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President Bush was right. A prison sentence for Lewis “Scooter” Libby was excessive—so too was the long three year probation term. But while he was at it, President Bush should have commuted the sentences of hundreds of thousands of Americans who each year have also received prison sentences for crimes that pose little if any danger or harm to our society. In the United States, every year since 1970, when only 196,429 persons were in state and federal prisons, the prison population has grown. Today there are over 1.5 million in state and federal prisons. Another 750,000 are in the nation’s jails. The growth has been constant—in years of rising crime and falling crime, in good economic times and bad, during wartime and while we were at peace. A generation of growth has produced prison populations that are now eight times what they were in 1970. And there is no end to the growth under current policies. The PEW Charitable Trust reports that under current sentencing policies the state and federal prison populations will grow by another 192,000 prisoners over the next fi ve years. The incarceration rate will increase from 491 to 562 per 100,000 population. And the nation will have to spend an additional $27.5 billion in operational and construction costs over this fi ve-year period on top of the over $60 billion now being spent on corrections each year.1 This generation-long growth of imprisonment has occurred not because of growing crime rates, but because of changes in sentencing policy that resulted in dramatic increases in the proportion of felony convictions resulting in prison sentences and in the length-of-stay in prison that those sentences required. Prison populations have been growing steadily for a generation, although the crime rate is today about what it was in 1973 when the prison boom started. It is tempting to say that crime rates fell over the past dozen years because imprisonment worked to lower them, but a look at data about crime and imprisonment will show that prison populations continued to swell long after crime rates declined and stayed low. Today, whatever is driving imprisonment policies, it is not primarily crime.
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