1 in 100 Behind Bars; Record High U.S. Incarceration Rate
One in 100 adults in the U.S. is serving time in prison right now, reportedly the highest incarceration rate ever.
And it is even higher for members of certain minority groups: “One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34,” recounts the New York Times in a column by Adam Liptak. In addition to DOJ statistics, it also relies on a new report by the Pew Center on the States.
While only one in 355 white women between the ages of 35 and 39 is imprisoned, among black women the figure is 1 in 100, according to the Pew report.
Such figures obviously implicate fairness concerns, as discussed in an earlier ABA Journal article. But they also add up to a lot of money spent on state and federal prisons. It costs an average of nearly $24,000 to house an inmate annually, and some prisoners, such as the elderly, also can require expensive health care, the Times reports.
Texas now has the largest inmate population, at 172,000, but is making changes in an effort to reduce the number of nonviolent offenders in prison.
“We have 5,500 DWI offenders in prison,” in the general inmate population, says state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, who chairs the senate’s criminal justice committee. Yet, he notes, some of those being held were not charged as a result of traffic accidents, let alone fatal ones. “As serious as drinking and driving is,” he says, “we should segregate them and give them treatment.”
