REPORT FINDS PRISON NOT UNCOMMON

WASHINGTON - About one in every 37 U.S. adults was either imprisoned at the
end of 2001 or had been incarcerated at one time, the government reported
Sunday.

The 5.6 million people with "prison experience" represented about 2.7
percent of the adult population of 210 million as of Dec. 31, 2001, the
report found. The study by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice
Statistics looks at people who served a sentence for a crime in state or
federal prison, not those temporarily held in jail.

The study is the first to measure the prevalence of prison time among
American adults. Last month, the bureau reported that a record 2.1 million
people were in federal, state or local custody at the end of 2002.

Between 1974 and 2001, the number of current and former inmates rose by 3.8
million, the study found. Of those, 2.7 million were former inmates.

Experts say the growing numbers of ex-prisoners means more people in
society have difficulty finding jobs because they have felony convictions.
Many cannot vote and they are more likely to have family or emotional
problems that exact a toll on government budgets.

"We're talking about a large number of people - bigger than a lot of
countries in Western Europe - who face the barriers that exist when you
have been in the correctional system," said Jason Zeidenberg, director of
policy and research at the Justice Policy Institute, which advocates prison
alternatives. "That's a really upsetting number."

The number of people sent to prison for the first time tripled from 1974 to
2001 as sentences got tougher, especially for drug offenses. There are more
ex-prisoners as well, the result of longer life expectancies and a larger
U.S. population.

"At every age, men have higher chances of going to prison than women, and
blacks and Hispanics have higher chances than whites," statistician Thomas
Bonczar said in the report. Almost 5 percent of men in 2001 had done prison
time, compared with less than 1 percent of women.

Almost 17 percent of black men in 2001 had prison experience, compared with
7.7 percent of Hispanic men and 2.6 percent of white men. The percentage of
black women with prison time was 1.7 percent, compared with less than 1
percent of Hispanic and white women.

No matter their ethnic origin, people between ages 35 and 44 in 2001 had
the highest rates of lifetime incarceration - 6.5 percent for men, almost 1
percent for women. About one-third of the former prisoners in 2001 still
were under correctional system supervision, including 166,000 in local
jails. The rest were either on parole or on probation.