The Nation - News from Dec. 15, 1986

The rising number of incarcerated people has drastically reduced space for each inmate, and prison security has been beefed up to keep the lid on the potentially violent situations that come from overcrowding, a federal Bureau of Justice Statistics report disclosed. The bureau said that in 1984, a typical state prisoner had about 57 square feet of cell space, an 11% decline since 1979. Within the same five years, the report said, the states added about 35,000 guards while state prison populations grew by 120,000, to a total of 382,000 inmates. It said the number of inmates per security officer averaged 4.1 in 1984.