US has more prisoners than high school teachers

The United States has more people locked up behind bars than it has high school teachers or engineers, according to a report.

In 2012, there were some 1,570,000 inmates in state and federal prisons in the US, according to an analysis of data from the Justice Department by the Huffington Post

By contrast, there were about 1,530,000 engineers last year, 815,000 construction workers, and 1 million high school teachers, the report said, citing numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

There were also 750,000 car technicians.

The actual number of people incarcerated in the US is higher than the Justice Department’s figure as the official account does not include those who are in county or city jails across America.

“That number is hard to come by, since counties and cities keep their own records and don’t report to a central authority,” the HuffPost said.

Even so, there are nearly five times as many people incarcerated in the US as there were in 1980, as more people are sentenced to prison and kept there for longer terms.

Today, a whopping 2.4 million people are behind bars in the US, according to the Washington Post.

That figure is still 45,000 less than its peak in 2009, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

There are 219,000 inmates in the federal prison system and drug crimes account for more than half of those inmates.

Overcrowding is a major problem facing the US prison population especially for inmates in federal prisons.

The private prison industry relies on and benefits from mass incarceration and prison overcrowding in America.