Rates of imprisonment and psychiatric hospitalization in the United States

The relationship between penal and therapeutic custodial populations bears not only upon theories of social control, but also upon the validity of prison population rates as social indicators. Separate regression analyses of interstate variations in institutional populations for the year 1970, interstate variations in rats of change for the period 1967–73, and variation over time in nationally aggregated data for the period 1930–70 imply that the two custodial systems are essentially independent. The findings suggest that rates of imprisonment, when employed as social indicators, need not be adjusted statistically to account for contemporaneous variation in rates of mental hospitalization.