THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, January 13, 1997 TAG: 9701130084
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: 49 lines
Drug offenders accounted for nearly a third of the 872,200 felony convictions in state courts in 1994, the Justice Department reported Sunday. Property crimes made up nearly another third.
Violent crimes were responsible for less than one in five state felony convictions that year, the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics reported.
The number of state felony convictions actually declined from the 1992 total of 893,600 but remained well above the 667,400 in 1988, the year the bureau began this biennial study.
During 1988 through 1994, the average time from arrest to sentencing dropped from 7 months to less than 6 1/2 months. The proportion of guilty pleas, which take less time than trials, rose slightly from 89 percent to 91 percent of the convicted defendants.
Over the six-year period, the percentage of state felons sentenced to prison time remained virtually unchanged - at 45 percent in 1994 compared to 44 percent in 1988.
The median age of convicted felons rose from 27 years in 1988 to 29 years in 1994, reflecting the rise in the average age of the population as the large baby boom generation grows older.
But teen-age murderers were an exception to that trend. Teen-agers accounted for 10 percent of murderers in 1988 but 18 percent in 1994, as they were recruited into violent crack cocaine trafficking. Later government figures from a different survey show that the arrest rate of teen-agers for violent crimes, particularly murder, declined in 1995 for the first time since 1987.
People in their 20s remained more crime-prone than older people: They comprised about 20 percent of the 1994 adult population but 43 percent of the convicted state felons.
Fifty-one percent of the convicted felons were white; 48 percent, black, and 1 percent, other races.
Felons sentenced to state prison during 1994 had an average sentence of six years, but were likely to serve about 38 percent of that term - or more than two years - assuming the 1994 release policies remained unchanged during their incarceration.
The violent crimes of murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and kidnapping accounted for 18.9 percent of 1994 state felony convictions. Property crimes of burglary, larceny, fraud and forgery accounted for 31.6 percent.
Drug possession or trafficking accounted for 31.4 percent.
KEYWORDS: STUDY CRIME