Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 28, 1994 TAG: 9410280094
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The incarceration rate nationwide also reached an all-time high, with 373 of every 100,000 people behind bars - up from 188 per 100,000 a decade earlier. Only Russia has a higher rate.
California, the nation's most populous state, had more federal and state prisoners than any other state, with 124,813 men and women locked up. Texas came in second with 100,136. New York came in third with 65,962.
The prison population of 1 million is double the number of a decade ago. The cause appears to be harsher treatment of criminals, not a sharp increase in crime.
Other statistics show that the crime rate for violent offenses peaked in 1981, at 35 incidents per 1,000 population, according to Allen Beck, a statistician at the department. In 1992, the latest year for which there was data, there were 32 violent crimes per 1,000 people, according to the Justice Department.
Instead, the prison population expanded because Americans lost faith in rehabilitation and turned to a ``lock 'em up'' strategy, analysts and corrections specialists said.
``It reflects an increasingly widespread belief that the rehabilitation strategies of the last several decades have not worked,'' said Gerald Caplan, dean of McGeorge Law School in Sacramento, Calif., and former head of the National Institute of Justice, the Justice Department's research arm. ``It's a desperation strategy in the absence of other alternatives. No one really knows what to do.''
William Barr, former President Bush's attorney general, said that the leveling off of violent crimes in recent years proves the effectiveness of the strict incarceration movement of the late 1980s, which he spearheaded.
``It has held the crime rate lower than it would have been,'' Barr said in an interview. ``The price of putting these people in prisons is lower than the price of leaving them out on the street where they would commit more crimes.''
Some criminologists agreed.
Without the tougher policies for locking up violent criminals, ``the violent crime rates would have gone up at least 15 percent and probably much much more,'' said Jeffrey Roth, a criminologist at the Urban Institute, a Washington-based research center.
The Justice Department attributed half of the increase in state prison populations and three-quarters of the increase in federal prison populations between 1980 and 1992 to people convicted of drug offenses.
Between 1980 and 1992, the proportion of drug arrests that resulted in prison admissions grew five-fold, from 19 per 1,000 to 104 per 1,000. Currently, 60 percent of federal prisoners are behind bars for drug convictions, most of them for trafficking.
In federal prisons, the increase in inmates also is attributable to harsher sentencing guidelines. In 1987, the federal government abolished parole and since then 10 states have passed measures to mandate ``truth in sentencing,'' so that criminals serve their full sentences.
Conservatives and liberals alike predicted that prison populations will continue to mushroom because of both tougher sentencing policies and an expected rise in the teen-age population starting at the end of this decade. Teen-agers account for a disproportionately large share of crime.
The Associated Press contributed information to this story.
by CNB