ABSTRACT
The practice of maintaining information on the scope and severity of punishment has been a constant throughout the history of America. This chapter examines the measurement of scope, whereby scope refers to prevalence or how many individuals are subject to a type of penal control over time or at a given point in time. Conventional indicators of scope are examined first and include the prison, probation, parole, and jail population figures routinely found in criminal justice texts, annual government reports, US Department of Justice/Bureau of Statistics publications, research institute reports, not to mention the scholarly literature. These conventional measures of scope are then augmented by discussion of penal populations that have not been assimilated into the usual counts. The chapter also examines the measurement of severity, whereby severity implies harshness or what is often dubbed punitiveness. The concept of punitiveness is restricted to what Kutateladze calls "state punitiveness".
