Federal Prison Reform Is a Necessity

The federal prison population, which currently exceeds 218,000 prisoners, has increased at an alarming rate for about three decades. Since 1980, the number of federal prisoners has grown by over 700 percent, while the U.S. population has only grown by slightly more than 32 percent, say Marc A. Levin and Vikrant P. Reddy of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

It is generally true that both state and federal prison populations rapidly outpaced population growth throughout the 1980s and 1990s. But in recent years, many state prison populations have declined, while the federal prison population keeps growing.

The prison population exploded after the passage of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, a major criminal justice overhaul which largely eliminated federal parole, reduced good time credits and transferred many sentencing decisions from the judiciary to Congress. The federal prison budget grew as the federal prison population grew.

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