A new study has made headlines with its finding that the United States leads the world in per-capita incarceration of criminals. Ten years ago the US trailed South Africa and the Soviet Union, two notoriously repressive countries, in that dubious distinction; but after a decade during which the US prison population doubled, we're No. 1. (it has now tripled)

At the same time that the prison population doubled, rates of non-incarceration supervision of convicted criminals - probation, parole, house arrest with monitoring - tripled.

 The incarceration rate in the United States has more than tripled in the last two decades. At year-end 1994, the prison population exceeded 1 million. One in every 175 US residents was in prison, compared with 1 in 450 at the end of 1980. Annual government outlays on prisons are roughly $40 billion. Among industrial nations, only Russia has a higher incarceration rate.

UPDATE 1997: The U.S. incarcerated a greater proportion of its population than any other country: more than 1.7 million people were either in prison or in jail in 1998, reflecting an incarceration rate of more than 645 per 100,000 residents, double the rate of a decade before. Approximately one in every 117 adult males was in prison.

Despite the growth in the number of prisoners, the crime rate continued to rise until recently. The reported rate of violent crime per capita in those two decades almost doubled; property crimes per capita rose 25 percent. Such facts led some commentators to label an increasing reliance on imprisonment a policy failure.

Between 1982 and 1992 in Texas, for instance, the prison population soared by 227,000, to 415,000. And the prison budget went from $600 million to $3 billion. But during the 10-year span, the overall crime rate in the Lone Star State increased by 25 percent and violent crime increased by 45 percent. Recently, Texas approved $1 billion for new prisons.

 The cost of operating the average prison bed over 30 years is $1.3 million, according to the NCCD.

We now spend more on prisons than on education ! Your children are being robbed by this plunder. 

Many who study crime have long maintained that building more prisons, as the US is now doing, takes money away from programs that could more fundamentally reduce crime by reforming people., Melanie Stetson Freeman -STAFF/FILE

 US Builds More Prisons, But Crime Rate Climbs Crime bill calls for construction of 10 large maximum-security jails. David Holmstrom, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

 ``We are in the midst of a vicious cycle,'' says Marc Mauer, assistant director of The Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C. 

 ``We have high crime rates, and the response of the politicians is to build more prisons,'' he continues. ``The more money we put into prisons means less money into programs that might prevent crime in the first place. But they think, if we build a few more prisons, we can start to make a dent in crime.''

In a recent proposal to reduce crime in the US, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD) in San Francisco said that ``despite doubling the size of our correctional system over the last 10 years, crime, and especially violent crime, has continued to increase.''

The US has the highest incarceration rate of any nation in the world !

TEXAS THE HIGHEST OF THE STATES, 

 In the US, a landmark 1987 study published in the Stanford Law Review identified 350 convictions since 1900 in which the accused were later shown to be innocent of ''potentially capital offenses.'' In 23 cases, the convicted person was executed.

WE NEED YOUR HELP. PLEASE CONTACT US
The life you save may be your own !