One in 35 Men on Probation, Parole or Imprisoned in 1984

One in every 35 men in the United States was on probation, parole or imprisoned in 1984, and offenders under community supervision outnumbered those behind bars by a 3-1 margin, a Bureau of Justice Statistics study said Sunday.

The Justice Department agency said that of more than 2.3 million men and 323,000 women in custody or under supervision of corrections authorities at the end of the year, 1.7 million were on probation and 268,500 were on parole.

About 464,000 people were in state or federal prisons while about half that number were in local jails.

Two Records Set

The probation population rose 8% in 1984, the last year for which data was available, while the parole population grew by 9%, with both setting records.

“Throughout the 1980s, the probation population in this country grew faster than the prison population did,” bureau Director Steven R. Schlesinger said. “Every year during this decade more offenders were sentenced to probation than to prison terms.”

More than 1 million adults were placed on probation during 1984, while 180,000 adults were paroled from jails and prisons.

The largest probation and parole populations at the end of the year were in Texas. That state had 235,500 people on probation, or 13.8% of all the adult probationers in the nation. Texas also had 41,000 people on parole.

Nationally, about one-third of those on probation in 1984 left the system. Some states may have had higher turnover rates than others because larger proportions of their probationers were convicted of less serious crimes, the bureau said.

The convictions of those on probation were split about evenly between misdemeanors and felonies, it said.

Increase in Tennessee

Tennessee experienced an 83% increase in inmates going on parole in 1984, due to a court order to release a large number of inmates in excess of the number of new inmates. Nearly 8,000 prisoners entered the parole program in Tennessee in 1984.

The largest percentage decline in parole population, 33%, occurred in Connecticut, where post-release supervision was abolished by the Legislature in 1981. There was a 23% drop in parole population in North Carolina, which enacted determinate sentencing in 1981.

A dozen states now have determinate sentencing laws, under which inmates are released from prison and enter a period of community supervision when they have served their original sentence minus time off for good behavior.