Federal inmates are a tiny minority of inmates in the United States, because the vast majority of crimes are prosecuted at the state level. There are about 147,000 convicted federal inmates compared to over a million held in state prisons and 103,000 convicts held in local jails.
> This methodology of counting current prison population is biased for more serious crimes with longer sentencing
This strikes me as an attempt to move the goalposts, given that we're several comments deep into a thread which started with the claim that "95% of US inmates are on plea deal".
This is HN, threads are supposed to get more interesting as they get longer. I was simply expending on my parent’s point by providing the data which was lacking, and my editorialization was to provide the necessary context.
This is false.
This is the ancestor comment that set the goalpost with the statement that "95% of US inmates are on plea deal". Neither that comment nor any of its ancestors were mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40906705
And it's rather rich of you to accuse me of dishonesty when you're the one providing misleading and unrepresentative statistics by focusing on federal inmates in particular.
https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
To summarize, 44% of current federal inmates are there for drug-charges. The second most category is weapons charges at 22%. So a good 2/3 of current federal inmates are there for non-violent crimes. Sex offense is third most common at 13% I’m sure many are there for illegal sex work or consumption rather than for sexual violence. A whopping 4.6% is in federal prison for immigrating (which isn’t even a crime; unless this category includes human trafficking, which I would call a violent crime).
EDIT: As for all US prisoners, here is the data I found (see table 16 on page 29):
62% are there for violent crimes and 12.5% for drug charges. Note that many large states—such as California—don’t imprison for drug possession any more, and this table does not include sentences shorter than 1 year. This methodology of counting current prison population is biased for more serious crimes with longer sentencing, as most crimes have shorter sentencing but serious and especially violent crimes have longer sentencing and thus are over-represented among the current prison population at any one point in time.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/p22st.pdf