U.S. Prison Population Drops for Third Year in a Row
State and federal prison populations dropped in 2016, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced Wednesday, making three successive years of decline in the national incarceration rate.
This decline led to the lowest rate of imprisonment (measured as commitment to a prison for more than one year) since 1997, when the rate was 450 prisoners per 100,000 U.S. population. The 2016 rate was 444 per 100,000.