1. The United States has a correctional population of 7,328,200, which means one in every 31 U.S. adults is under correctional control. [Bureau of Justice Statistics at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs and U.S. Census State Population Estimates]
2. The U.S. has the highest prison population rate in the world, some 738 per 100,000 of the national population, followed by Russia at 611. [Walmsley, Roy, “World Prison Population List (Seventh Edition)” (London, England: International Centre for Prison Studies, 2007), p.1.]
3. The U.S. nonviolent prisoner population is larger than the combined populations of Wyoming and Alaska. [John Irwin, Ph.D., Vincent Schiraldi and Jason Ziedenberg, America’s One Million Nonviolent Prisoners (Washington, DC: Justice Policy Institute, 1999), p.4.]
4. States spent $42.89 billion on corrections in 2005. To compare, states spent $24.69 billion on public assistance. [National Association of State Budget Offices (NASBO), 2005 State Expenditure Report (Washington, DC: NASBO, June 2005), p.35, Table 18, and p.58, Table 32.]
5. From 1984 to 1996, California built 21 new prisons, and only one new state university. [Ambrosio, T. & Schiraldi, V., “Trends in State Spending, 1987-1995,” Executive Summary-February 1997 (Washington DC: The Justice Policy Institute, 1997).
6. California state government expenditure on prisons increased by 30 percent from 1987 to 1995, while spending on higher education decreased by 18 percent. [National Association of State Budget Offices (NASBO), 2005 State Expenditure Report (Washington, DC: NASBO, 1996].
7. According to the American Corrections Association, the average daily cost per state prison inmate per day in the U.S. in 2005 was $67.55. That means it costs states approximately $16,948,295 per day to incarcerate drug offenders in state prison, or $6,186,127,675 per year. [American Corrections Association, 2006 Directory of Adult and Juvenile Correctional Departments, Institutions, Agencies and Probation and Parole Authorities, 67th Edition (Alexandria, VA: ACA, 2006), p.16: Harrison, Paige M. & Allen J. Beck, Ph.D., U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice statistics, Prisoners in 2005 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, November 2006), p.9.
8. Due to harsh sentencing policies, such as Three-strikes, you’re out, “a disproportionate number of young Black and Hispanic men are likely to be imprisoned for life under scenarios in which they are guilty of little more than a history of untreated addiction and several prior drug-related offenses.” [Craig Haney, Ph.D., and Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D., “The Past and Future of U.S. Prison Policy: Twenty-five years After the Stanford Prison Experiment,” American Psychologist, vol. 53, No. 7 (July 1998), p.718.]
9. The total number of violent crimes was only about three percent higher in 2008 than it was in 1980, while the total number of property crime was about 20 percent lower. Over the same period, the U.S. population increased about 33 percent and the prison and jail population increased by more than 350 percent. [“The High Budgetary Cost of Incarceration,” John Schmitt, Kris Warner and Sarika Cupta, June 2010 (Center for Economic and Policy Research, @ www.cepr.net)]
10. “We have to fundamentally rethink prisons.” Newt Gingrich, American Enterprise Institute forum, March 27, 2008. (The PEW Center on the States, “One in 31, The Long Reach of American Corrections”, March 2009) p.3.]—Juan Haines contributed to this story.
