The number of persons imprisoned in the U.S. now exceeds two million, according to the latest Justice Department statistics.

The Sentencing Project has the details.

Prisons and jails held one out of every 142 U.S. residents. The prison and jail population, long the world's largest, has almost doubled since 1990.

....There were 2,019,234 people in prisons or jails at the end of June 2002, according to the report. About two-thirds of the total were in state and federal prisons, and the rest were in local jails.

"The relentless increases in prison and jail populations can best be explained as the legacy of an entrenched infrastructure of punishment that has been embedded in the criminal justice system over the last 30 years," said Malcolm Young, the group's executive director.

In the 12 months that ended June 30, the jail population went up by 34,235 inmates, a 5.4 percent rise and the largest increase since 1997, according to the report. State prisons added 12,440 inmates, a 1 percent increase, while the federal prison system grew by 8,042 inmates, a 5.7 percent increase.

Among the other findings of the report:

• A total of 7,248 jailed inmates and 3,055 state prisoners were younger than 18.

• The federal government's prison system had the largest number of inmates at 161,681, followed by California with 160,315 prisoners and Texas with 158,131 inmates.

• Twenty states experienced an inmate population increase of 5 percent or more during the 12-month period.

• Female prisoners totaled 96,099 at the end of June, accounting for 6.7 percent of all inmates. There's more.

The rate of incarceration in the United States, 702 inmates per 100,000 residents, continues to be the highest in the world. Among black males 25 to 29, 12.9% were in prison or jail. Overall, 4.8% of black males were in prison or jails, compared to 1.7% of Hispanics and 0.6% of whites. Black women in prisons and jails continue to outnumber their white (5 times as many) and Hispanic (more than twice as many) counterparts.

This is America--land of the free?