In 2000 state and federal courts convicted some 984,000 adults of felonies, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). Of those, 924,700 were adults convicted in state courts and 59,123 were convicted in federal jurisdictions. Some 68 percent of convicted felons were sentenced to a period of incarceration in 2000. Of those, 40 percent went to state prisons and 28 percent to local jails. …
Executions in the United States had been dropping for decades since their height of some 200 a year in the late 1930s. By the 1960s capital punishment was seldom used at all. (See Figure 6.1.) In 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional as it was then administered by the states. But in 1976 the Court approved revised capital punishment laws. Since that time, the number …
In 2002 about 6.7 million Americans, or about 3.1 percent of the adult population of the United States, were under some form of correction supervision (prison, jail, probation, and parole). According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, by December 31, 2001, over two million persons (2,166,260) were incarcerated in federal, state, and local correctional facilities in the United States. Of those, a…
Inmates may be in jails for a variety of reasons: Table 6.6 lists these and other reasons for holding inmates in jails. Jails are a generally neglected part of the corrections system. They frequently fail to meet minimum standards TABLE 6.5 Number of sentenced prisoners under state or federal jurisdiction, by gender, race, Hispanic origin, and age, 2002 for space, care, and staffing and ha…
Persons convicted of murder, burglary, or larceny/theft are most likely to be sent to a state prison. If the crime is a federal offense or was committed outside a state jurisdiction, the offender can be sentenced to a federal prison. Federal offenses include crimes that The BJS regularly surveys the nation's correctional facilities. The 2002 survey counted 2,166,260 prisoners. State and fed…
In 2002 women accounted for a total of 89,044 prisoners under state (76,200) and federal (12,844) correctional authorities. Of females in state prisons in 2001, 24,400 (32 percent) were convicted of violent offenses, 23,200 (30.4 percent) on drug offenses, and 20,000 (26.2 percent) on property offenses. (See Table 6.9.) From 1995 to 2001 the number of females in state prisons increased for violent…
At the end of 2002 nearly 4.74 million adults were on probation or parole in the United States, up from 3.2 million at the end of 1990. The total number of probationers in 2002 was 3,995,165. Fifty percent were convicted of felonies, 49 percent of misdemeanors, and 1 percent of other types of infractions. Twenty-four percent of probationers had drug law violations as their most serious offense. (S…
The recidivism rate measures the degree to which inmates return to criminal behavior after their release from prison. In "Recidivism of Prisoners Released in 1994" (Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, June 2002), authors Patrick A. Langan, Ph.D., and David J. Levin, Ph.D., released the findings of a study that tracked TABLE 6.16 Educational programs offered in state, fe…
Is prison the answer to crime? Is prison supposed to punish, or is it supposed to rehabilitate? It is certainly the primary method the government uses to show that it takes crime seriously and will not let it go unpunished. It keeps dangerously violent criminals off the street, which has very likely contributed somewhat to the drop in crime during the 1990s. Prisoners are often considered society&…
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