U.S. PRISON ROLLS GROW BY 2.6 PERCENT

The nation's prison population grew 2.6 percent last year, the largest
increase since 1999, according to a study by the Justice Department.

The jump came despite a small decline in serious crime in 2002. It also
came at a time when a growing number of states facing large budget deficits
have begun trying to reduce prison costs by easing tough sentencing laws
passed in the 1990s, thereby decreasing the number of inmates.

``The key finding in the report is this growth, which is somewhat
surprising in its size after several years of relative stability in the
prison population,'' said Allen J. Beck, an author of the report. Beck is
the chief prison demographer for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the
statistical arm of the Justice Department, which puts out an annual study
of the number of people incarcerated in the United States.

At the end of 2002, there were 2,166,260 Americans in local jails, state
and federal prisons and juvenile detention facilities, the report found.

Another important finding in the report was that 10.4 percent of all black
men ages 25 to 29, or 442,300 people, were in prison last year. By
comparison, 2.4 percent of Latino men and 1.2 percent of white men in the
same age group were in prison.

The report, which was released Sunday, found that this large racial
disparity had not increased in the past decade. But Marc Mauer, the
assistant director of the Sentencing Project, a prison reform research and
advocacy group, said that with the number of black men in prison remaining
so high, ``the ripple effect on their communities, and on the next
generation of kids growing up with their fathers in prison, will certainly
be with us for at least a generation.''

Beck and Mauer and other experts said the growth in the prison population
last year, despite the efforts by some states to reduce the number of
inmates, was a result of the continuing effect of draconian sentencing laws
passed in the 1990s when the states could afford to build more prisons and
politicians competed to sound tough on crime.

Beck said increases in inmates in several of the largest states contributed
to most of the national increase. Those states included California,
Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania, he said. In Florida, he said, local
judges used their discretion under the tougher laws to sentence more people
convicted of felonies to prison rather than probation or other programs.

Alfred Blumstein, a leading criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University,
said it was not illogical for the prison population to go up even when the
crime rate goes down.

For one thing, Blumstein said, some crimes considered victimless are not
counted in the FBI's annual report on the crime rate, including drug
crimes, gun possession crimes and immigration offenses.

Another reason, Blumstein said, was that it has become increasingly clear
from statistical research that ``there is no reason that the prison count
and the crime rate have to be consistent.'' The crime rate measures the
amount of crime people are suffering from, he said, while the prison count
is a measure of how severely society chooses to deal with crime, which
varies from time to time.

Beck said he did not believe the sizable increase in the prison population
last year was the start of a trend back to the big increases of the 1980s
and 1990s, when the number of incarcerated Americans quadrupled. States do
not have the money to build more prisons now, he said.

If You're Interested

Visit the Bureau of Justice Statistics Web site (www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs).