What's Going on with the Prison Population?

According to the Division of Adult Correction’s (DAC) website, there are about 38,900 people in prison in North Carolina today. That number actually overstates the real population slightly, because it includes the hundred or so people that are in escape status and a handful of others who are being held in other states for one reason or another. But still, that’s a lot of people. Some would say too many, and by international standards there may be something to that (see page 35 of the Pew Center’s recent report, One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008, comparing the per capita incarceration rate of the United States to the 26 largest European inmate populations). Within the United States, though, North Carolina falls in the middle of the pack as far as incarceration rate (see page 34 of the document linked above). And looking at our own recent history, the prison population is as low as it has been for years. After a decade of steady increases, the population has dropped by about 3,000 inmates from a high of nearly 42,000 inmates in late 2009. Recently released projections from the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission, available here, indicate that the population is likely to hold pretty steady at around 40,000 for the next decade. In previous reports (the 2009 report is available here), the Sentencing Commission had projected that the prison population would be pushing 50,000 by 2018. So what is going on? It’s worth noting at the outset that [...]