instead of giving out stiff sentences, persuade them there's a very good chance they're going to be caught if they commit a crime. That's what actually works .]

E1 "An era of budget restraint...is as good a time as any to try [locking up fewer people]. Sooner or later American voters will realize their incarceration policies are unjust and inefficient; politicians who point that out to them may, in the end, get some credit."

N3 "[The U.S. system is] extraordinarily expensive. Billions of dollars now being spent on prisons each year could be used in far more socially productive ways...[T]he economic downturn should make both federal and state lawmakers receptive to the idea of reforming a prison system that is as wasteful as it is inhumane."

P11 [724] "The explosion of the prison population has also meant an explosion in prisons and prison costs. Between 1985 and 1995, the federal and state governments opened an average of one new prison each week. Between 1982 and 1993, government spending on corrections increased over 50%, far outstripping inflation. The rate of spending on prisons also grew to exceed spending on other social services. For example, in 1991, the federal government spent $26.2 billion on its main welfare program, Aid to Families With Dependent Children, which serviced13.5 million people. Critics argue that spending billions of dollars on prisons [725] diverts funds from social services that might prevent crime, and is this counterproductive."

G5 [249] "For prison guards, job security comes from rising crime and tougher laws -- or at least the perception of it, which is enough to get those tougher laws. In California, the guards' union is a legendary political machine. In the 1980s, it provided most of the funding to create the new victims' rights organizations that became key players in the push for longer sentences. The union funded the victorious 'yes' side when the state's ferocious three-strikes law -- the one that locked away petty thieves for life -- was put to a state-wide vote in 1994, and it funded the victorious 'no' side when there was a vote to narrow the law modestly a decade later. California's prisons have been at double capacity for years, even though the state built new prisons at a feverish pace. For guards, overcrowding means overtime, and in California, overtime typically means $37 an hour. According to Daniel Macallair of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, a liberal NGO in San Francisco that tracks the union's activities, it is not uncommon for California guards to earn over $100,000 a year, including their overtime.'"

[One particular point in the above bears repeating: The California prison guards' union 'provided most of the funding to create the new victims' rights organizations that became key players in the push for longer sentences.' That means the so-called '"victims" rights organizations' were essentially just fronts for the c.o.'s union. This should have been pointed out every time such "victims"' organizations were covered in the media.]

E2 "Crime is a young man's game...Yet America's prisons are crammed with old folk. Nearly 200,000 prisoners are over 50. Most would pose little risk if released. And since people age faster in prison than outside, their medical costs are vast. Human Rights Watch, a lobby-group, talks of 'nursing homes with razor wire.'...Jail is expensive...'[W]e are well past the point of diminishing returns,' says a report by the Pew Center on the States. Since the recession threw their budgets into turmoil, many states have decided to imprison fewer people, largely to save money. Mississippi has reduced the proportion of their sentences that non-violent offenders are required to serve, from 85% to 25%. Texas is making greater use of non-custodial penalties. New York has repealed most mandatory terms for drug offenses."

[But that's nothing compared to what still needs to happen in New York.]

B32 [209] [Cited figures are ca.2105, when this book was published.] "America accounts for less than 5 percent of the world's population, but almost a quarter of all prisoners. Some 2.3 million individuals are behind bars across the country, and in excess of 6 million are under 'correctional supervision' -- more, by far, than in any other nation. Even at their height, the Gulag labor camps never came close to the number of our citizens currently on probation, in jail or in prison, or on parole. Take one hundred thousand Americans, and 707 of them are languishing in a cell. By contrast, 282 out of every hundred thousand Iranians are locked up, 118 out of every hundred thousand Canadians, and only 78 out of every hundred thousand Germans.

"A country that abolished slavery 150 years ago now has a greater number of black men in the correctional system than there were slaves in 1850 and a greater percentage of its black population in jail than was imprisoned in Apartheid South Africa.

"Although there are many factors behind America's high incarceration rates, the ever-expanding list of criminal violations and the harshness of our sentencing are front and center.

"When Illinois's criminal code was updated in 1961, it was 72 pages, but by 2000 it had grown to 1,200 pages. Illinois is no anomaly: in every state, we imprison people for relatively minor nonviolent crimes -- like using drugs or passing a bad check -- that would receive a slap on the wrist in other countries. While no more than 10 percent of those convicted of crimes in Germany and the Netherlands are sent to prison, in the United States it's 70 percent. We also hand out much longer prison sentences than in other parts of the world. Burglarize a house in Vancouver, and on average you can expect five months in a Canadian facility. [210] But drive an hour south to Bellingham, Washington, and commit the same offense, and you'll spend more than three times as long in prison. The same pattern is true for serious crimes. In Norway, for example, no one can be given a sentence of more than twenty-one years, while in the United States we regularly lock people up and throw away the key."

[211] "The truth is that we're not going to make much progress until we realize that we are just as ignorant of the effects of our punishments as we are of what actually drives us to punish. Our favored tools of mass incarceration and solitary confinement do not do what we think they do. And we remain wedded to the same mistaken theories espoused two hundred years ago..."

"Now, as then, the prisoner and potential prisoner are viewed [212] as rational beings who make decisions to offend based on a cost-benefit analysis. To decrease crime, the thinking goes, you just need to increase the magnitude of the punishment until violating the law no longer seems to pay.

"That's what...we believe. And we are dead wrong."

[230] "To many policymakers, severe mandatory sentences seem to offer a powerful incentive to follow the rules. But the extreme harshness of our punishments may actually increase the likelihood of malfeasance because they suggest that the law is not worthy of respect. If a couple of garage break-ins over the summer and a stolen car can land a nineteen-year-old in prison for life, then it is hard to trust the system, believe in its rules, and rely on its processes and officers. Research has shown that citizens are more willing to follow the law when those authorities and legal rules are legitimate."

R26 [951] "[T]here is growing evidence to suggest skepticism about the criminal law's deterrent effect -- that is, skepticism about the ability to deter crime through the manipulation of criminal law rules and penalties...We suggest that, while it may be true that manipulation of criminal law rules can influence behavior, it does so only under conditions not typically found in the criminal justice systems of modern societies. In contrast, criminal lawmakers and adjudicators formulate and apply criminal law rules on the assumption that they always influence conduct. And it is this taken-for-granted assumption that we find so disturbing and so dangerous...[W]e briefly summarize the social science literature that prompts our skepticism as to whether the criminal law deters, showing that potential offenders do not know the law, do not make rational choices, or do not perceive an expected cost for a violation that outweighs the expected gain." [Emphases original.]

[954] "The available studies suggest that most people do not know the law, that even career criminals who have a special incentive to know it do not, and that even when people think they know the law they are frequently wrong."

[955] "It appears that it is the intensity of the punishment experience, rather than its duration, that is of significant effect."

[977] "[I]f the probability of punishment were high...even moderate punishments seem sufficient to deter the conduct. As the likelihood of punishment declines the deterrent effect soon becomes greatly reduced or even negligible. This suggests that the probability of punishment should be more heavily weighted in the deterrence equation than should be the intensity of the punishment."

----- * John Kaplan, Roberta Weisberg & Guyora Binder (2000)