You'd be surprised what constitutes a felony. In some states a theft or destruction of an item valued at over $100 is a felony. In fact the crux of this artic

You'd be surprised what constitutes a felony. In some states a theft or destruction of an item valued at over $100 is a felony. In fact the crux of this article is that the prison population has risen so dramatically due to the decision by prosecutors to file dramatically more felony charges than they they had previously filed: "What appears to happen during this time—the years I look at are 1994 to 2008, just based on the data that’s available—is that the probability that a district attorney files a felony charge against an arrestee goes from about 1 in 3, to 2 in 3. So over the course of the ’90s and 2000s, district attorneys just got much more aggressive in how they filed charges. Defendants who they would not have filed felony charges against before, they now are charging with felonies. I can’t tell you why they’re doing that. No one’s really got an answer to that yet. But it does seem that the number of felony cases filed shoots up very strongly, even as the number of arrests goes down."