During 2011, the number of prisoners under the jurisdiction of state and federal correctional authorities by 0.9% from 1,613,803 to 1,598,789. This decline represented the second consecutive year the prison population in the United States decreased.

The prisoner population in the United States in 2012 declined for the third straight year, from 1,599,000 at yearend 2011 to 1,570,400 at yearend 2012. On December 30, 2012, the number of persons sentenced to serve more than 1 year (1,511,500) in state or federal prion facilities decreased by 27,400 prisoners from yearend 2011 and by 42,600 from yearend 2009, when the U.S. prison population was at its peak.

This program helps you learn about the impact of crime on victims. You will have opportunities to learn information and skills that benefit you. The program challenges you to begin to focus on other people...people you have harmed.

Historically, prohibition and parole practices have been offender-directed and have ignored or passively responded to the concerns of crime district. While offender supervision strategies are aimed at protecting the public as a whole from further victimization, the interests of individual victims often are lost under the mass of paperwork and growing caseloads of offenders.

Overall, 67.8% of the 404,638 state prisoners released in 2005 in 30 states were arrested within 3 years of release, and 76.6% were arrested within 5 years of release.

In 2011, correctional administrators reported 6,660 allegations of sexual victimization in prisoners. Of those, 605 were substantiated based on follow-up investigation. Local jail authorities reported 2,042 allegations, of which 284 were sustained.

Between February 2012 and September 2012, the Bureau of Justice Statistics completed the second National Survey of Youth in Custody (NSYC-2) in 273 state-owned or -operated juvenile facilities and 53 locally or privately operated facilities that held adjudicated youth under state contract. The survey was conducted by Westat (Rockville, MD), under a cooperative agreement with BJS. It was administered to 8,707 youth sampled from at least one facility in every state and the District of Columbia.

This review by the Department of Justice (Department) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) examined the impact of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' (ATF) implementation of Project Gunrunner on the illicit trafficking of guns from the United States to Mexico. Violence associated with organized crime and drug trafficking in Mexico is widespread, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. In part because Mexican law severely restricts gun ownership, drug traffickers have turned to the United States as a primary source of weapons, and these drug traffickers routinely...

Between February 2011 and May 2012, BJS completed the third National Inmate Survey (NIS-3) in 233 state and federal prisons, 358 jails, and 15 special confinement facilities operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Military, and correctional authorities in Indian country. The survey, conducted by RTI International (Research Triangle Park, North Carolina), was administered to 92,449 inmates age 18 or older, including 38,251 inmates in state and federal prisons, 52,926 in jails, 573 in ICE facilities, 539 in military facilities, and 160 in Indian country jails.

The Survey of Sexual Violence is an annual collection based on official records that the Bureau of Justice Statistics has conducted since 2004. It is one of a number of BJS data collections that are conducted to meet the mandates of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003.