Overall, 738 people were locked up for every 100,000 residents, compared with a rate of 725 at mid-2004. The states with the highest rates were Louisiana and Georgia, with more than 1 percent of their populations in prison or jail. Rounding out the top five were Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma.

Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, sums it up: "It's not a sign of a healthy community when we've come to use incarceration at such rates."

The annual report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics tells us that jail populations have increased at a faster rate than prison populations, in part because prison systems increasingly rent jail space to catch the overflow when they run out of prison beds. But the number of pretrial detainees held in jail is also growing.

"The jail population is increasingly unconvicted," [Allen] Beck [of the Bureau of Justice Statistics] said. "Judges are perhaps more reluctant to release people pretrial." The report by the Justice Department agency found that 62 percent of people in jails have not been convicted, meaning many of them are awaiting trial.

Almost a third of the soaring jail population is presumed innocent. Why isn't this alarming statistic more newsworthy than the runaway bride's latest marital decision?