By Stacey Patton

Last Thursday, Mark Mauer, Executive Director of The Sentencing Project, paid a visit to LDF’s national headquarters to talk with the attorneys and staff about America’s growing corrections system and its impact particularly on blacks, Latinos and women. While some media pundits have argued that this country’s world record high incarceration rate has produced safer streets, Mauer disagrees.

“The U.S. is now the world leader in incarceration,” Mauer said.  He added that prisons are being used as “a primary response to socio-economic issues in low-income communities.”

Mark Mauer, Executive Director of The Sentencing Project, talks with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund about America's prisons and prisoners.

A recent report from The Sentencing Project indicates the United States has only five percent of the world’s population, yet it holds 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Close to two-thirds of those in prison are black or Latino. As of June 30, 2007 (the most recent statistics taken), 2,299,116 prisoners were held in federal or state prisons or local jails and 1,528,041 were under state or federal jurisdiction.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons imprisoned more than 202,000 people at the end of October 2008. In the federal system alone, 75,865 people were sentenced in 2007, the overwhelming majority to terms of incarceration. Of those sentenced, almost 24,000 were sentenced for drugs offenses, and two thirds of them received five or ten year mandatory minimum sentences.

Below are some recent facts about American prisons and prisoners:

The number of inmates in state and federal prisons has increased nearly seven-fold from less than 200,000 in 1970 to 1,518,535 by midyear 2007. An additional 780,581 are held in local jails, for a total of 2.3 million.

Between 2000 and 2006, the state prison population increased by an average annual rate of 1.7%, the federal population by 5.3%, and jail population by 3.6%.

As of 2007, 1 of every 131 Americans was incarcerated in prison or jail.

The number of persons on probation and parole has been growing dramatically along with institutional populations.  There are now 7.3 million Americans incarcerated or on probation or parole, an increase of more than 290 percent since 1980.

One in ten (10.4%) black males aged 25-29 was in prison or jail in 2007 as were 1 in 28 (3.6%) Hispanic males and 1 in 59 (1.7%) white males in the same age group.

Nationally, 69 females per 100,000 women are serving a sentence in prison; 957 males per 100,000 men are in prison.

The 2007 United States’ rate of incarceration of 762 inmates per 100, 000 population is the highest reported rate in the world, well ahead of the Russian rate of 635 per 100, 000.

Who is in our Prisons and Jails?

• 93% of prison inmates are male, 7% female.
• As of 2007, there were 208,300 women in state and federal prison or local jail.
• 40% of persons in prison or jail in 2006 were black and 20% were Hispanic.
• 62% of jail inmates in 2006 were awaiting trial, compared to 51% in 1990.
• 82% of those sentenced to state prisons in 2004 were convicted of non-violent crimes, including 34% for drug offenses, and 29% for property offenses.
• 1 in 4 jail inmates in 2002 was in jail for a drug offense, compared to 1 in 10 in 1983; drug offenders constituted 20% of state prison inmates and 55% of federal prison inmates in 2001.
• Black males have a 32% chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives; Hispanic males have a 17% chance; white males have a 6% chance.

Learn more about The Sentencing Project.

Stacey Patton is Senior Editor of TheDefendersOnline and Senior Writer/Editor for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.