By 1996 it had reached 427 per 100,000.īear in mind that these figures are averages for the country as a whole. During the entire period from the end of World War II to the early 1970s, the nation’s prison incarceration rate-the number of inmates in state and federal prisons per 100,000 population-fluctuated in a narrow band between a low of 93 (in 1972) and a high of 119 (in 1961). Our overall national population has grown, too, of course, but the prison population has grown much faster: as a proportion of the American population, the number behind bars has more than quadrupled. To put the figure of 1.7 million into perspective, consider that it is roughly equal to the population of Houston, Texas, the fourth-largest city in the nation, and more than twice that of San Francisco. Adding in local jails brings the total to nearly 1.7 million. The prison population, in short, has nearly sextupled in the course of twenty-five years. By the end of 1996 we were approaching 1.2 million. In 1971 there were fewer than 200,000 inmates in our state and federal prisons. But what we have witnessed in the past quarter century is nothing less than a revolution in our justice system-a transformation unprecedented in our own history, or in that of any other industrial democracy. A huge and constantly expanding penal system seems to us like a normal and inevitable feature of modem life. Just as violent crime has become part of the accepted backdrop of life in the United States, so too has the growth of the system we’ve established to contain it.
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