Washington - The number of people held in US prisons, jails and juvenile or other facilities surpassed 2 million at the end of 1999, according to a US Justice Department report released yesterday.
The department's Bureau of Justice Statistics said the US prison and jail population, long the world's largest, added nearly 74,000 inmates in 1999 for a total of 1.89 million, although the rate of increase slowed from previous years.