(RT) The number of Americans incarcerated in federal prisons throughout the country has increased by nearly 30 percent over the past ten years, according to a new report by an investigative arm of Congress.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released Monday attributed the 27 percent surge in prison population to mandatory sentencing minimums. The practice, in which a judge's discretion is almost completely removed from the sentencing process, mandates that nonviolent drug offenders are given pre-determined sentences. Critics have asserted that those prison terms are needlessly harsh and can put someone who presents no physical threat to society behind bars for decades.
“The Department of Justice's (OJ) Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) is responsible for the custody and care of over 219,000 federal inmates – a population that has grown by 27 percent in the past decade,” the GAO report states. “BOP is composed of 119 institutions, 6 regional offices, 2 staff training centers, 22 residential reentry management offices (previously called community corrections offices), and a central office in Washington DC.
“With a fiscal year 2013 operating budget of about $6.5 billion – the second-largest budget within DOJ – BOP projects that its costs will increase as the federal prison population grows through 2018...A variety of factors contribute to the size of BOP's population. These include national crime levels, law enforcement policies, and federal sentencing laws, all of which are beyond BOP's control,” the report continued.
Punishment for the same crime has become much more severe over the past quarter-century, according to a study released earlier this year by the Urban Institute. Drug offenders arrested in 1974 were facing an average of 38.5 months, yet if someone was charged with a similar crime in 2011 they would have faced an average of 74 months.
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