But just a bit, according to Heather C. West at the Bureau of Justice Statistics. At the end of 2009, state and federal correctional authorities had jurisdiction over 1,613,656 prisoners, an increase of 0.2% (3,897 prisoners) from 2008. Black men are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men. Non-citizens (not all of…
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I don’t normally go around asking for stats. I’ll take a good anecdote over a slippery statistics any day. And yet… I feel like an old operator at times saying, “Number, please.” Last night I was writing and had a very simple question: how many US prisoners are in solitary confinement? Seems like a simple…
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A study by Daryl Fischer shows that 94 percent of Arizona state inmates are repeat or violent offenders. That “or” is important. “The myth that we’re filling our prisons with first-time drug offenders is not true.” Well sort of. It is generally true (with some notable exceptions) that people don’t do prison time for non-violent…
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Barely. And the population of federal prisons grew 3 percent. But still… “Fewer State Prisoners” is a headline that hasn’t been seen since 1972.
While the prison population keeps going up, not many know that in some states it’s going down. Kansas, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York have reduced their prison populations by five to twenty percent since 1999 (without any increases in crime) while the national prison population increased by another twelve percent. The Sentencing Project explains.
Crediting prisons and not mentioning police for the crime drop is a bit misguided, but there are still some very good points in Ross Douthat’s New York Times column.
Should an 87-year-old go to prison? John Eligon and Benjamin Weiser write about this in the New York Times. I don’t think so. What good does it serve? Punishment, of course. But aren’t there better and cheaper ways to punish? I certainly don’t want to pay to keep people who are no threat to me…
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If you look at this chart, it’s not hard to think that the great crime drop was caused by locking up all the criminals. A student brought this up in class. In the 1990s, it looks pretty convincing: But just looking at the 1990s misses the big picture. Here’s the same data going back to…
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The other night I had a minor but perhaps brilliant idea. What if there were a correlation between the numberof prisons in a state and that state’s incarceration rate? Perhaps the more prisons there are, the greater the political influences that play in a state, leading to more people locked up! Prison-Industrial-Complex shit I’m talking…
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In 2008, New York’s Department of Correction’s budget was $978 million ($939 million of which is paid for city tax dollars). “In Fiscal 2007, the Department handled over 100,000 admissions, managed an average daily population of 13,987 and transported 326,735 individuals to court.” The average length of stay is 47 days. That’s $70,000 per inmate…
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