The number of people sentenced to state prison from Delaware County increased 169.4 percent from 2000 to 2016, writes Samantha Melamed for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

This follows a trend that’s seeing mass incarceration move from Philadelphia, which had a 16 percent drop over the same period, to the suburbs.

In 2006, Delaware County sent 7.6 people per 10,000 residents to state prison. By 2015, that number increased to 10.1.

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The numbers seem to reflect disparate approaches to criminal justice in the city versus the suburbs. According to the nonprofit Measures for Justice, a defendant with no recent violent history in a nonviolent misdemeanor case receives an average jail sentence of 90 days in Delaware County, compared with five days in Philadelphia.

“District attorneys in rural and suburban areas tend to be much more punitively oriented, with harsh, tough-on-crime rhetoric, and a lot of that follows from the attitude of the people that live in those areas,” said Bret Bucklen, director of research for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. “They’re responding to the people that elected them.”

Read more about the rise in state prison sentences in the suburbs in the Philadelphia Inquirer here.