Lock 'em Up!

• Author: HIGGS, ROBERT

Let's play the old form-a-line game. Suppose you took all the people incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons as of June 30, 1998, and formed them into a line, with the individuals standing one yard apart. How far would the line stretch? Starting from Boston, it would reach almost to Atlanta. You can form a long line with 1,802,496 individuals.

Back on December 31, 1985, the line would have stretched less than half That far, only from Boston to the southern suburbs of Baltimore. (See figure 1 for a graphic history.) But during the next twelve and a half years, the incarcerated population grew at an average annual rate of 7.3 percent. (The entire U.S. population increased about 1 percent per year.) At the end of 1985, of every 100,000 persons, 313 were confined; by the middle of 1998, the incarceration rate was 668. If the incarcerated population continues to grow at the rate experienced since 1985, then by the middle of 2008 our imaginary line will be long enough to extend from Boston to Atlanta, then turn west and continue all the way to San Antonio, Texas.

[Figure 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Here's another way to picture the prisoners. If you gathered all of them together in a formerly vacant location, you would have an agglomeration about as populous as Houston, the fourth-largest U.S. city. Add the more than 3 million persons on probation, and you would have an aggregation larger than any U.S. city except New York. (Of course, New York City itself would be a good deal smaller once its convicts and probationers had been relocated.)

(Sources of data for the preceding calculations include the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Bulletin, NCJ 173414, March 1999; the 1996 Rand McNally Road Atlas, and the Statistical Abstract of the United States 1997.)

In 1998, men constituted the great bulk--about 92 percent--of the nation's incarcerated population, but as in so many other areas of American life, the women have been catching up. In the state and federal prisons, females accounted for 4.1 percent of all inmates in 1980, 5.7 percent in 1990, and 6.4 percent in 1998. In the jails-the locally operated penal institutions, as opposed to the federal and state prisons--females accounted for 9.2 percent of the adult inmates in 1990 and 10.9 percent in 1998 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, Bulletin, NCJ 173414, 4, 6).

Nationally, the jail population in 1998 was 41 percent white, 41 percent black, 16 percent Hispanic, and 2 percent other ethnicities...