State prison population drops amid budget woes

New York : Spurred by budget crises, a new report says the number of inmates in US state prisons has declined for the first time since 1972.

The overall drop was slight, according to the Pew Centre on the States — just 0.4 per cent — but its report suggests there could be a sustained downward trend because of keen interest by state policymakers in curtailing corrections costs.

"The political and policy environment has changed drastically," said Adam Gelb, director of the Pew Centre's Public Safety Performance Project.

"There's now a realisation on both sides of the aisle that there are research-based strategies to protect public safety and hold offenders accountable without sinking ever more public dollars into prisons," Gelb said.

According to official data, 1,403,091 people were under the jurisdiction of state prison authorities on January 1, down by 5,739 from a year earlier.

The report, released yesterday, said this was the first year-to-year drop in the state prison population since 1972, when there were about 174,000 prisoners.

Since then, the US prison population has soared, in part because of stiff sentencing laws, giving the US the world's highest incarceration rate.

With more inmates to handle, state corrections costs quadrupled over the past 20 years, according to the report. Many states are now in fiscal disarray, and legislators are looking afresh at ways to curb prison spending, but the Pew survey revealed a wide variation of responses.