The number of Americans under supervision of state adult correctional systems has fallen to the lowest level in a decade, the federal government said Tuesday, while the number of people serving time in federal prison fell for the first time in more than three decades.
Data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics showed 6,899,000 adults were under supervision of adult correctional systems at the end of 2013, the last year for which figures are available. The number of adults under supervision includes those who are incarcerated, on parole or probation.
The total number declined by 41,500 from the end of 2012, and it represented the first time since 2003 that the number fell below 6.9 million.
About one in every 35 adults was under some form of correctional supervision at the end of 2013, unchanged from the previous year. That rate is the lowest it has been since 1997.
The total incarceration rate has fallen, too, from about one in every 100 adults to one in every 110 adults.
Adam Gelb, director of the Public Safety Performance Project at the Pew Charitable Trusts, called that decline significant. States have reported an uptick in the number of inmates they held last year, although further reforms to the criminal justice system could lower those numbers over the long term.
The drop in prison populations came almost entirely from declines in the number of adults under community supervision and the number of inmates housed in local jails. At the end of 2013, 2,220,000 inmates were being housed in prisons or jails, down 11,000 from the year before.
And 2013 marked the sixth consecutive year that the number of supervised adults had decreased, since reaching a peak in 2007. Still, prison populations remain near an all-time high: More than 1.5 million inmates are housed in state or federal prisons, and another 731,000 reside in local jails. The local jail population fell by 13,000 inmates compared with the previous year.
The total prison and jail populations have increased 1.2 percent per year since 2000, the bureau reported, although it reported declines over the past six years. The federal prison population has led the growth, rising from almost 134,000 in 2000 to 205,700 today, while state prison populations have grown by a much smaller percentage.
