The United States has the world’s highest rate of incarceration or “correctional control,” and one of the causes is changes in sentencing laws.
According to various reports, during the 1980s, the United States locked up around 200 people per 100,000 of the population. By 2010, that number more than tripled to 731 per 100,000.
Today, roughly six million Americans are under some kind of “correctional supervision” – that’s more than at the peak of the Stalin era gulags, reports the New Yorker in a recent article. The story spotlights America’s extensive prison system where “huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world.”
From 1980 to 2003, California prisons have quadrupled their population even though violent crime has remained relatively constant or even declined, according to the American Society of Criminology.
The increases were most pronounced in the use of life prison sentences – upped by 83 percent between 1992 and 2003, Wikipedia notes.
The percentage of prisoners in state and federal prisons aged 55 and older increased by 33 percent from 2000 to 2005 while the prison population grew by only eight percent.
California’s fastest growing age category are those prisoners over the age 55, according to the Human Rights Watch. Ronald Aday, a professor of aging, predicts 16 percent of those serving life sentences will be elderly by 2020.
Prison administrators around the country report spending more than 10 percent of their state’s annual budget on elderly prisoner care, Wikipedia finds.
California currently has 8,780 Three Strikers; 25,135 lifers with the possibility of parole; 4,303 serving life without the possibility of parole; and 715 condemned.
Editor’s Note: This article utilized data from: The Sentencing Project: The State of Sentencing, 2011; Prison Census Data as of June 2011; PEW One in 31, The Long Reach of American Corrections; American Society of Criminology; The New Yorker magazine, Wikipedia, and Human Rights Watch.
–Juan Haines contributed to this story.
