one in 10

Here's a mind-blowing statistic. It's from a lead article in today's Washington Post: "As many as 60,000 D.C. residents -- one in 10 -- are felons, 15,000 of them under court supervision."

The headline is Back From Behind Bars and it's author, Robert E. Pierre, focuses on the difficulties encountered by felons on their release from prison.

I blogged about incarceration stats a year ago: (Throw away the key). Here is a short update to that post: Here's a short update to that post from the Jail Statistics page of the Bureau of Justice statistics site. It gives data only for locally-operated jails which generally only lock up people before of after they've been to court. The stats are thus a subset of the data in my original post.

Jail Statistics, Summary findings

• 94% of the rated capacity was occupied at midyear 2006.
  
• At midyear 2006, 766,010 inmates were held in the Nation's local jails, up from 747,529 at midyear 2005.

The BOJ stats show that Blacks were almost three times more likely than Hispanics and five times more likely than whites to be in jail. Project the red line forward. How many years before one in 10 Blacks are in jail? At that date will one in seven be felons in DC?

{source: Jail incarceration rate trends by race and ethnicity, 1990 - 2006}