(Photo : Reuters) America leads the way in prison populations


In a recent comparison compiled by the Centre for Prison Studies and Prison Policy Initiative, it was found that the state of Mississippi locks up more people per capita than China and Russia combined.



The Magnolia State had 1,155 inmates per 100,000 population in 2013, far out-pacing China's comparatively paltry 121 and Russia's 475. Over the last 30 years, the amount of people incarcerated exploded exponentially, growing by 300 percent. By comparison, the state's population grew only 17 percent during the same time period.



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Several factors come into play to get the numbers.



In the last decade, Mississippi officials lengthened sentences by a factor of 28 percent, and state law is written so several crimes carry a maximum sentence provision. Moreover, Mississippi is one of the few states to enact the so-called "three-strikes" law, which mandates the maximum sentence for third-time felons, regardless of what the third crime was. The state also has several for-profit prisons, favored in juvenile cases.



Social advocates claim that the state is swept up in an incarceration craze as state lawmakers, not wanting to look soft on crime, take hard stances on law-breakers that are particularly punitive.



According to the National Institute of Corrections, the Mississippian crime rate was four times higher than the national average. Property crimes account for the vast majority of incidents, around 92 percent, which is nearly seven percent higher than the national rate. The remaining eight percent are violent crimes and are about 22 percent lower than other states.



"The Mississippi prison system is in a crisis of over-incarceration, and that crisis will continue as long as the state imposes wildly excessive sentences, allows private corporations to reap profit from mass incarceration, and locks people up in conditions so nightmarish that some will never recover, physically or mentally," said Margaret Winter, associate director of the ACLU's National Prison Project, to The Clarion-Ledger.



Tommy Taylor, the Mississippi House Corrections Committee Chairman, said he believes those who commit violent crimes "should be put away for good."



The Clarion-Ledger, however, points out that three-fourths of the state's prison population is behind bars for non-violent crimes.



After a scathing report on such figures by the New York Times in May of this year, US Attorney General Eric Holder threw his weight behind the Smarter Sentencing Act, a bipartisan bill backers say would save billions on prison. Were the bill to become law, it would adjust federal mandatory sentencing guidelines for certain crimes in hopes of reducing the federal prison population.




TagsMississippi, prison, incarceration, Crime Rate, imprison