The United States still has the largest known incarcerated
population in the world.
“If we keep working on the kinds of criminal justice reforms
that we’re doing right now, it’s going to take us 75 years to reduce the
population by half,” said Rachel Barkow, a sentencing expert at New York
University School of Law and author of “Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the
Cycle of Mass Incarceration.”
Like others who study the United States prison population,
Ms. Barkow saw the significance of Thursday’s report not in the decline itself,
but in how minor it was.
“The kinds of reforms we’re seeing now are really modest,”
she said. “I’m glad were getting them. But this is not transformative yet.”
Slightly under 1.5 million people were in prison at the end
of 2017, a slight decrease from 2016 but still a population that, if gathered
in one place, would be one of the largest cities in the country.
County and city jails held around 750,000 inmates in mid-2017.
Combined, the United States would remain the world’s leader
in incarceration, according to data collected by the Institute
for Criminal Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London. It is
unclear, though, exactly how many people are held in detention in China, a
country with a similarly high prison population.
The incarceration rates for both jails and prisons in the
United States have declined by more than 10 percent over the past 10 years, the
federal report found. (Prison is for people serving sentences longer than one
year, while jails typically hold those awaiting trial or sentencing, or those
serving shorter sentences.)
The decline in the prison population is not connected to the
crime rate, which has fallen steadily over the past decades. Instead it is it
the result of policy changes and court orders, and has been markedly uneven.
A drop in the federal prison population, due in large part
to a 2014 decision by the U.S.
Sentencing Commission to reduce sentences for drug crimes, accounts for a third
of the year-over-year decline. And while some states have significantly reduced
their prison populations in recent years, others continue to set records for
the number of people they are keeping locked up.
To read more CLICK HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment