ABSTRACT
In 1991 the Sentencing Project, an independent reform organization based in Washington DC, issued a report authored by Marc Mauer, its assistant director, entitled Americans Behind Bars: A Comparison of International Rates of Incarceration. The report found that the US had the highest incarceration rate in the world compared to the distant second, South Africa and third, the Soviet Union. As author writes this, a new crime bill has just been passed by Congress. This bill will render the numbers discussed small by comparison. Political scientists and criminologists have started to estimate the impact that this bill will have on imprisonment. Consider the racial nature of imprisonment with a million people in US prisons. Using US Census figures and estimates derived from publications of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, calculations show that the imprisonment rate for Black people is 1,534 compared to the white rate of 197.
