THE US ANY OTHER LAST YEAR DRIVER
THE US ANY OTHER LAST YEAR SERIES

In the U.S., each state is responsible for making its own policy choices about which people to lock up and how for long.

THE US ANY OTHER LAST YEAR DRIVER

In the aggregate, these state-level policy choices have been the largest driver of our unprecedented national experiment with mass incarceration, but not every state has contributed equally or consistently to this phenomenon. they have either been convicted of violating a federal law or are being detained by the immigration authorities and are awaiting potential deportation to anther country. Federal-level policy directly accounts for only the 10% of people behind bars in the U.S. Another 30% are confined in local jails - which are outside the scope of this briefing - generally either for minor violations of state law or because they are waiting to be tried for charges of violating state law. Most (57%) people incarcerated in the United States have been convicted of violating state law and are imprisoned in a state prison. Texas has clearly made a policy choice to stop building more prisons as the state’s population has grown, but unlike New York and California, the state is not making the active choice to shrink its prison population. The scale of that change is far less significant when we take into account the fact that the total number of people incarcerated in the state has remained relatively unchanged: For example, while Texas’ incarceration rate has fallen over the last decade: Generally, rates are more useful for policy analysis, but that’s not always the case. states - allow meaningful comparisons between places or time periods of different population sizes. Incarceration rates - which control for the significant differences in population size between U.S. experiment with mass incarceration requires us to focus on state policy because individual states are the most active incarcerating bodies in the nation:įigure 1: Graph showing the number of people (per 100,000 national population at that time) that is confined in state, local and federal correctional facilities from 1925 to the present.

THE US ANY OTHER LAST YEAR SERIES

This briefing fills the gap with a series of more than 100 graphs showing prison growth (and sometimes decline) for every state in the nation to encourage states to confront how their criminal policy choices undermine our national welfare.Įnding the U.S. Among people with experience in criminal justice policy matters, the “hockey stick curve” of the national incarceration rate is well known but until now more detailed data on the incarceration rates for individual states has been harder to come by. Over the last three decades of the 20th century, the United States engaged in an unprecedented prison-building boom that has given our nation the highest incarceration rate in the world. Tracking State Prison Growth in 50 States

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