WASHINGTON - More than one in 100 adults are now behind bars in the United States, home to the world`s largest penal population, with a startling one in nine young black men incarcerated, a study showed Thursday.
The prison and jail population rose to 2.3 million last year, out of a US adult population of 230 million, bringing the incarceration rate to one in 99.1 for the first time in US history, the Pew Center on the States said.
By comparison, China, with a population of one billion people, was second in the world with 1.5 million inmates, followed by Russia with 890,000 people in the slammer, the study said.
America`s one-in-100 incarceration figure also gives it the dubious distinction of leading the planet in the rate of incarceration, the study said.
The statistics are particularly striking among minorities.
While one in 106 adult white men are incarcerated, one in 36 Hispanics and one in 15 African-Americans are behind bars. Younger black men fare even worse, with one in nine African-Americans ages 20 to 34 held in cells.
While men are still 10 times more likely to be incarcerated than women, the female penal population is "burgeoning at a far brisker pace," the study said.
One in 265 women ages 35 to 39 are behind bars, but minority women are also sent to jail or prison at a higher rate than white women.
One in 100 black women and one in 297 Hispanic women are incarcerated, compared to one in 355 white women, the study said.
Tough policies, such as "three strikes" laws boosting prison time for repeat offenders, have mainly fueled the rise in the penal population, rather than an explosion in crime or overall population, it said.
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02/28/2008 23:03 GMT