Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Just Say Stupid

Via Radley Balko, take a look at the following stats relating to American prisons:

As of 2005, drug offenders accounted for 55 percent of the federal prison population. About 45 percent of them were in prison for possession, not trafficking.

The number of people incarcerated in federal prisons for drug crimes rose from 14,976 in 1986 to 68,360 in 1999.

It costs U.S. taxpayers $3 billion per year to keep drug offenders behind bars in federal prisons.

Drug offenders have accounted for nearly half the meteoric growth in prison populations since 1995.

About half the population of U.S. jails and prisons are nonviolent offenders, more than the combined populations of Wyoming and Alaska.

Forty percent of the more than 1,000 state prisons in the U.S. opened in just the last 25 years.

The state of Texas alone has opened an average of 5.7 new prisons each year for the last 21 years. Despite this, about half of federal and state prisons operate over capacity.

Total U.S. inmates numbered 488,000 in 1985, 1.3 million in 2001, and number 2.2 million today.

According to federal sentencing guidelines, a man would need to possess 50 times more powder cocaine (prefered by white users) than crack cocaine (prefered by black users) to earn the same prison sentence.

Blacks represent about 12 percent of the U.S. population, but 48 percent of the prison population. They represent just 13 percent of drug users, but 38 percent of those arrested for drug crimes, and 59 percent of those convicted.

When convicted of the same drug felony, blacks are about 50 percent more likely to be sentenced to prison than whites.

A black woman's chances of spending some time in prison over the course of her life (5.6 percent) is about equal that of a white man (5.9 percent). For black men, the odds are nearly one in three (32.2%).

Before Congress passed mandatory minimums for offenses related to crack (but which didn't apply to powder cocaine) in 1986, the average drug-related sentence for blacks was 11 percent higher than for whites. After that law, the disparity jumped to 49 percent.

The average prisoner in the U.S. costs taxpayers approximately $36,000 per year. What a waste.