Population in U.S. Prisons Is Up Record 8.8%

The population of prisons in the United States grew by almost 9% in the 12 months that ended June 30, reflecting the effect of tough sentencing laws and prison-building programs in many states, according to a Justice Department report released Sunday.

The one-year increase of 89,707 inmates in state and federal prisons is the largest on record. As of June 30, there were 1,004,608 state prison inmates, up 9.1%, and 99,466 federal inmates, up 6.1%. The rate of growth, 8.8%, exceeded the 8% average for the past five years.

The trend reflects stricter mandatory-sentence laws in many states for drug-related and violent crimes as well as tougher sentencing rules, which have restricted the use of parole.

Fear of crime and growing outrage over widely publicized acts of violence have bolstered public support for strict sentences for many offenses, criminal justice experts said.

“This is part of a general, long-emerging public view that there are no alternatives to prison,” said Gerald Caplan, the dean of McGeorge Law School in Sacramento and a former Justice Department official. “Incarceration has increasingly become the acceptable way of handling wrongdoers. Those who argue for leniency are an increasingly smaller crowd.”

On average, the nation added 1,725 new prison beds each week over the 12-month period. The previous record for added inmates was 84,764 in 1989, according to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, which released the report.

The state with the largest growth in prison population over the period was Texas, with an increase of 27%. Twenty-two other states reported increases of 10% or more. Texas also had the highest state and federal incarceration rate among its population, with 659 convicts per 100,000 residents, compared with a nationwide rate of 403 per 100,000 on June 30.

During the same time, the state and federal prison population in California increased about 5%, from 125,605 to 131,342. The incarceration rate in the state on June 30 was 402 convicts per 100,000 residents.

State and federal prisons primarily house felons serving sentences of a year or more and account for slightly more than two-thirds of the 1.5 million adults now incarcerated in the United States.

The female prison population increased at a faster rate than the male prison population. The number of female prison convicts grew by 11.4%, compared with an 8.7% increase in the number of male prisoners.

The number of black inmates in state and federal prisons and local jails continues to rise at a disproportionate rate. There were seven times as many black women in prison as white women in 1994, and the proportion of black men incarcerated was eight times higher than that of white men. Almost 7% of all black men were incarcerated in 1994, compared with less than 1% of white men.

Drug crimes played a major role in the prison population increase. Because of tougher sentencing laws, those arrested for drug offenses were five times as likely to go to jail in 1992 than in 1980. There have also been increases in incarceration rates for aggravated assault, robbery and sex offenses, according to the Justice Department.