'PRISON EXPERIENCE' RATE RISES

Experts Warn Of Impact Of Millions Of Ex-Inmates

Washington--About one in every 37 U.S. adults was either imprisoned
at the end of 2001 or had been incarcerated at one time, the
government reported Sunday.

The 5.6 million people with "prison experience" represented about 2.7
percent of the adult population of 210 million as of Dec. 31, 2001,
the report found. The study by the Justice Department's Bureau of
Justice Statistics looked at people who served a sentence for a crime
in state or federal prison, not those temporarily held in jail.

The study is the first to measure the prevalence of prison time among
American adults.

Last month, the bureau reported that a record 2.1 million people were
in federal, state or local custody at the end of 2002.

Between 1974 and 2001, the number of current and former inmates rose
by 3.8 million, the study found. Of those, 2.7 million were former
inmates. Experts say the growing number of ex-prisoners means more
people in society will have difficulty finding jobs because they have
felony convictions.

Many cannot vote, and they are more likely to have family or emotional
problems that exact a toll on state and local government budgets.

"We're talking about a large number of people --- bigger than a lot of
countries in Western Europe --- who face the barriers that exist when
you have been in the correctional system," said Jason Zeidenberg,
director of policy and research at the Justice Policy Institute, which
advocates alternatives to prison. "That's a really upsetting number."

Harsher sentences

The number of people sent to prison for the first time tripled from
1974 to 2001 as sentences got tougher, especially for drug offenses.

There are more ex-prisoners as well, the result of longer life
expectancies and a larger U.S. population. Prison experiences vary
greatly by gender and ethnic origin.

"At every age, men have higher chances of going to prison than women,
and blacks and Hispanics have higher chances than whites,"
statistician Thomas P. Bonczar said in the report.

Almost 5 percent of men in 2001 had done prison time, compared with
fewer than 1 percent of women.

Almost 17 percent of black men in 2001 had prison experience, compared
with 7.7 percent of Hispanic men and 2.6 percent of white men.

The percentage of black women with prison time was 1.7 percent,
compared with fewer than 1 percent of Hispanic and white women.

No matter their ethnic origin, people between ages 35 and 44 in 2001
had the highest rates of lifetime incarceration --- 6.5 percent for
men, almost 1 percent for women.

About one-third of the former prisoners in 2001 still were under
correctional system supervision, including 166,000 in local jails. The
rest were either on parole or on probation.

The study projects that, by 2010, about 3.4 percent of the adult U.S.
population will have had served time in prison. That translates to
about 7.7 million people.

Grim projections

If 2001 incarceration rates remain the same, about 6.6 percent of
people born that year can expect to serve a prison sentence during
their lifetimes, based on life expectancy tables, according to the
study.

That compares with 5.2 percent of those born in 1991 and 1.9 percent
of people born in 1974, according to the estimates.

About 11.3 percent of men and 1.8 percent of women born in 2001 will
go to prison during their lifetimes.

For black males, that translates into a one in three chance of doing
time, compared with one in six for Hispanic males and one in 17 for
white males, according to the projections.