U.S. Prison Population Slowed in ’96

WASHINGTON — The nation’s adult prison population grew a little more slowly last year after a 10-year surge that more than doubled the number of inmates, the Justice Department reported Sunday.

The nation’s federal and state prisons added 55,876 inmates, bringing the prison population to a record of just more than 1.18 million in 1996, as of Dec. 31. The additional prisoners represented a 5% increase over the previous year. Between 1985 and 1996, the average annual increase had been 8.1%, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

It was the second straight year of slower growth--1995 saw a 6.8% increase. The record increase, 84,000 inmates, came in 1994.

The slowing partly reflected the decline in major crimes during the last five years, given a delay for suspects in criminal cases to get through the court system.

“We’ve seen some impact on prison population as a result of the half-percent decline in arrests for serious crimes” since 1990, said statistician Allen J. Beck, coauthor of the bureau’s study, “Prisoners in 1996.”

Although admissions are still rising, Beck noted, “fewer are coming directly from court convictions and more are returning as parole violators from unsuccessful community supervision.”

As of June 30, 1996, another 518,492 people were being held in local jails, which are used primarily for sentences of less than one year and for defendants awaiting or on trial.

Counting both prison and jail inmates, more than 1.6 million adults were behind bars as of last June 30, an incarceration rate of 615 inmates for every 100,000 U.S. residents.

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That rate of imprisonment put the nation second only to Russia, which had a rate of 690 inmates per 100,000 residents in 1995, the last available figure. The two countries imprison a far higher proportion of their citizens than any other country in the world.

California, with 147,712 inmates, Texas (132,383) and the federal prison system (105,544) held one-third of all the nation’s prisoners, while 15 states, with fewer than 5,000 inmates each, together held only 3% of all inmates.

The number of state and federal prison inmates grew from 502,507 at the end of 1985 to nearly 1.13 million at the end of 1995. But the statistics bureau attributed the huge growth in state prisoners more to a decline in early releases than to the highly publicized use of longer sentences.