More Americans than ever behind bars

One in every 100 Americans is now living behind bars, according to a report released Feb. 28 by the Pew Center on the States. While figures for the state of Indiana are largely below the national average, growing incarceration rates have had no small impact on the Hoosier state. As of Jan. 1 this year, 26,249 Indiana residents were housed in state prisons, according to the report, which is part of Pew’s Public Safety Performance Project. That is an increase of more than 250 percent over the past 20 years, when slightly fewer than 10,000 Hoosiers were behind bars.\nWhile the numbers are certainly noteworthy, they were not the most interesting discovery for those who compiled the report.\n“I think what surprised us the most was the extent of the cost of this ... while the population has gone up by about three times over the past 20 years, the costs have gone up four times – they’ve quadrupled,” said Adam Gelb, one of the report’s co-authors, during an appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal March 3.\nAccording to the Pew Report, the state of Indiana spent $649 million out of its general fund on corrections in the fiscal year 2007 – 5.3 percent of its total budget. That is below the national average of 6.8 percent. \nIndiana also ranks below the national average on corrections spending in relation to spending on higher education. The state of Indiana spends 40 cents on corrections for every dollar it spends on higher education, an increase of 16 cents since 1987. Nationally, the average is .60 for every dollar spent, an increase of 28 cents over the past 20 years.\nThe more than $44 billion spent collectively on corrections in 2007 represents a 127 percent increase over 1987 totals after adjusting for inflation, according to the Pew report’s findings. In that same time period, spending on higher education rose by only 21 percent.\nDespite the increases in spending, however, the report’s authors did not uncover a proportional decrease in crime and recidivism.\n“Around the country we are seeing state policymakers saying ... we’re not getting our money’s worth out of all these prisons in terms of reduction in crime,” Gelb said. “Crime is still too high, recidivism rates are still too high and all this spending is starting to crowd out dollars for other pressing public priorities like health care and education, particularly higher education.”\nOne statistic in which the state of Indiana hews closer to the national average is in the percentage of minorities behind bars in comparison to the percentage of those same groups represented in the overall population of the state. While African-Americans make up only 8.9 percent of the state population according to the U.S. Census Bureau, statistics published in the Indiana Department of Correction’s 2006 Annual Report show that nearly 39 percent of the adult male prison population in the state is African-American. The percentage for adult females is slightly lower at around 30 percent.\nNationally, while African-Americans make up roughly 13 percent of the national population, roughly 38 percent of the adult male and 28 percent of the adult female prison population are African-American, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Most notably, 1 in 9 black men between the ages of 20-34 are currently behind bars. In Geld’s view, however, that is not the most distressing figure.\n“It’s really a stunning figure,” Geld said. “It’s something that’s building and has been building for a long time ... That’s the number of young black men who are behind the walls right now. But if you look at some other data, you’ll see black males born in 2001 actually have a one in three chance of spending time behind bars in their lifetime.”\nGeld said that policy must be the focus if there is any chance of reversing these trends.\n“Policy choices made over the past 20 years have sent more offenders to prison and kept them there longer, particularly for drug and property violations,” Geld said. “Taking another look at these policies may be one way to reverse this growth.”