US prison population continues to soar in 2005

According to the federal Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics’ annual report, “Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2005,” last year the nation’s prisons and jails held 2,186,230 prisoners—an increase of 56,428, or 2.6 percent over midyear 2004. This is an average of nearly 1,100 new inmates each week—more than twice the rate of population growth for both the US and the world, according to Census Bureau data.

The BJS statistics indicate that 738 per 100,000 of the population were incarcerated last year, up from 725 per 100,000 the year before. According to the report, as of midyear 2005, 1 in every 136 US residents were imprisoned. If this ratio excluded children from the total population, the percentage of those incarcerated would likely be closer to 1 in every 100 residents.

The US incarcerates by far the largest proportion of its population of any country in history, accounting for a quarter of the world’s prisoners in its corrections system. The US also has the most actions criminalized of any country, and routinely doles out mandatory sentences lasting decades. On any given day in America, more than 7 million of its residents are under some form of supervision of the corrections systems.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/pris-j05.shtml