Prison population down in Pa., N.J.

The number of prisoners is declining in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Data released today by the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that Pennsylvania's population stood at 51,125 at the end of 2012, a 0.9-percent drop from the state's 2011 year-end inmate count of 51,578 prisoners.

In New Jersey, corrections facilities held 23,225 prisoners at the end of 2012, a 2.6-percent decline from 23,834 inmates a year earlier.

Those numbers mirror national trends.

The number of prisoners nationwide dropped for the third consecutive year, dropping 1.7 percent, to 1,571,147 inmates. The three straight years of declines come after the country's prison population rose every year between 1978 and 2009.

That drop was fueled by a 2.1-percent decline in the number of inmates held in state prisons. The number of prisoners in federal facilities rose 0.7 percent from the end of 2011 to the end of 2012. The bureau said that increase was due to growth in the number of unsentenced inmates -- those who have been arrested, but whose cases are still ongoing.

Imprisonment rates also dropped in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as well as the country as a whole.

Nationwide, 480 out of every 100,000 people -- nearly 0.5 percent of the population -- were being held in state or federal prisons at year-end 2012.

Pennsylvania's imprisonment rate was 398 inmates per 100,000 people. In New Jersey, the rate was 261 prisoners per 100,000 residents.

In Pennsylvania, which had the nation's sixth-highest inmate population at the end of 2012, the prisoner population peaked in 2011, after having grown consistently since the 1970s. In 1978, there were 7,814 inmates in the state.

New Jersey's prison population peaked in 1999, with 31,493 inmates, and has been steadily declining since then.