|
US HAS WORLD'S HIGHEST INCARCERATION RATE
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0818/p02s01-usju.html
GAIL RUSSELL CHADDOCK, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR -
More than 5.6 million Americans are in prison or have served time there, according to a new report by the Justice Department released Sunday. That's 1 in 37 adults living in the United States, the highest incarceration level in the world. It's the first time the US government has released estimates of the extent of imprisonment, and the report's statistics have broad implications for everything from state fiscal crises to how other nations view the American experience.
If current trends continue, it means that a black male in the United States would have about a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison during his lifetime. For a Hispanic male, it's 1 in 6; for a white male, 1 in 17.
. . . Nor does the impact of incarceration end with the sentence. Former inmates can be excluded from receiving public assistance, living in public housing, or receiving financial aid for college. Ex-felons are prohibited from voting in many states. And with the increased use of background checks - especially since 9/11 - they may be permanently locked out of jobs in many professions, including education, child care, driving a bus, or working in a nursing home. More than 4 million
prisoners or former prisoners are denied a right to vote; in 12 states, that ban is for life.
IMPRISONED NOW TOP TWO MILLION
WASHINGTON POST - The number of people in U.S. prisons and jails has surpassed 2 million for the first time, according to a Justice Department report released yesterday. Prisons and jails held one out of every 142 U.S. residents. The prison and jail population, long the world's largest, has almost doubled since 1990. There were 2,019,234 people in prisons or jails at the end of June 2002, according to the report. About two-thirds of the total were in state and federal prisons,
and the rest were in local jails. . . In the 12 months that ended June 30, the jail population went up by 34,235 inmates, a 5.4 percent rise and the largest increase since 1997, according to the report. . .
An estimated 12 percent of black males, 4 percent of Hispanic males and 1.6 percent of white males in their twenties and early thirties were in prison or jail. . .
The federal government's prison system had the largest number of inmates at 161,681, followed by California with 160,315 prisoners and Texas with 158,131 inmates.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42707-2003Apr6.html
|
|