Fewer Americans Behind Bars, BJS Reports

For the third straight year, fewer Americans were under "correctional supervision"--a catch-all description that includes prisons, jails, probation, and parole--in 2011.

That was the major finding of a U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics report released today.  Read more...

Probation Numbers Down, Parolees Up Slightly in 2010: BJS Survey

The number of adult offenders on probation or parole declined by 1.3 percent last year, dropping to 4.9 million, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics said today. It was the second consecutive year of decline in the number of adults under community supervision. At year's end, about 1 in every 48 adults in the U.S. was on probation or parole. The number of adult probationers declined for the second consecutive year to nearly 4.1 million but the number of parolees increased to 840,700.

The failure rate of parolees-the percentage who were returned to incarceration at some point during the year-decreased over the decade. During 2010, about 13 percent of parolees were reincarcerated at some time during the year, down from about 16 percent in 2000. About 5.7 percent of probationers were incarcerated at some point during 2010, nearly unchanged since 2000 (5.5 percent).  Read more...

Correctional Populations in the United States, 2009

Presents summary data on the number of adults under some form of correctional supervision in the United States at yearend 2009. Correctional supervision includes adults supervised in the community on probation or parole and those incarcerated in prison or local jails. The report provides a comparison between the change in the correctional population observed since 2000 and the changes observed during the 1980s and 1990s, which illustrates the slowing of growth in the population during each decade. It also includes the number of men and women under each correctional status and trend analysis of men and women under correctional supervision since 1990.  Read More...

BJS Promises Better, More Timely Data On Repeat Criminality

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics is improving its research capabilities on offenders' recidivism nationwide so that the problem can be measured more accurately and more quickly, BJS official Howard Snyder told the National Committee on Community Corrections yesterday in Washington, D.C. A frequently quoted BJS report concluded that about two-thirds of released state prisoners were rearrested for serious new crimes within three years. That report is based in 1994 prison releases in 15 states and was not issued until 2002 because of difficulties in collecting and analyzing the data. Snyder said that in the future, BJS will be able to measure recidivism based on data from 32 states. It is not clear yet exactly when the new data will be publicly available.

The committee also heard from Marc Mauer of the Washingon, D.C.-based Sentencing Project on a survey of more than 99 studies from various states on recidivism. Mauer described the results as "all over the map," in part because studies used differing definitions of recidivism. Some, for example, measure it in terms of re-arrests, while others focus on convictions or re-imprisonment. Some studies report reductions of 5 percent or 10 percent in recidivism after improved rehabilitation, results Mauer termed "not trivial." Recidivism reduction gains should not be exaggerated, "or we risk setting ourselves up to fail,' he said. The Sentencing Project survey can be found HERE.