This Sunday, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released their report "Prisoners in 2000." This report is part of an annual series released by the Bureau, and sets the bar by which national criminal justice researchers measure changes in the incarcerated population. The press release announcing this year’s "Prisoners" report places emphasis on the fact that, in the last six months of 2000, the state prison population declined by about 6,200 inmates (out of 1.2 million prisoners), and that the number of prisoners in total only grew by 1.3%. In an effort to contextualize the data contained in "Prisoners in 2000" survey, the Justice Policy Institute identifies other key "highlights" in the BJS report, and other trends in the American correctional population.

1. Despite slowing state prison growth, the incarcerated population of the United States grew by 40,388 persons. More people were added to the nations prisons, jails, juvenile facilities and detention centers than are currently held in all but 9 of the nations prison systems. While the state prison population declined in the last six months of 2000, over the span of the year, 16,000 more people were added in the aggregate for the whole year.
2. After nearly a decade of declining crime rates in nearly every state, 37 states still reported increases in their prison populations in 2000.
3. The Sentencing Project reported in 2000 that with mass releases of prisoners in Russia, the United States surged ahead to have the highest incarceration rate in the world. With 2,071,686 persons incarcerated in 2000, the United States, with just 5% of the world’s population, has roughly a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
4. The slowing growth rate and modest decline in the aggregate state prison population totals mask the explosive prison growth occurring the federal prison system. Of the total increase in adult citizen prisoners by yearend 2000, more than half of the increase came in the federal system:
• The federal prison system, which is now the third biggest prison system in the United States, grew at 10 times the rate of the state prison systems in 2000. Over the last twenty years, the number of people under the jurisdiction of the federal prison system has soared from 24,363 to 145,416 today. Recently, the executive director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons announced that 30 new federal prisons would open in the next seven years, adding about 50,000 prison beds to this system.
• Sixty percent of the growth in the federal prison population over the last twenty years has been due to drug offender commitments. Non-Whites, mainly African Americans, and Latinos, have accounted for 75% of the prison growth over the last two decades. The number of women in federal prison increased nine -fold since 1980, and 67% of federal women prisoners were incarcerated for drug offenses.
• While some states, particularly in 2001, have pulled prisoners out of private-for-profit facilities, and the prison privatization companies have posted financial losses, virtually all the growth in private prison use in 2000 came in the federal system. According to this Bureau of Justice statistics survey, 72% of the growth in prisoners being held in private prisons in 2000occurred in the federal system (Much of the growth in the private prison populations this year may have come from a change in the methodology by which states have counted their prisoners. The Justice Department has been requested to qualify the increase).

The Justice Policy Institute is a criminal justice research and public policy organization with offices in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, CA. For more information on the nations prison system, visit our website at http://www.cjcj.org, or call (202) 737-7270.

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