The number of people on probation and parole jumped last year in the District, Maryland and Virginia, in contrast to a decline nationwide — but local prison populations dropped, bucking a nationwide increase. In 2009, D.C.’s parole population rose 9.6 percent compared with 2008 and the number of people on probation jumped 16.2 percent, the largest increase in the country, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics data released Tuesday.
Those numbers are a sharp contrast to 0.7 percent drop in the total number of people under correctional supervision nationwide, the first overall decline since the agency began reporting the data in 1980. Nationally, the probation population dropped 0.9 percent, the parole population declined 0.7 percent and the prison population rose 0.2 percent.
The report said some of the District’s increase was because of a slower discharge rate, meaning probationers’ and parolees’ supervision was “extended due to noncompliant behavior, such as not fulfilling all sentence conditions.” And BJS statistician Lauren Glaze said D.C.’s relatively small size makes its numbers “more sensitive to population shifts.”
D.C.’s Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency has handled the increase by focusing on high-risk offenders, spokesman Leonard Sipes said.
“The issue is not necessarily the number of individuals so much as ascertaining who is the greatest risk to public safety and providing the appropriate level of supervision,” he said.
In Maryland, the number of people on parole increased 3.9 percent, and the probation population rose 3.5 percent. But the number of incarcerated adults declined 4.6 percent, the third-largest drop in the country.
That’s “consistent with the way Maryland’s correctional population has been trending for the past couple years,” said David Soule, executive director of the Maryland State Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy.
Soule and Rick Binetti, spokesman for the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, both pointed to the state’s lowering crime rate as a reason for the declining prison population.
Maryland was one of just six states to see a drop in prison inmates between 2000 and 2009.
Virginia’s parole population rose 3 percent and the number of adults on probation increased 3.8 percent, while prison population dropped 0.5 percent.
Because D.C. prisoners are under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, BJS did not separately report the District’s prison population.
The nation’s first drop in the number of people in the corrections system isn’t a surprise, said Glaze, of BJS.
“The growth rate has been slowing,” she said. “We were expecting a decline at some point in time.”
