PRISON POPULATION STILL RISING, BUT MORE SLOWLY

1.8 Million People Incarcerated in Federal, State or Local Facilities

The nation's incarcerated population continues to climb, although at a
slower rate than earlier in this decade, and now numbers more than 1.8
million people, the Justice Department reported yesterday.

The report, compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, recorded changes
in the population of federal and state prisons and local jails between June
30, 1997 and June 30, 1998. It said the overall prison population grew by
4.4 percent. This was less than the average annual increase of 6.2 percent
since 1990 but still represented an average of 1,475 new inmates every week
during that 12-month period.

From 1985 to 1998, according to the report, the nation's prison population
more than doubled, from 744,208 inmates to 1.802 million, or one of every
150 Americans. During that same period, the incarceration rate--the number
of inmates per 100,000 people--also more than doubled, from 313 to 668.

The federal prison system is growing faster than state prisons and local
jails, driven by an increasing number of drug-related incarcerations. The
report said that from 1997 to 1998 the federal prison population increased
by 8.3 percent compared to growth rates of 4.1 percent for state prisons
and 4.5 percent for local jails. Still, state prisons, which hold 1.1
million inmates, dwarf the federal prison population of 107,381. Local
jails held 592,462 inmates as of last June 30, the report said.

Darrell K. Gilliard, a Justice Department statistician who compiled the
report, said that in "the federal system, drug offenders make up 60 percent
of the prison population. From 1990 to 1996, 72 percent of the growth in
the federal system was due to drugs."

Only 23 percent of state prisoners have been convicted of drug-related
crimes, Gilliard said.

The continued growth of the prison population comes amid generally
declining crime rates. Michael Rand, chief of the victimization statistics
branch of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, said that FBI statistics show
that violent crime dropped from a peak of 757 crimes per 100,000 people in
1992 to 610 crimes per 100,000 people in 1997, the lowest rate since the
mid-1980s.

There has been a similar steady drop in the rate of property crimes such as
burglary and theft since the early 1990s, Rand said.

Alfred Blumstein, a public policy professor at Carnegie Mellon University
in Pittsburgh, said several factors accounted for this seeming anomaly. He
said one is that drug-related crimes are not counted in the FBI statistics
or the Justice Department's annual survey of crime victims, which also
shows declining crime rates. If more people are being sentenced to prison
for drug offenses, which appears to be the case at least in the federal
system, they would not be counted in the crime rate statistics.

Another factor is that those who are sentenced to prison are staying there
longer than in the past.

"For the past few years the number of new admissions [to prison] has not
been going up, but what has been going up is time served," Blumstein said.
"Several factors contribute to that. Judges may be giving longer sentences.
Parole boards may be more reluctant to release people when they become
eligible. Parole authorities may be more ready to send people back to
prison for parole violations."

In addition, Blumstein said, the federal government offers financial
incentives to states that make their prisoners serve at least 85 percent of
their sentences.

James Alan Fox, dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern
University in Boston, said that violent offenders have accounted for the
largest part of the growth in the number of state prison inmates. "All this
really means is that we are sending a higher percentage [of criminals] to
prison," he said. "We still have a huge pool. The pool is smaller but the
percentage we're sending to prison is higher."

Fox said: "There is an eventual downside to this. What happens down the
road when the number of ex-cons coming out of prison with poor skills and
bad attitudes necessarily increases? Most prisoners don't go there forever.
They come out and often times they come out worse because we're spending
more money on construction of prisons than on treatment and programs in
prisons."

The prison report indicated that tougher attitudes by judges and prison and
parole authorities contribute to the growth in the number of inmates.
Gilliard said that in 1990 about 29 percent of prison admissions were
former inmates being returned for parole violations. He said parole
violators now account for about 35 percent of admissions.

In 1990, prisoners being released for the first time had served an average
sentence of 28 months, but by 1996 the average time served by first
offenders was up to 30 months, Gilliard said.

According to the report, the female prison population is growing faster
than the male prison population. Last year there were 82,716 female inmates
in state and federal prisons, an increase of 5.6 percent from 1997 while
the male prison population grew 4.7 percent to 1.1 million over the year.

The report also said that blacks made up 41 percent of the nation's local
jail inmates, about the same percentage as white jail inmates. But because
blacks make up a smaller percentage of the nation's population, the report
said they were six times more likely than whites and nearly 2.5 times more
likely than Hispanics to be held in a local jail on June 30, 1998.

California, with 158,000 inmates, and Texas, with 143,299 inmates, had the
largest state prison populations, while North Dakota, with 883 inmates, and
Vermont, with 1,312, had the smallest. The report said the number of people
under federal or state jurisdiction, including prison inmates and those
serving sentences outside of prisons, was 22,566 in Maryland, 28,681 in
Virginia and 8,679 in the District of Columbia. The District's prison
population declined by almost 11 percent between 1997 and 1998, the largest
drop in the country, while prison populations in Maryland and Virginia
remained about the same.

D.C. officials said the decline reflects two favorable criminal justice
trends. The number of reported crimes has fallen sharply and drug abuse
within the District has declined.

Crime and the use of crack cocaine peaked in the late 1980s and early
1990s, they said, with a corresponding surge those years in the prison
population.

Officials said, however, that they hadn't seen the Justice Department
report and couldn't confirm the exact numbers.

The incarceration rate for the District was 1,329 prisoners and others
under federal, state or local jurisdiction per 100,000 residents. But
Gilliard said this should not be compared to state incarceration rates,
which include rural and suburban areas where there is typically less crime
than in cities. He said the District's incarceration rate was probably
close to that of other large urban areas.