Test Your Knowledge About Crime and Imprisonment In The U.S.

True. The crime rate fell 13 percent in states where imprisonment rates decreased, while dropping 11 percent in states where imprisonment rates increased. Read more here.

False. Research shows that shorter prison terms followed by community supervision have the potential to reduce both recidivism and overall corrections costs. In New Jersey, for example, inmates released to parole supervision before their sentences expired were 36 percent less likely to return to prison—even when controlling for risk factors that reliably predict recidivism, such as an offender’s prior record—than inmates who maxed out. Read more here.

D. Eighty-five percent of likely voters agreed with the statement in a 2014 poll conducted for Pew by the Mellman Group and Public Opinion Strategies; 73 percent of respondents strongly agreed with the statement, and the results were identical among Republicans, Democrats, and independents. Read more here.

C. The overall incarceration rate, which combines inmates held in state and federal prisons and local jails, reached 1 in 100 adult residents at year-end 2006 and stayed at that level through the end of 2008. It then fell in each of the next five years, dropping to 1 in 110 adult residents by the end of 2013. See Table 2 here.

C. Florida. South Carolina passed reforms in 2010, Kentucky and North Carolina in 2011, and Mississippi in 2014. Read more here.

C. Louisiana had the highest incarceration rate at the end of 2013, with 1,420 inmates in prisons or local jails per 100,000 residents 18 or older. The national incarceration rate in state correctional facilities and local jails was 910 per 100,000 adult residents. See Appendix Table 1 here.

B. Leading criminologists attribute no more than 25 percent of the crime drop in the 1990s to increased incarceration. Other factors contributing to the crime decline include better policing, waning demand for crack cocaine, declining use of cash in favor of debit cards and other electronic transactions, increased private security, and improved antitheft technologies. Read more here.

C. The average time served was 40.1 months, largely the result of policies enacted by Congress requiring drug offenders to be sentenced to mandatory minimum prison terms. Read more here.

 

D. The Georgia General Assembly passed House Bill 1176 with votes of 162-0 in the House and 51-0 in the Senate, and Governor Nathan Deal signed it into law in May 2012. Read more here.

E. Expenditures for the federal Bureau of Prisons rose from $970 million to more than $6.7 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. Read more here.