DISTURBING STATISTICS

Too Many Behind Bars, On Parole Or Probation

One in 32 adults was either in prison, on probation or on parole in the
year 2000, according to the federal government.

That's 6.47 million people or 3.1 percent of the adult population.

Of these Americans under corrections supervision, 30 percent or 1,933,503
were behind bars. On probation were 3,839,532 offenders, about 59 percent.
And 725,527 were on parole.

To gage the explosion in corrections in recent years, one only has to
compare today's figures to 1980, when 1 percent of the adult population was
either in jail, on probation or parole.

The numbers have tripled in the last two decades.

The corrections population increased 49 percent in the 1990s, growing at an
average annual rate of 4 percent, according to the justice department.

In 2000, America had 2.1 million more adults in the correction system than
there were in 1990.

What happen to people after they are released from prison?

Some 2.5 million offenders were released from parole in 2000. While half of
parolees finished there terms successfully in 1990, about 43 percent did so
in 2000.

Yet 15 percent of probationers and 42 percent of parolees in 2000 were
unsuccessful and returned to prison or jail. Experts say that the number of
Americans who return to prison remain fairly stable. For some analysts,
that shows the emphasis on incarceration as opposed to rehabilitation.

" It's just overwhelming," said Kara Gotsch of the American Civil Liberties
Union. " It just shows that we need to put much more into prevention."

" It's no wonder that they're reoffending at incredibly high rates because
we don't teach them anything else," she said.

She has a point. But America needs to so do some soul-searching to find out
just why so many people are breaking the law in the first place.