On this day, Oct. 27, in 1994, the U.S. Justice Department announces that the U.S. prison population has topped 1 million for the first time in American history. That number more than doubled by 2009 to about 2.3 million adults in federal and state prisons and county jails, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Another 5 million people were on probation or parole. There were another 87,000 juvenile in juvenile detention.
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Of the 2.3 million adults behind bars, more than 2 million were male. About 785,000 were white, 905,000 were black and 475,000 were Hispanic.
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, but it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
China, four times more populous than the United States, has the second most, with 1.6 million people in prison.
— Scott McCabe
