TDCJ Statistics Homepage The Texas Department of Criminal Justice operates State prisons, State Jails, Parole, and provides funding and certain oversight of Community Supervision http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/statistics/stats-home.htm
Extractions: be found in the Publications section. Please note the DEATH ROW INFORMATION has moved. Community Justice Assistance Division (probation) Death Row Information Executive Services Finance Services Health Services Risk Management Website Report Page Updated: August 22, 2005 Contact Organization General Information Employment ... Texas Correctional Industries
Drugstory | Drug Stats | Crime Stats crime stats. General Information; Percentage of Homicides Linked to Substance Use Behind Bars Substance Abuse and America s Prison Population (1998) http://www.drugstory.org/drug_stats/crime_statistics.asp
Extractions: WASHINGTON - Sexual assaults and other illicit incidents of sexual contact are reported at juvenile prisons at 10 times the rate than at adult lockups, a government study finds. The research found 10 reported incidents for every 2,000 youths at state-run juvenile facilities. At state-run adult prisons, it was one reported incident for every 2,000 inmates, according to the study by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics released Sunday. The numbers are based on substantiated reports to corrections officials in 2004. Better reporting is one factor contributing to the higher rate at the juvenile corrections centers, said study co-author Allen J. Beck. State laws require staff to report sex allegations involving minors, he said. Beck, the bureau's chief of corrections statistics, said the study did not make a distinction between consensual and nonconsensual sexual contact. For people under age 18, any sexual contact is considered illegal, he said. The study defined sexual contact between corrections officials and inmates at adult facilities, including consensual but illegal acts, as "sexual violence." By that standard, the study found that most of the reports of sexual violence in adult facilities involved guards and other corrections officials having sexual contact with inmates.
Prisons.net Every year, the United States sets two prison recordsone we talk about, Does this mean the crime rate will spike as all these folks return home? http://www.prisons.net/
Extractions: As A Shameful Social Problem Ex-Con Nation We locked 'em up. They're getting out. What do we do now? by David Plotz Every year, the United States sets two prison records-one we talk about, and one we don't. Our mania for incarceration is common knowledge: The number of state and federal prisoners has quadrupled to 1.3 million in the past 25 years. But Americans have paid no attention at all to the backdoor of the prison. Inmates are arriving at an unprecedented rate, but they are also leaving at one. This year, American prisons will release more than 600,000 inmates, up from 170,000 in 1980. (To put it another way, a city with a population larger than Washington, D.C., leaves prison every year. And this does not even count the hundreds of thousands of lesser criminals who finish short jail sentences.) We lock them up, but we don't throw away the key. For all the hoopla that surrounds the death penalty and life sentences, only a teeny fraction of inmates-fewer than 4,000 per year-actually die in prison. Those who study "prisoner re-entry" have a new catch phrase to describe prisoners returning home: "They all come back."
TalkLeft: How To Reduce Crime In L.A. The heart of the crime problem in the state is its prison and parole systems .93% of Whenever crime statistics fall, the wingnuts use these stats as a http://talkleft.com/new_archives/009431.html
Extractions: Main Sunday :: January 23, 2005 How to Reduce Crime in L.A. Excellent op-ed by Joe Domanick, senior fellow in criminal justice at USC Annenberg's Institute for Justice and Journalism today in the LA Times Stop LA' s Crime Engine . His premise: L.A.' s communities. The gist of the argument: The heart of the crime problem in the state is its prison and parole systems....93% of everyone who enters prison in California will be released, and that the vast majority of them will return to places like South L.A. where social services to assist parolees reentering society barely exist. As a result, ex-cons are unprepared to do anything other than commit another crime and go back to prison. A 1997 Department of Corrections survey of parolees found that 85% were chronic drug or alcohol abusers, 70% to 90% were unemployed, 18% mentally ill and 10% homeless. ...Parole policies and laws that effectively stigmatize former inmates compound the problem. Until recently, the operating philosophy of the state's parole system was to return parolees to prison no matter how minor their violations. Typically, they return to their communities with little or no money. Employers routinely shun them. Laws deny them driver's licenses, access to public housing and other services. The effect on communities is devastating. Dominack praises LA police chief Bill Bratton for realizing that America cannot "arrest its way out of its crime problem." But, he says its not enough and he lays out the guantlet for Bratton:
TalkLeft: Is It Time To Put An End To Prisons? You have no idea how difficult it was to spend time in prison and not adopt that Which brings us back to the caveat, crime statistics are often better http://talkleft.com/new_archives/007586.html
Extractions: Main Sunday :: August 15, 2004 Is it Time to Put an End to Prisons? An article in the New York Times Magazine today asks a very interesting question: Is it time for America to Decarcerate? There is a movement afoot today, albeit a tiny one, that aspires to get rid of prisons altogether. The members of this movement call themselves ''abolitionists,'' borrowing the term applied to steadfast opponents of slavery before the Civil War. Since the 80's, an international group of abolitionists lawyers, judges, criminologists has been holding conferences every few years. According to ''Instead of Prisons,'' published by the Prison Research Education Action Project in 1976, the first article of the abolitionist catechism is that imprisonment is morally objectionable and indefensible and must therefore be abolished. Are these people moral visionaries, like their 19th-century namesakes? Or are they simply nuts? Inmates and Prisons
Prisons Don't Deter Crime Prison Boom Has Not Deterred crime, Report Suggests. By FOX BUTTERFIELD The study examined 272111 former inmates in 15 states during the first three http://threehegemons.tripod.com/threehegemonsblog/id30.html
Extractions: espite the prison-construction boom of recent years, the rate at which inmates released from prison committed new crimes actually rose from 1983 to 1994, suggesting that the increased number of criminals put behind bars has not been an effective deterrent to crime, according to a Justice Department study released today. The study found that 67 percent of inmates released from state prisons in 1994 committed at least one serious new crime within three years. That is a rearrest rate 5 percent higher than for inmates released in 1983. ``The main thing this report shows is that our experiment with building lots more prisons as a deterrent to crime has not worked,'' said Joan Petersilia, a professor of criminology at the University of California at Irvine and an expert on parole. A major reason that putting more people behind bars has not been an effective deterrent, Professor Petersilia said, is that state governments in an effort to look tougher on crime and to save money cut back on rehabilitation programs, like drug treatment, vocational education and classes to prepare for life outside prison.
Extractions: Internet Law Library: Crime, Law Enforcement, and Prisons: General Crime and Justice laws (complied by the General Services Administration) U.N.T.S. No. 14118, vol. 974, pp. 178-184CONVENTION FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF UNLAWFUL ACTS AGAINST THE Alaska Administrative Code, title 22 (Department of Corrections) Alaska Court of Appeals criminal appeals decisions ... LawMoose World Legal Resource Center Home See Also: Crime, Law Enforcement, and Prisons: Sentencing and Parole Civil Liberties and Civil Rights: General Computers and the law Domestic relations ... Translate with AltaVista's TM Systran R to: French German Italian Portuguese ... Spanish The Internet Law Library, originally the U.S. House of Representatives Internet Law Library (1994-1999), may not provide current information. Many now historic Internet resources are now found in the Library along with many still current ones. We recommend that you supplement the Internet Law Library as follows: Search LawMoose's World Legal Resource Center Search Engine (see search box above), and
Prison Rules - Super Max Prisons - Prison Supposition Oct 2003 Search on Google the phrase crime Statistics , is it strange that Do we close all prisons and help and assist criminals to the path of http://www.thesahara.net/prison_rules.htm
Prisons "R" Us By Mark Weisbrot - University Of Maryland More prisons will do little to address this problem. A glance at the last 25 years of crime statistics shows that crime rates have moved up and down, http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Topic/Diversity/Specific/Race/Specific/African_A
Extractions: Prisons "R" Us By Mark Weisbrot weisbrot@preamble.org Source: Knight-Ridder/Tribune Media Services; 17 February 2000 America is facing an epidemic of incarceration. Like a dread disease it has spread and multiplied until it begins to corrode the fabric of our society. The number of prisoners has multiplied six-fold over the past 27 years, and will reach the astounding milestone of two million some time this year. No other country, with the possible exception of Russia, puts so many of its people in cages. We have less than 5% of the earth's population, but somehow manage to hold a quarter of the world's prisoners. How can this be? Are we afflicted with so much more crime than other countries? It turns out that for most crimes, we are not: the best available data place the United States at about average in its crime rate as compared to countries of similar income. The big exception is homicide. America is number one among developed nations, with more than three times the rate of Canada or France, and six times the rate of Ireland. This is, as everyone except the NRA [National Rifle Association] seems to know, primarily a result of our widespread availability of firearms, as compared to other countries. More prisons will do little to address this problem.
'Crime Is Causing Untold Misery' [Archive] - Prison Talk Online Prison Talk AROUND THE WORLD EUROPE PRISON FORUMS Europe prisons News Each one of the crime statistics released yesterday represents a real http://www.prisontalk.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-120601.html
Extractions: "The horrific stabbing of a young woman in a Surrey village and the shocking shooting of a man as part of an apparent attempt to steal his car from his driveway have done more to highlight crime in this election than any speech by any politician from any party. That these events came to light as the party leaders were arguing about the meaning of the competing crime statistics released yesterday illustrates the imperfect value of any of these figures. The principal issue facing ministers, the police and the public today is not the number of crimes committed but the changing character of criminality. It is on this matter that the parties should be pressed ... "The consequences of the new character of crime are huge. There is a vast difference between a 30-year-old returning to his car to discover a radio has disappeared and a 15-year-old having his mobile phone seized at knifepoint or worse. The debate on crime figures has gone on for long enough. The political obfuscation on this issue now verges on the criminal."
Crime In America Documents the rise of crime in America. Discusses how to fight crime in your Massive spending on social programs, massive spending on prisons, http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/crime.html
Extractions: LU-Announce Case #1: Polly Klaas of Petaluma, California, was abducted from her suburban home during a sleepover with two friends on October 1, 1993, and subsequently murdered. Her alleged assailant, Richard Allen Davis, had been sentenced to sixteen years in prison for kidnapping, but was released in June after serving only eight years of that sentence. Case #2: Michael Jordan's father, James Jordan, was fatally shot in the chest on Interstate 95 in North Carolina on July 23, 1993. Charged with the murder were Larry Martin Demery and Daniel Andre Green. Demery had been charged in three previous cases involving theft, robbery, and forgery. He was awaiting trial for bashing a convenience-store clerk in the head with a cinder block during a robbery. Green had been paroled after serving two years of a six- year sentence for attempting to kill a man by smashing him in the head with an axe, leaving his victim in a coma for three months. Americans are scared, and they are angry. The scary orgy of violent crime has made average citizens afraid to walk the streets in front of their homes. And this fear has fueled a public cry to end the killing fields in America. Americans have had enough, and they want to know why known criminals were let back out on the streets so they could kill Polly Klaas and James Jordan.
Extractions: Correspondence and enquiries This bulletin on Scottish prison statistics forms part of The Scottish Executive Justice Department series of bulletins on aspects of the criminal justice system. We have again presented figures on the average daily population of prisoners and the number of receptions. This information is disaggregated by age, gender, sentence type, sentence length and main crime. Details and historical figures are included in the Annex Detailed tables can be found in the Appendix and explanations of the terms and classifications used throughout the bulletin are provided in the Annex Chart 1 Average daily prison population, 20
Private Prisons:Profits Of Crime Private prisons Profits of crime. By Phil Smith from the Fall 1993 issue of Covert Action Private prisons are a symptom, a response by private capital http://mediafilter.org/caq/Prison.html
Extractions: At Leavenworth, Kansas, within a perimeter of razor wire, armed prison guards in uniform supervise hundreds of medium- and maximum-security federal prisoners. Welcome to one of America's growth industries- private sector, for-profit prisons. Here in the shadow of the federally-run Fort Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks and the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) runs a short-term detention facility for medium- and maximum-security prisoners. Under contract to the U.S. Marshal's Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the CCA Leavenworth facility is not an anomaly but part of a trend. In the last decade, from juvenile detention centers to county jails and work farms to state prison units to INS holding camps for undocumented aliens, private interests have entered the incarceration business in a big way. Where there are people detained, there are profits to be made. Imprisonment is an ugly business under any regime, but the prospect of a privatized prison system raises difficult and disturbing questions beyond those associated with a solely state-operated prison system. It has been, after all, a common assumption that the criminalization and punishment of certain behaviors-the deprivation of physical liberty and even of life itself-are not amenable to private sector usurpation. Some of the arguments that inform this assumption are ethi cal, some legal, and others practical, but all are being chal lenged by a growing group of special interests.
Prisons Essays And Articles At ENotes prisons essays, articles, and viewpoints. According to 1998 FBI statistics, the overall rate of serious crime is at a 25year low. http://www.enotes.com/prisons-article/
Extractions: Advanced Search Welcome, guest! Login Join eNotes Help September 20th, 2005 Tell a friend about Prisons eNotes. Printable Version Download PDF Cite this Page In 1971 there were fewer than 200,000 inmates serving time in Americas state and federal prisons. During the 1980s and early 1990s, the American publics fear of rising violent crimemainly attributable to the explosion of the crack cocaine trade in the 1980sinspired many politicians to pass laws that imposed harsher sentences on those who engaged in criminal behavior. Three strikes laws, which mandate an automatic life sentence for a third felony conviction, and truth-in-sentencing laws, which require violent criminals to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences, combined with Americas War on Drugs to fuel a prison population increase of unprecedented proportions. As of 1996, there were more than 1.7 million people behind bars in the United States. California alone has more prisoners than France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands combined. Since the 1970s, over 1,000 new prisons and jails have been constructed to accommodate the massive influx of inmates, and more facilities are needed to relieve the dangerously overcrowded conditions found in most prisons. The cost of convicting, housing, and feeding Americas prisoners now exceeds 120 billion dollars per year. Three statesNew York, California and Texasspend more on incarcerating criminals than on higher education. Because prison construction and maintenance are consuming more from limited government budgets, many social critics are reexamining the effectiveness of increased incarceration as a solution to crime.
Is Crime Down Because More People Are In Prison? The crime rate does not continue to drop as our prisons expand. But the crime rate did not decline in Texas more than all other states. http://www.solutionsfortexas.info/id184.html
Extractions: Effective Solutions for the Texas Criminal Justice System Is crime down because more people are in prison? Home Solutions F.A.Q.s At the Legislature ... Events Texas' incarceration rate has been 51% higher than the national average, but in spite of that the crime rate has been 24% higher than the national average. TDCJ Community Justice Assistance Division, "Community Supervision in Texas: Summary Statistics January 2003", Prepared by Research and Evaluation. The crime rate does not continue to drop as our prisons expand. It is even possible that an unintended consequence of over-incarceration is an increased crime problem. It would seem logical that if we keep putting more criminals in prison, then the crime rate will keep getting lower at the same time. In fact, Texas is a good example of how that has of its prisons. Texas expanded its prison space, and the number
The Prison Industrial Complex And The Global Economy The proliferation of prisons in the United States is one piece of a puzzle called the prisons are not reducing crime. But they are fracturing already http://www.prisonactivist.org/crisis/evans-goldberg.html
Extractions: prisons issues crisis The Prison Industrial Complex and the Global Economy by Eve Goldberg and Linda Evans Over 1.8 million people are currently behind bars in the United States. This represents the highest per capita incarceration rate in the history of the world. In 1995 alone, 150 new U.S. prisons were built and filled. This monumental commitment to lock up a sizeable percentage of the population is an integral part of the globalization of capital. Several strands converged at the end of the Cold War, changing relations between labor and capital on an international scale: domestic economic decline, racism, the U.S. role as policeman of the world, and growth of the international drug economy in creating a booming prison/industrial complex. And the prison industrial complex is rapidly becoming an essential component of the U.S. economy. PRISONS ARE BIG BUSINESS Like the military/industrial complex, the prison industrial complex is an interweaving of private business and government interests. Its twofold purpose is profit and social control. Its public rationale is the fight against crime. Not so long ago, communism was "the enemy" and communists were demonized as a way of justifying gargantuan military expenditures. Now, fear of crime and the demonization of criminals serve a similar ideological purpose: to justify the use of tax dollars for the repression and incarceration of a growing percentage of our population. The omnipresent media blitz about serial killers, missing children, and "random violence" feeds our fear. In reality, however, most of the "criminals" we lock up are poor people who commit nonviolent crimes out of economic need. Violence occurs in less than 14% of all reported crime, and injuries occur in just 3%. In California, the top three charges for those entering prison are: possession of a controlled substance, possession of a controlled substance for sale, and robbery. Violent crimes like murder, rape, manslaughter and kidnaping don't even make the top ten.
Prison Fellowship Newsroom - Press Kit (Diminishing Returns crime and Incarceration in the 1990s, Of the 272111 persons released from prisons in 15 states in 1994, an estimated 67.5 percent http://www.demossnewspond.com/pf/presskit/generalstats.htm
Extractions: Wilberforce Forum Criminal Justice Statistics Nearly 7 million men, women, and youth are under correctional supervision in Americaincarceration, probation, or parole (2003). Studies show that the high price tag of incarceration ($146 billion annually) is not leading to a solution to crime. The number of people under correctional supervision has doubled in ten years: Today there are nearly 7 million men and women under correctional supervisionincarceration, probation or parolein the United States, compared with 6.6 million in 2002 and 3.2 million in 1990. (Bureau of Justice Statistics, August 2004)
