Overview: Trends in the Crime Control Industry

This overview takes a brief look at trends within various parts of the crime control industry. It's a fair assumption that barring outside action, what happens tomorrow will resemble what happened yesterday. But with so many factors at play in the crime control industry, we should look at what influences the health of the industry in order to assess likely industry scenarios in the future.

Each section provides a short summary of the numerical trends, and then lists some factors that will determine what happens in the next two to five years. Many of these factors are directly or indirectly political, and therefore ripe for being influenced by advocacy efforts.

• Incarceration
• Death Penalty
• Private Prisons
• The Crime Control Industry and the Economy

This page is an excerpt from The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control Industry (April 2003) by Peter Wagner, published by the Western Prison Project and the Prison Policy Initiative.