Using state-by-state data, the report says 2,319,258 Americans were in jail or prison at the start of 2008 one out of every 99.1 adults. Whether per capita or in raw numbers, it's more than any other nation.Prisons are big business in the Adirondacks so I guess this is good news for us. I'm not sure what it says about life in the USA. This is costing the states upwards of 49 billion dollars per year. Fortunately, New York State is one state that spends less than the national average on corrections. NYS has also had a decrease in the number of persons incarcerated. But for every dollar NY spends on higher education, it spends 0.73 cents on corrections. That's 3.597 billion dollars for higher education and 2.622 billion for corrections. 13.6% of NYS employees work for the department of corrections. That's higher than every state in the Northeast.
See the whole Pew report here (pdf).
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