Prison Overcrowding

In the past ten years, the U.S. prison population has increased 43 percent, with the national incarceration rate (adults incarcerated per 100,000) jumping from 272 in 1990 to 478 in 2000 (Beck and Harrison 2001). Fortunately, an 82 percent increase in prison capacity in the past ten years has prevented significant overcrowding in many states.

However, despite some lessening of prison over-crowding, many states are struggling to reduce their prison populations. Much of this struggle stems from legislation enacted in the early 1990s, when the nation witnessed unprecedented crime, and in part from the nation's War on Drugs. In response, many states enacted legislation to increase prison terms for drug offenders and repeat offenders as well as to institute minimum mandatory sentences for serious, violent felonies. The early 1990s also ushered in the use of sentencing guide-lines as a way to institute truth-in-sentencing principles to limit or abolish discretionary release (e.g., parole) of offenders from prison while making offenders serve a greater percentage of their court-imposed sentence (Tonry 1996; Tonry and Hatlestad 1997).

In the face of these trends, policy makers have two options: (1) to predict, fund, and build adequate space for more beds or (2) to take the necessary policy or legislative steps to reduce the number of inmates entering prison and/or reduce how long inmates stay. Complicating the debate is the fact that prison populations vary [Page 1221]naturally over time for a number of reasons: changes in prison admission patterns, changes in the demographic makeup of offenders (particularly age and ethnicity), changes in sentences imposed by judges, changes in economic and social conditions, changes in resource allocation and prison capacity, and annual legislative changes to criminal sanctions. Together, these reasons interact in a dynamic system that complicates planning efforts to manage the growth of prison populations—ensuring that prison beds are in place when beds are needed. Building too many prisons can be a costly investment for any state, particularly because the cost of a 1,000-bed prison can run $50,000 per bed or $50 million in construction and $20 million in annual operations. Building too few prisons can also be a costly mistake that typically results in extensive social and legal costs (federal lawsuits). Accurate long-term planning is the key, given the constraints of lengthy time periods required for prison construction—appropriating funds, bidding contracts, selecting a site, constructing prisons, and training new staff.

There is an entirely new penology in American criminal justice that views the integration of sentencing guidelines with computer simulation models as the key to managing the nation's correctional resources. This new penology does not reject the pejorative view that the criminal justice system is an “assembly line.” Quite the contrary, the assembly line not only is embraced today but also is studied, modeled, and perfected mathematically in hopes of ensuring the smooth flow of people into and out of the penal system. This new penology attempts to integrate sentencing guidelines, which offer the promise of certainty and predictability, with the rationality and empiricism of systems theory and operations research.

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