Prisons - Who's In Prison?

Who's in prison these days? Violent criminals, drug offenders, persons who committed property crimes, and public order offenders.¹ More than 90% of state prisoners have either committed one or more serious violent crimes or have served a previous jail term or been on probation. The chart shows state imprisonment trends from 1980 through 2000. Two things are strikingly different about the prison population in 2000 compared to that of 1980. The population was much larger — the number of adults in state prisons grew 309% between 1980 and 2000. And as both the chart and table show, the distribution of offenses that sent adults to prison changed in the 20-year period.

Total and Percentage Distribution of State Prison Population by Most Serious Offense

Year	Total	Violent Crime	Property Crimes	Drug Offenses	Public Order
1980	294,000	58.9	30.4	6.5	4.2
1985	448,200	54.9	31.3	8.7	5.1
1990	681,400	46.0	25.5	21.8	6.7
1995	985,500	46.6	23.0	21.6	8.8
2000	1,203,300	49.0	19.8	20.9	10.4

Drug offenders made up only 6.5% of the state prison population in 1980, which then numbered about 300,000, but drug offenders grew to 21% of a prison population of 1.2 million by 2000. Offenders against the public order comprised 10.4% of the prison population in 2000, up from 4.2% in 1980. Violent criminals, who were 59% of the prison population in 1980, made up 49% in 2000, which means that in 2000, a scant majority of the population in state prisons (51%) was there for nonviolent crimes.

According to the Justice Policy Institute (JPI), the 1990s was "the most punishing decade on record in American History…. As the doors to new cellblocks opened, the number of prisoners and jail inmates soared, in good times and bad times, independent of whether the crime rate rose or fell." During the 1990s, prisons added 275,500 violent offenders and 102,500 drug offenders to their rosters. As a percentage of the total growth in the1990s, violent offenders accounted for 51%, drug offenders 20%, property offenders 14%, and public-order offenders 15%.

Prisoners Under Sentence of Death: 1953-2000

Also in prison are people sentenced to death. The small chart shows the trend over the period 1953 to 2000. The number rose 2,643%, from 131 to 3,593.

Is there a connection between falling crime rates and rising rates of incarceration? Can we sleep more soundly, knowing that America has more of its citizens behind bars than any other country in the world? JPI calls the connection between crime rates and incarceration "elusive." Comparing violent crime rates and rates of imprisonment in New York and California in the 1990s, JPI says: "New York experienced a percentage drop in homicides which was half again as great as the percentage drop in California's homicide rate, despite the fact that California added 9 times as many inmates per week to its prisons as New York."

Getting tough on crime, states have adopted measures like mandatory minimum sentencing, tighter parole policies, and longer prison sentences. Under the popular "3 strikes and you're out" policy, lesser criminals can find themselves behind bars for life if convicted of a felony for a third time. In November 2002 the constitutionality of California's "3 strikes" law, the toughest in the country, was under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court.

To accommodate growing numbers of prisoners, more prisons must be built. The number of state prisons grew 14% between 1990 and 1995, from 1,207 to 1,375. Federal prisons grew 56%, from 80 to 125.

Sources: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Correctional Populations in the United States, 1997, and Prisoners in 2000, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/corrtyp.htm, and Prisoners on death row, Capital Punishment 2000, December 2001, NCJ 190598, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables/drtab.htm. Justice Policy Institute, The Punishing Decade: Prison and Jail Estimates at the Millennium, May 2000, www.cjcj.org/punishingdecade/.