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1 Patrick A. Langan & Lawrence A. Greenfeld, The Prevalence of Imprisonment 1 (1985)

handle is hein.death/previmp0001 and id is 1 raw text is: U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justices Special Report Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report The Prevalence of Imprisonment By Patrick A. Langan, Ph.D. with the assistance of Lawrence A. Greenfeld BJS Statisticians In the 1960s, while crime soared, prison populations declined. What fol- lowed in the 1970s was a marked shift in national opinion: increasingly, the public began to demand that the juitice system get tougher with criminals. The response of the justice system seemed immediate. From 1970 to 1979, the imprisonment rate surged a record 39%, the largest single decade increase since the 1920s, when the Federal government started keeping records on State and Federal prison populations. The 32% increase during the 1930s is the closest any other decade has come to this record. Since the 1970s, imprisonment rates have continued to climb. With a 36% increase in just the first five years of the 1980s, and with further increases projected for the remainder of the de- cade, indications are that the impris- onment rate increase of the 1980s may turn out to be the biggest ever. The significance of these statistics on the changing imprisonment rate is that they are a measure--perhaps the measure-by which the public gauges government response to crime. But these statistics do not speak for them- selves. The changing imprisonment rate is actually a measure of the num- ber of persons (usually per 100,000 pop- ulation) in prison on a single day in one year relative to the number in prison on a single day in another year. The vari- ous implications of a change in these single-day counts are not obvious. July 1985 With this study, the Bureau of Justice Statistics introduces a new statistical indicator measuring the use of imprisonment as a sanction for crime. The prevalence of imprisonment indicator, along with the annual count of prison inmates, gives a comprehensive portrait of the American prison system in both static and dynamic terms. While the annual count of inmates reveals the number of prison in- mates on 1 day, the prevalence indicator measures the cumulative effect on the Nation's population of admitting and releasing inmates from State prisons. The findings of this study ques- tion some widely held beliefs about prisons, about deterrence (the inhibiting effect of the threat of imprisonment on the criminal ac- tivity of people), and about inca- pacitation (the effect that prisons have on reducing crime by pre- venting offenders from committing crimes in society). The fact that so few criminals go to prison relative to the large volume of serious crime convinces many that prisons cannot possibly have much of a deterrent or incapacitative effect on crime. Assessing the States' use of imprisonment in This study translates imprisonment rates into more easily understood terms, better to convey the implica- dynamic terms, however, reveals that the proportion of the Nation's population affected by imprison- ment is higher than might previously have been realized. Moreover, it suggests that the deterrent and incapacitative potential of prison may be larger than previously thought. Estimates of the prevalence of incarceration are useful for a number of other reasons as well. Presenting incarceration rate data in this form facilitates comparison of the likelihood of imprisonment with other prevalence indicators of significant life events increasingly being used to convey important epidemiological information to the public. These data are valuable for planning purposes in anticipat- ing future prison populations. The prevalence indicator is also useful for measuring recidivism, or the percentage released from prison who eventually return to serve another sentence. These detailed measures of lifetime recidivism establish a national benchmark (the first of its kind) against which future claims of superior correc- tional efficacy can be evaluated. Steven R. Schlesinger Director tions of record prison population growth in the 1970s. The findings presented disclose that the proportion of the pop-

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