US prison population skyrocketing: Report

The devastating report, issued this week by the National Research Council which is an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, shows the growing size of the world’s largest prison population does not correspond to an increase in violence but is driven by politically-motivated policy changes.

The 464-page report describes the rise in the US incarceration rate since the 1970s as “historically unprecedented and internationally unique.”

According to the report, 200,000 adults were locked in US federal and state prisons in 1973 but by 2009, that number had ballooned to 1.5 million. Since 2009, the number of adults that federal and state prisons in the US hold has risen to 2.23 million.



However, that number multiplies when people who are on parole or probation are considered.



Meanwhile, sixty percent of incarcerated people in the US are people of color. African-American males who have not completed high school and are under the age of 35 are more likely to be incarcerated than employed in the formal labor market.

“The U.S. prison population is largely drawn from the most disadvantaged part of the nation's population: mostly men under age 40, disproportionately minority, and poorly educated,” the report said.

This comes as the April jobs report released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showed the African-American unemployment rate stood at 11.6 percent, compared with the overall unemployment rate of 6.3 percent. The data also showed that the black jobless rate was more than twice the white jobless rate of 5.3 percent.

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