Study: One out of 31 people in United States are in prison, on probation or on parole

A new Pew Center on the States study has found there are more than 7.3 million Americans in the corrections system — or one in every 31 adults — costing the states $50 billion in 2008.

This rise hasn’t been due to “fate or even the natural consequence of spikes in crime,” the report stated. It was state policies that sent more people to prison and kept them there longer that was responsible for the rise, the study said.

The authors said that laws passed during the ’80s and ’90s put so many people behind bars that last year, for the first time in history, one in 100 adults were behind bars — one in 155 in Washington. This is a 274 percent rise in the number of prison and jail inmates during the past quarter century.

Corrections spending is the fastest-growing major expenditure of state budgets, outpacing education and transportation, and has quadrupled in the last 20 years, the report said. Washington state spent $917 million last year on corrections, up from $178 million in 1988.

The report argued that while lengthy sentences for serious and violent offenders is justified, the current budget crisis may be an opportunity to start rethinking sentencing guidelines for lower-level offenders, emphasizing stronger community corrections, like probation and parole, which several states have started to do.

“The fact that so many Americans, including hundreds of thousands who are a threat to no one, are incarcerated means that something is wrong with our criminal justice system,” David Keene, president of the American Conservative Union, said to the researchers.

Poll: World’s publics favor women’s equality

As many celebrate International Women’s Day, a widespread consensus of people around the world feel that women should have “full equality of rights,” according to an updated comprehensive poll conducted by the University of Maryland.

The poll, which encompassed 22 nations representing 60 percent of the world’s population, found an average of 86 percent agreed that it was important for “women to have full equality of rights compared to men,” with 59 percent saying it’s “very important.”

Ninety-seven percent of U.S. respondents felt equal rights for women were either important (77 percent) or very important (20 percent), along with similar large majorities in Mexico, Britain, Turkey, France, Indonesia and Argentina.

Large majorities of all the Muslim nations surveyed also felt equality was important: in Iran, 78 percent; Jordan, 83 percent; Azerbaijan, 85 percent; Egypt, 90 percent; Indonesia, 91 percent; Turkey, 91 percent; and in the Palestinian territories, 93 percent.

A majority of nations surveyed felt that the government should do more to prevent discrimination. Fourty-eight percent in the United States agreed, while 35 percent said the government was doing enough. A world average of two-thirds of respondents also agreed that the U.N. should do more to protect women’s rights.

“The idea that women should have equal rights is fairly new in the context of human history,” said Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org, adding that there’s a global consensus across cultures for both equal rights and government protection from discrimination.

Reach columnist Aditya Ganapathiraju at news@dailyuw.com.