Statistics

Mass Incarceration’s Slow Decline Recently however, there has been some incremental progress in reducing mass incarceration. In the last decade, prison populations have declined by about 10 percent. Racial disparities in the prison population have also fallen.

A 2014 report by the National Research Council identified two main causes of the increase in the United States’ incarceration rate over the previous 40 years: longer prison sentences and increases in the likelihood of imprisonment.

Comparing English-speaking developed countries; the overall incarceration rate in the US is 639 per 100,000 population of all ages (as of 2018), the incarceration rate of Canada is 104 per 100,000 (as of 2018), England and Wales is 130 per 100,000 (as of 2021), and Australia is 160 per 100,000 (as of 2020).

“the law requiring longer sentences has been effective in lowering crime. Within three years, crimes covered by the law fell an estimated 8 percent. Seven years after the law changed, these crimes were down 20 percent.”

One of the more important factor judges consider when sentencing is the defendants’ prior criminal histories. If you have a squeaky clean record and this was a first-time offense, the judge is much more likely to go easy on you. California sentencing guidelines typically override other factors.

Scholars have found that women receive shorter sentences for sex crimes than men. A 2014 study suggests that federal courts are more lenient on female defendants in general. They are less likely to incarcerate women and tend to give women shorter sentences than men.

Namely, female judges are more lenient than male judges when sentencing female defendants. Together, these empirical results provide important new insights into the behavior of male and female trial court judges.

Over 60 years ago, Pollak (1950) claimed that female offenders were the recipients of male notions of chivalry from a male-dominated criminal justice system (Tjaden and Tjaden 1981).

Federal Bureau of Prisons

The American criminal justice system holds almost 2.3 million people in 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,134 local jails, 218 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric …

Harold Shipman