Prisons and Imprisonment

Abstract

Imprisonment is the punishment for most violent crimes, serious property crimes, and serious drug trafficking in most countries. In most countries, prisons hold all convicted offenders and pretrial detainees. In the United States, federal and state ‘prisons’ hold offenders sentenced to terms of a year or longer, and ‘local jails’ hold pretrial detainees and offenders sentenced to terms of less than a year. Countries vary enormously in how imprisonment is used. In 1998 incarceration rates ranged from 680 per 100,000 residents in the United States and Russia to 60 to 120 per 100,000 in most Western countries and 30 to 50 per 100,000 in many Asian countries. In some countries, such as Scandinavia, large percentages of offenders are sentenced to prison sentences, many for only a few days. Other countries, including Germany and Austria, sentence smaller percentages of offenders to prison but for longer terms. Most prisoners are young, male, and unmarried, and most have long criminal records, come from disadvantaged backgrounds, and committed their crimes under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Disproportionate and increasing numbers of prisoners in most countries are members of ethnic and racial minorities. Although in the 1970s, most scholars concluded that prison treatment programs cannot be shown to reduce recidivism rates, by the 1990s credible research showed that drug treatment, cognitive skills training, some sex offender treatment, and some vocational training programs do reduce recidivism. Prison policy has become an important subject in electoral campaigns in the United States, England, and Australia (but not in most of continental Europe) and punishment policies have become much harsher.