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Prisons(1) and jails(2) added more than 1,000 inmates each week for a year, putting almost 2.2 million people, or one in every 136 U.S. residents, behind bars(3) by last summer.
The total on June 30, 2005, was 56,428 more than at the same time in 2004, the government reported Sunday.
Of particular note was the gain of 33,539 inmates in jails, the largest increase since 1997, researcher Allen J. Beck said. That was a 4.7 percent growth rate, compared with a 1.6 percent increase in people held in state and federal(4) prisons.
Prisons accounted for(5) about two-thirds of all inmates, or 1.4 million, while the other third, nearly 750,000, were in local jails, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Beck said jails often hold inmates for state or federal systems, as well as people who have yet to begin serving a sentence.
"The jail population is increasingly unconvicted(6)," Beck said. "Judges are perhaps more reluctant(7) to release people pretrial(8)."
The report found that 62 percent of people in jails have not been convicted, meaning many of them are awaiting trial.
Overall, 738 people were locked up(9) for every 100,000 residents, compared with a rate of 725 at mid-2004. The states with the highest rates were Louisiana and Georgia, with more than 1 percent of their populations in prison or jail. Rounding out the top five were Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma.
Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, supports alternatives(10) to prison。
"It's not a sign of a healthy community when we've come to use incarceration(11) at such rates," he said.
Mauer also criticized sentencing guidelines, which he said remove judges' discretion, and said arrests for drug and parole(12) violations swell(13) prisons.
"If we want to see the prison population reduced, we need a much more comprehensive approach to sentencing and drug policy," he said.
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Director: Liu Chi