Less Crime, More Criminals (was Re: Damien): correction

[Fellows, Jeffrey]

I believe the "growth" in incarceration rates will be, and in many states
already is, a thing of the past. I recently attended a criminal justice
workshop on balancing expenditures in prisons, police, and prevention. It
was evident that new incarcerations are not growing, but that individuals
already in prison are being held for longer periods of time. States are
finding that they simply can no longer afford to imprison folks at the same
rates as before, so states with the biggest problems appear to be moving
into intermediate sanctions for nonviolent offenders (between imprisonment
and probation). This certainly says nothing about the problems of what acts
are or are not criminalized, the racial disparities in experiences with the
CJ system, etc. But invoking past incarceration rate growth as a strong
indicator of the future growth in prison populations is no longer valid. 

Jeff      

-----Original Message-----
From: Yoshie Furuhashi [mailto:furuhashi.1 at osu.edu]
Sent: Sunday, March 07, 1999 8:23 PM
To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
Subject: Re: Less Crime, More Criminals (was Re: Damien): correction


>>> But the U.S. state has 1.8 million people behind bars.
>>> Doug
>>
>>a 'growth industry'...number was 196,000 in 1973 and 314,000
>>in 1981...Angela Davis is correct - it is a prison-industrial
>>complex...Michael Hoover
>
>Egan, Timothy. "Less Crime, More Criminals." _New York Times_ 7 March 1997,
>Sec. 4: 1+

Correction. The article is from today's paper, so it has to be 1999!

Yoshie