Word: prisoners
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Building federal prison facilities over the next four years that will house 24,000 additional inmates at a cost of at least $1 billion...
Administration officials contend that an expansion of federal prisons, as well as recent changes in the law, will ease the burden on hard-pressed state and local officials by making it easier to charge drug offenders under federal statutes. Federal prosecutors are instructed to avoid offering plea bargains in such cases, making a prison term harder to dodge. Says White House aide Roger Porter, who helped design the package: "The people who are committing these crimes are not dumb. They know what the chances are of getting caught and getting sent to prison, and as we increase those odds...
...federal convict population will have grown to 84,000, which is 17,000 more than the expanded system is designed to accommodate. Study after study has shown that only a fraction of all reported crimes result in arrest, and only a fraction of those people arrested are sent to prison. During the past three decades, there have never been more than six imprisonments for every 100 reported crimes. Even doubling the current prison population, which would cost more than $43 billion, would leave the chance of a prospective criminal's facing imprisonment at no more than...
...judges have shaved sentences to help make room for more prisoners, the length of the average prison term has declined from 18 months to one year. Criminals, quickly recycled back to the streets, bring the deadly code of prison conduct with them. "Prison works to reduce crime only if you don't let the inmates out -- ever," says Jerry Miller, a former corrections official who directs the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives in Arlington...
...city is under court order to remedy the situation, but New York prison authorities are forbidden by law to resort to a simple release of surplus prisoners to alleviate overcrowding. Instead, the city is scrambling to speed up inmate processing, so that accused criminals awaiting trial can be released on bail, while it is also spilling inmates into the overcrowded state system...