California Prison Populations

The data visualization below shows the occupation rate of California's prisons in 2007. Many of the prisons were over 200% capacity. 

Today's Fox News about the U.S. Supreme Court decision indicates the problem of overcrowded California prisons hasn't been resolved.

Prison reform is a serious issue for the U.S.

Visualizing the U.S. Federal Prison Population by Types of Offenses (April 2009)

(Click on image for dynamic chart.)

This chart shows the types of offenses under which the U.S. federal prison population (205,096) was sentenced.

The big fat light-blue bubble is Drug Offenses, 350% larger than the next highest category (Weapons, Explosives and Arson).

Data came from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and the data visualization was made using Many Eyes.

Juvenile Incarcerations by U.S. State

Geography Matters - Child Well-being in the States - April 2008 is an important report indicating how U.S. states vary in their care of juveniles.

Extracting data from the report, I used Many-eyes.com to show the number of juveniles incarcerated by U.S. state. Wyoming has an incarceration rate 8 times more than Vermont.

Visualizing Overcrowded Prisons

The data for this visualization is from the
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, State of California.

California's 2008 data is due out in July 2008. Prison overcrowding is expected to increase even more.

The U.S. Incarceration Mentality

The Bureau of Justice statistics on Prisoners in 2005 says Federal prisons were operating at 34% above capacity. State prisons were operating between 1% below and 14% above capacity.

This was 3 years ago.

Why the high rate? Possibilities include:

• 3-strikes rule
• War on drugs
• Probations extending many years
• Politicians "getting tough on crime"
• Mandatory sentencing

See the map below to see the projected 2006 incarceration rate by U.S. state.

Prisons and the Need for Prison Reform

To better represent statistics available through the PEW Charitable Trusts or government organizations such as the U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Justice Statistics, I use Many-Eyes. Many-Eyes is a powerful visualization tool for all on the Internet. Prison data is under my topic hub called, Prisons and Prison Reform.

A few significant facts among the charts and graphs:

• From 2000 to 2005, felony arrests in California increased 17%.
• More than half the California prison institutions/camps are occupied at over 200% of the capacity for which they were designed, and all are over 100%.
• In French Guiana, prison occupancy is at 469% of prisons' designed capacities.
• Prison incarceration rate in the state of Louisianna is 835 per 100,000 population. It's the highest in the U.S. and higher than any country in the world.

And here is a U.S. map showing States' ratios of blacks (%) in prison to blacks (%) by population.

technorati tags: population, many-eyes, statistics, us, worldwide, prisons, incarceration, prisoners, grjenkin, garrysblog, visualization

Worldwide Prison Population Rate

Worldwide statistics from Feb. 2005 show the prison population rate of the U.S. is 25% higher than the next highest rated countries of Russia, Belarus and Bermuda (UK)...Bermuda??? They were tied for



Thanks to MetaFilter by shothotbot for inspiring post and helpful links to prison statistics.
Thanks to Many-Eyes for the visualization capabilities and to King's College London; International Centre for Prison Studies for the data source.

technorati tags: garrysblog, manyeyes, prison, population, world, international, studies