MORE AMERICANS BEHIND BARS THAN EVER

A Report Finds One In 100 U.S. Adults Is In Custody, Highest Ratio In World

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The United States incarcerates more people
than any other country in the world and for the first time in the
nation's history, more than one in every 100 American adults is
confined in a prison or jail, according to a report released Thursday.

The report by the Pew Center on the States said the American penal
system held more than 2.3 million adults at the start of the year.

The far more populous nation of China ranked second with 1.5 million
behind bars, with Russia a distant third with 890,000. The U.S.
figure is about seven times that for Canada.

"Beyond the sheer number of inmates, America also is the global
leader in the rate at which it incarcerates its citizenry, outpacing
nations like South Africa and Iran," according to the report.

Tough sentencing laws, record numbers of drug offenders and high
crime rates have contributed to the United States having the largest
prison population and the highest rate of incarceration in the world,
criminal justice experts say.

The latest report tracked similar findings on the U.S. prison
population by the Justice Department and various private groups. A
report in November by a criminal justice research group found the
number of people in U.S. prison had risen eight-fold since 1970.

The new report said that the national prison population has nearly
tripled between 1987 and 2007.

"The number of people behind bars in the United States continued to
climb in 2007, saddling cash-strapped states with soaring costs they
can ill afford and failing to have a clear impact either on
recidivism or overall crime," it said.

States last year spent more than $44 billion on corrections, the
report said, six times more than they spent for higher education.

The report said the current prison growth has not been driven mainly
by a parallel increase in crime or a corresponding surge in the
nation's population.

"Rather, it flows principally from a wave of policy choices that are
sending more lawbreakers to prison and, through the popular
'three-strikes' measures and other sentencing enhancements, keeping
them there longer," it said.