An organization that advocates for fairer criminal punishment and prison alternatives rightly has sounded an alarm about an increase in America’s inmate population in 2022.
The Sentencing Project cited a recent report from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics that reported a 2% increase in the U.S. prison population at the end of 2022.
The report said the prison populations of 36 states and the federal system increased last year — unfortunately led by Mississippi, whose count of felons behind bars was up 14%. (This surely is affected by the state Parole Board’s recent reluctance to release prisoners.)
Next door, Louisiana’s prison population rose by nearly 5% in 2022.
To put numbers to this, state and federal prison systems reported 1.230 million people behind bars at the end of 2022. About 96% of them were sentenced to more than a year.
In Mississippi, there were 19,802 prisoners, an increase of 2,470 from 2021. Perhaps the most disturbing element of the state figures is that female inmates increased by 31% last year, up by 378 women to a total of 1,594. There were 2,092 more male inmates in 2022, for a total of 18,208 men behind bars.
Louisiana’s female prisoner count was 1,436 in 2022, up 17%. The state had 25,860 men in prison as well.
A press release from The Sentencing Project was understandably glum about the latest figures. “Fifty years since the onset of mass incarceration, the prison population remains nearly 500% larger than in 1973,” it noted.
That is too large of an increase, but America’s population is at least 50% higher than it was in 1973. And it seems like more people today, perhaps fueled by drug addiction, seem determined to commit the multiple felonies that ultimately land them in prison.
The Sentencing Project further said the country “has been moving away from a failed playbook of incarceration and overcriminalization,” and should not let “the recent, temporary uptick in crime” alter those efforts.
Agreed. But who knows how long the uptick will last? Plus, the federal agency’s report says efforts to reduce inmate counts have worked: 2022 was the first time since 2013 — nine years — that the prison population has risen.
A chart in the agency report said there were 1.570 million people in prison in 2012. That number declined every year through 2021, when it was down to 1.205 million. That’s a 22% decrease, spread fairly evenly between states and the federal prison system. It’s progress.
Yes, it is disappointing that 25,000 more people were in prison in 2022. But a look at the bigger picture shows the country clearly is making strides at reducing its prison population and giving more people convicted of serious crimes an alternative to rehabilitation. This is saving tax dollars and turning lives around.
