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To avoid confusion you shouldn't use the words "jail" and "prison" interchangeably. They are not the same thing. Jails are the local facilities generally funded by counties where people are incarcerated awaiting trials on felonies and misdemeanors and where people tend to be sent after be convicted of misdemeanors and given jail sentences. Prisons are run by either the state or federal government and they are where people go after being sentenced for felonies. Our incarceration rate in state and federal prisons was 486 per 100,000 on December 34, 2004. Our total incarceration rate, including both those locked up in jails after sentencing and those locked up in state and federal prisons, was 724 per 100,000.

I don't know how this guy calculated his numbers, what age brackets he used and so on, but the percentage of people in this country behind bars is at an all time high. If you break it down and just look at the number of young men in prisons and jails it's really high. When you look at the percentage behind bars compared to incarceration rates in the rest of the world our rate of incarceration is incredibly high. If you look at historical numbers for our country our rate is several times higher than it ever was before 1980.

I'll give you one more link to incarceration data. This shows our incarceration rate and numbers of people incarcerated since 1925. These number only include people in state and federal prisons, not those in jails. Note how our incarceration rate in state and federal prisons was 486 in 2004, as we've discussed. Note also how that that number never was as high as 139 per 100,000 prior to 1980. The previous all time record was in 1939 when we had 137 per 100,000 locked up in state and federal prisons. The rise in incarceration rates in the last twenty-five years or so is unprecedented in this country. It is true that we now lock up people at a rate several times the rate we ever used to lock people up in the years prior to 1980. It is true that we now have the absolute highest incarceration rate in the world, and that we lock up more of our people in total than any other country in the world. Take a look at the world incarceration rates from the link in my post # 114. It's pretty interesting to see our rate compared to all those other countries.

Number and rate per 100,000 of prisoners in state and federal prisons from 1925 through 2004:

http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t6282004.pdf

World incarceration rates (see post # 114 for instructions on how to find the data):

http://www.prisonstudies.org/

"December 34, 2004"

Should have read: "December 31, 2004"

Just to get further clarification on your comments - this is the first time I've seen anyone explain clearly the distinction between prisons and jails. But as for the term "incarceration", is that generally understood to apply to one more than the other, or is does it cover both prisons and jails equally?

Jails are the local facilities generally funded by counties where people are incarcerated awaiting trials on felonies and misdemeanors and where people tend to be sent after be convicted of misdemeanors and given jail sentences. Prisons are run by either the state or federal government and they are where people go after being sentenced for felonies.

a distinction without a difference; typical twisting involved in making the statistics fit the predefined agenda.

What is your source for those definitions? My working copy of Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (1980, pg 613) notes "prison" as a synonym for "jail"."Jail" and "Prison" both come up as synonyms for each other using the Microsoft Word thesaurus.Roget's Thesaurus (1972, pg. 167 notes "jail" as a synonym for "prison" at entry #752.

if you're incarcerated, it makes little difference in the big view whether it's in a "jail", or in a "prison". You're still "in the big house".