your first sentence finally comes around to my original point: there's lies, damn lies, and statistics (Mark Twain).
As to how I reached my #'s, please check back to my post #129:
thanks for the links!
table #2 of link 1 (on page 3) shows 1,494,216 in jail as of 06/30/2004.
when we subtract "non-citizens" (91,789 - page 5 of link #1), we see there are 1,402,427 citizens incarcerated (1)
from Census Factfinder -2004 data 212,767,197 (18& over) - 34,205,301 (65 & over) = 178,561,896 (2)
(2) divided by (1) => 1 out of 127 +/-, not 1 out of 80. interesting note on your 1st link, page 4: "The incarceration rate of State and Federal prisoners sentenced to more than 1 year was 486 per 100,000 U.S. residents on June 30, 2004, up from 482 per 100,000 on December 31, 2003." 100,000/486 => 1 in 206 +/-
at least I showed how I reached my conclusions.
your 726 per 100,000 is 1 out of 137 (= 100,000 / 726) - still a far cry from 1 in 80.
"your 726 per 100,000 is 1 out of 137 (= 100,000 / 726) - still a far cry from 1 in 80."
Now, you aren't subtracting "children and the elderly" when you make this calculation. The author asked, "why is one of every 80 Americans (not counting children and the elderly) locked away from family, friends, career and life?" Both those in jail and in prison are locked away, so it would be fair to include both those in jails and in prisons in the calculation. If you separate out those under 18 and those 65 and older like you did in your other calculation, leaving 178,561,896 people, and then divide that by the number of people in prisons and jails, 2,131,180, there would be about one in almost 84 behind bars. That puts the author in the ballpark of being right, and depending upon which data sources and he was using, it may be that his calculations actually may have resulted in a one out of 80 answer. Even looking at U.S. census numbers we can see all sorts of discrepancies in one report from another about how many people actually lived here. We see the same thing in the incarceration numbers. Even something as simple as the date the numbers come from can make a fairly big difference. These USDJ numbers we are using are from June 30, 2004. There were more behind bars on December 31, 2004. And looking at the USDOJ numbers I can see one odd discrepancy I can't quite explain. They say that as of June 30, 2004, there were 1,494,216 people in prisons. On the same date, there were 784,538 "under jail supervision." But a portion of those were supervised by the jail in "alternate programs," presumably things like house arrest, leaving only 713,990 actually in jail custody. Anyway, when you add the 1,494,216 people in state and federal prisons on June 30, 2004, with the 713,990 in jails on that date, you come up with 2,208,206 behind bars instead of the other figure they provided. Work the calculation using that number divided into the number of people 18 through 64, and you come up with one out of 80.76 people behind bars on June 30, 2004. I wouldn't say the author is entirely off base making the one out of 80 claim. I wish he had had told us exactly which numbers he was using and how he did his calculations, but his numbers do not appear to be way out of line with reality to me.
Here's the USDOJ link again:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/pjim04.pdf
I don't agree with everything the author was saying. I do think we've gone crazy with locking so many people up in this country though. I work in the criminal justice system and I pay attention to these numbers. I see how things work within the system. I see our prisons and jails in my state being way overcrowded, despite massive budget increases over the years and all sort of new facilities being built. Our county jail is so full that we have to send people to other county jails and pay for them to be housed because we can't afford another new jail at the moment. They aren't even really putting people in jail here for misdemeanors anymore because there is no room. Almost everyone is getting signature bonds when they are arrested. Some of these people should be going to jail and staying there. Our prisons are so full that parole officers can no longer seek to get parole revoked for parolees who commit crimes. These guys practically have to kill someone to get sent back on a parole violation. The new crime they are accused of committing has to be in our state's highest felony classification below a death penalty case before parole can be revoked. Child molesting, kidnapping, burglary, and so on are not generally in that high of a classification. It's crazy. Our legislators who keep passing "tough on crime" laws to appease voters are at the same time having to pass laws to let people out of prison earlier and earlier. People who are really bad who should be in prison for the good of us all are getting out earlier and earlier. We've just gone nuts with locking people up and we're starting to pay the price for it.
No, I really don't see any good reason why we have to have the highest incarceration rate in the world along with the highest number of persons actually behind bars. This is America, the land of the free, yet we lock up more people than Russia or China or any other country in the world. You can say that some of these countries shoot people or chop off their hands if they do wrong, but in reality that is only a tiny few of them. Most are a lot like us and have the same types of problems we have but they deal with them in different ways than us. What we are doing is not something we've always done. There is nothing traditional about it. It's something that just started about two and a half decades ago and it has gotten out of hand. It is not the "American way." It is not conservative, in any sense of the word. It's just crazy.
One more time, just for your reading enjoyment, I'll post a link to the number and rate per 100,000 of prisoners in state and federal prisons from 1925 through 2004. Again, this only includes those in prisons, not jails:
http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t6282004.pdf