There’s a surge happening, but it’s not in Iraq. Instead it’s in the millions of people being put behind bars in the United States.
According to the Washington Post, which cites the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics:
The number of people under supervision in the nation’s criminal justice system rose to 7.2 million in 2006, the highest ever, costing states tens of billions of dollars to house and monitor offenders as they go in and out of jails and prisons.
According to a recently released report released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 2 million offenders were either in jail or prison in 2006, the most recent year studied in an annual survey. Another 4.2 million were on probation, and nearly 800,000 were on parole.
The report states that this is with an estimated cost of $45 billion to tax payers, which federal numbers show is paying for the incarceration of a racially skewed prison population:
Black men, about one in 15, were most affected, and Hispanics, one in 35, were well represented among offenders. The number of women in prison "rose faster in 2006 than over the previous five years," mostly in Hawaii, North Dakota, Wyoming and Oklahoma, the Bureau of Justice
There are just over 23,000 state inmates in Colorado, according to April figures from the Department of Corrections.
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