The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School released a report on incarceration in the US and the statistics are shocking.

While the crime rate has been steadily declining since 1990, the U.S. has added about 1.1 million additional people behind bars, almost doubling the nation’s incarcerated population.

The below chart shows how the percentage of our population that is incarcerated has grown to absurdly high levels. Florida outpaces the US average.

While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners. According to a US Department of Justice report published in 2006, over 7.2 million people were at that time in prison, on probation, or on parole (released from prison with restrictions). That means roughly 1 in every 32 Americans are held by the justice system.

The Brennan report found that in the 1990s, it may have accounted for about 5 percent of the crime decline.  Since 2000, the effect of increasing incarceration on the crime rate has been effectively zero.

Over 50% of state prisoners are incarcerated for non-violent offenses and the feds are filled with low level drug mules and first time, non-violent, no-contact child pornography offenders.

Not only are we incarcerating twice as many people, we’re keeping them locked up for more than twice as long. mandatory minimums and three strikes laws (mandatory life sentence for a third felony) are keeping people behind bars for long periods as a consequence of benign offenses. The classic example is a case out of California, where a person’s “Third Strike” was stealing a piece of pizza (see: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/10/local/la-me-pizzathief10-2010feb10) for that, the guy got a life sentence! Can you imagine how many pizzas you can buy for the $40,000 a year it costs to imprison him?

America’s prisons and jails cost more than $80 billion annually – about equivalent to the budget of the federal Department of Education! Maybe we have the wrong idea here?