1 in 136 U.S. Residents Behind Bars
By ELIZABETH WHITE

WASHINGTON (AP) - Prisons and jails 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 by last summer. ....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 prisons.

Prisons accounted for 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, the bureau's chief of corrections statistics, said the increase in the number of people in the 3,365 local jails is due partly to their changing role. 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," Beck said. "Judges are perhaps more reluctant to release people pretrial." (John Grisham donations WELCOME!) The report by the Justice Department agency 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 for every 100,000 residents, ....Men were 10 times to 11 times more likely than women to be in prison or jail, but the number of women behind bars was growing at a faster rate, said Paige M. Harrison, the report's other author.

The racial makeup of inmates changed little in recent years, Beck said. In the 25-29 age group, an estimated 11.9 percent of black men were in prison or jails, compared with 3.9 percent of Hispanic males and 1.7 percent of white males.

Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, ... criticized sentencing guidelines, which he said remove judges' discretion, and said arrests for drug and parole violations swell prisons. "If we want to see the prison population reduced, we need a much more comprehensive approach to sentencing and drug policy," he said.

COMMENT from Jailslibrarian

Jail Librarians are like Wide Receivers, we go out for the passes that come our way. And the end zone keeps receding down the field, with the magic words "Fiscal Year!" It is a daily challenge to match a shrinking book budget with a 4.7 growth rate in jailed "patrons." This affects crowd control; the patience and workload of deputies (who give the yea or nay to our service,) AND the circulation of our precious paperpacks. How many hands really touch our books?

Some improvisations in our play book are the following: holiday handouts; comic books from the local 1/2 priced bookseller; poetry selections; inspirational bookmarks (our most popular one featured a poem by Assata Shakur,) & the perennial favorite, Gothic Lettering. (Yep, we are the source of innovation in the art of temporary tattoos. One Housing Unit asked us to stop bringing National Geographics because the inmates were dissolving the beautiful inks and applying it to their skin.) All these "extras" help inmates face the sensory deprivation of their living quarters; they complement our bins of paperbacks and magazines really well.

Feel free to post suggestions to help us continue what one member of our staff describes as a "Smoke and Mirrors" show!

Here's a snip from Assata's poem, "Leftovers, what is left?"
Assata, p. 146 (Lawrence Hill Books, 1987)

After the bars and the gates
and the degradation,
What is left?
...
I mean, like, where is the sun?
Where are her arms and
where are her kisses?
There are lip-prints on my pillow--
i am searching
What is left?
....