WASHINGTON One out of every 20 U.S. residents born today will
spend time behind bars, if 1991 crime, incarceration and death rates
remain constant, according to the Justice Department.

For minorty males, the chances of spending time in prison are much
greater.

"At current levels of incarceration a black male in the United States
today has greater than a one in four chance of going to prison during his
lifetime," the report issued Thursday said. The chance for Hispanic
males is 16 percent, compared with 4.4 percent for white males.

The projections by the Bureau of Justice Statistics are based on what is
likely to happen to a hypothetical population of newborns over their
lifetimes, the bureau said. They assume that recent rates of crime,
imprisonment and death will not change.

An estimated 5.1 percent of those born today 9 percent of males and
1.1 percent of females can be expected to serve time in a state or
federal prison, the study said.

Nearly 1.1 million men and women were unprisoned in a state or federal
facility at the close of 1995.

We lock up a lot of people in this country," said Malcolm Young,
executive of the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit group that advocates
less imprisonment and more use of creative alternatives.

The study "confirms our research and what we've published and I think it
issues a pretty clarion call for some of the recommendations and
solutions that we and groups like us have proposed," Young said. "I
think the consequences of this kind of information is pretty serious."

The study did not include the likelihood of being imprisoned in a local
jail, juvenile facility or other type of detention center. It also did
not estimate a person's chances of simply being arrested. The probability
of a person committing a crime and being sentenced to prison for the
first time declines steadily with age.

For example, 2.1 percent of white males age 30 with no previous record
of imprisonment are likely to go to prison sometime before they die, the
study said.

"Among those 35 years old, 1.5 percent will go to prison," it said.
"Among those age 45, fewer than 1 percent will go to prison."

Most data for the survey were collected in 1991, but other statistics
indicate that incarceration rates have remained stable since then even
though prison populations have been increasing, the bureau said.

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