Policing resource round-up: Where to find data, advocacy materials, and more information about American policing

A list of the most valuable online resources from organizations focused on policing.

by Emily Widra and Wendy Sawyer, August 28, 2020

In the wake of yet another tragic police shooting, it’s more important than ever that the public be able to access clear, timely data about police behavior and connect with organizations fighting police brutality. Earlier this year, we summarized our key research on policing and showed that U.S. police kill civilians at a much higher rate than in other countries; now, for those looking for more information, we’ve compiled a (not exhaustive) list of the most valuable online resources from organizations focused on policing.

Data about police behavior and brutality:

Deaths by police:

• Mapping Police Violence has the most comprehensive database of killings by police in the United States, which is publicly available for download. They also publish data visualizations that help advocates communicate the gravity and severity of police violence.
• Data visualizations from Fatal Encounters show the national trends in deaths by police, by specific demographics like race and poverty levels across the country. Their database documents all deaths that happen when police are present or that are caused by police, and users can filter to examine specific categories, including deaths caused by on-duty law enforcement, off-duty law enforcement, as well as federal and local law enforcement.

Arrest, stop, and misconduct data:

• The Center for Policing Equity works at the intersection of data and advocacy, using data-driven interventions to partner with police departments across the country to better address community needs like mental health, immigration enforcement, and homelessness, as well as changes to departments to enhance diversity recruitment and retention, training and patrol practices.
• The NYCLU just released the NYPD Misconduct Complaint Database, a repository of complaints made by the public at the Civilian Complaint Review Board. This database includes over 300,000 unique complaint records involving over 80,000 active or former NYPD officers and the raw database is available for download.
• The Stanford Open Policing Project collects and standardizes data on vehicle and pedestrian stops from law enforcement departments across the U.S. Data from over 200 million records of state and local police departments is freely available. A working paper from these researchers analyzes racial disparities in policing and finds that police stops and search decisions are heavily influenced by racial bias.
• Open Data Policing makes stop, search, and use-of-force data publicly available. This aggregated data covers all known traffic stops in North Carolina since 2002, Illinois since 2005, and Maryland since 2013.
• The Texas Commission on Law Enforcement compiles data on records of police racial profiling reports and this data is available to download for 2016-2019.

Police spending:

• The Vera Institute of Justice created a tool that allows individuals to analyze just how much money is allocated to policing and to explore how changes in each spending category could reduce the total policing budget.

Information about police reform and abolition:

(in alphabetical order)

• Campaign Zero tracks legislative changes and a curated collection of research across ten major categories of police reform, including limiting the use of force, community oversight, demilitarization, and fair police union contracts at the federal, state, and local levels. The organization’s platform is dynamic, informed by new research and community feedback.
• Communities United Against Police Brutality (CUAPB) is a Minneapolis-based organization working to empower local communities to confront and end police brutality. With a local lens, CUAPB publishes reports on proposed and enacted legislation, as well as fact sheets and educational materials about debunking myths around policing.
• In New York, Communities United for Police Reform (CPR) leads the campaign to end discriminatory policing practices with a team of community members, lawyers, researchers, and activists.
• Critical Resistance curates a list of resources to provide education about the connection between policing and imprisonment, as well as a number of toolkits for advocates working toward dismantling the current law enforcement system and building viable alternatives in our communities.
• The Dream Defenders began in Florida as an effort to organize Black and Brown youth to build power and strength in their communities, and to advance a vision of safety and security that is less reliant on prisons and policing. They offer a downloadable toolkit that outlines the steps for communities to start divesting from police.
• The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) is a national organization supporting community-led efforts to defund police and to reinvest in long-term safety strategies like education, local restorative justice services, and employment programs.
• MPD150 is a Minneapolis-based collection of local organizers, researchers, artists, and activists dedicated to shifting the discussion of police violence in Minneapolis from procedural reform to more meaningful structural change. They have an accessible and detailed resource list for readers seeking more in-depth information about changing policing.

Commentary:

• NPR’s Code Switch produced a podcast episode — A Decade of Watching Black People Die — with an in depth discussion with journalist Jamil Smith about the years of deaths of Black people at the hands of police and the media coverage of these frequent violent deaths.
• On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver explores the intertwined history of policing and white supremacy, the current roadblocks to police reform, and some potential paths forward for the nation.
• The Untold Story: Policing is a four-part podcast series working to demystify police union contracts, as well as advocate for concrete steps to end police violence.
• After George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police, NPR’s history podcast — Throughline —released an episode analyzing the centuries of tensions between police and Black communities.
• In a two-part episode of the podcast Intercepted, Ruth Wilson Gilmore makes the case for police and prison abolition, and offers a road map for understanding the current political moment of police brutality and resistance.
• Human rights lawyer Derecka Purnell offers step-by-step guidance to understanding calls for defunding and abolishing policing as we know it in an effort to reduce harm to individuals and communities in this piece for The Atlantic.
• In a recent article for Vanity Fair, Josie Duffy Rice of The Appeal presents the rationale for rethinking the policing and justice systems in the United States.

Finally, we’re always curating the best new research about the criminal justice system in our Research Library, which has a section dedicated to policing.

Half of states fail to require mask use by correctional staff

States are not reducing their populations sufficiently to slow the spread of COVID-19, and our survey reveals that 20 states are not even requiring masks to be worn by staff and most are not requiring incarcerated people to wear them.

by Emily Widra and Tiana Herring, August 14, 2020

The best way to slow the spread of COVID-19 in state prisons is to reduce the population density, but as we’ve found, states are moving far too slowly in this regard. In this new analysis, we find that states are also failing at the most modest mitigation efforts imaginable: requiring correctional staff and incarcerated people to wear masks.

Almost all states¹ are distributing masks to staff and incarcerated people,² but only half of all states are requiring that staff wear the masks at work. We examined the policies of each state’s Department of Corrections to see which states are requiring masks for staff.

30 states currently require correctional facility staff to wear face masks, while 20 states and the District of Columbia do not. Map updated on August 24, 2020 following a report from the South Carolina Department of Corrections that they are requiring staff to wear masks, although no policy requiring masks is available to the public. (Data collected by the Prison Policy Initiative from Departments of Corrections policies and news reports.)

Just because states require the use of masks by staff does not mean that the policy is adequately enforced. There have been a number of reports from incarcerated people that correctional staff have not been wearing masks appropriately when interacting with those who are in custody. In Arkansas, masks are required for staff, but an internal email from the state’s highest corrections official to the wardens of each prison in the state reveals that “hospitals are not wanting to treat our inmates because our staff are not following the [mask] guidelines that we are sending out.”³

Of course, even in states where masks are not required by correctional policy, staff can choose to wear them. But reports from incarcerated people and their families suggest this is wishful thinking. For example, in New Jersey — a state where the COVID-19 pandemic hit prisons early and hard — staff are not required to wear masks and reports from inside say that many staff are not wearing masks.⁴

As we all know by now, the federal government’s February guidance discouraging masks quickly proved to be misguided, and the most current research makes it even clearer that masks benefit both the wearer and everyone else.

Wearing masks protects the public:

• In states that only required certain employees to wear masks, there was no effect on the county-level daily COVID-19 growth rate, but requiring everyone to wear masks results in a significant decline in infections.
• Face masks have driven down rates of overall COVID infections, as seen in hospital settings, hair salons, and on cruise ships.
• Beyond COVID, masks have long been known to reduce the likelihood of transmission of epidemic respiratory illnesses. This is particularly true in community-living settings like dense prisons.

Masks protect the individuals who wear them:

• Wearing a mask reduces the likelihood of contracting COVID-19.
• Even if you still contract COVID-19 while wearing a mask, the disease is more likely to be mild or even asymptomatic.⁵

Requiring correctional staff to wear face masks is just commonsense: staff are responsible for most day-to-day movement in and out of prisons (and are therefore most likely to carry the virus in and out of them) and they are state employees who must adhere to state regulations and requirements. But states should not stop with mandating masks for staff; they should be requiring everyone in the facility to wear masks.
The obvious implication of the science behind using masks is that the more people who wear masks, the slower the virus will spread. Yet while 27 states require correctional staff to wear masks, only 15 state prison systems require incarcerated people to wear masks.⁶

15 states currently require incarcerated people to wear face masks, while 35 states and the District of Columbia do not. Strangely, Illinois is the only state that appears to require incarcerated people wear masks, but does not require the same for staff. Map updated on August 24, 2020 following a report from the South Carolina Department of Corrections that they are requiring incarcerated people to wear masks, although no policy requiring masks is available to the public. (Data collected by the Prison Policy Initiative from Departments of Corrections policies and news reports.)

The fact that far fewer states require incarcerated people to wear masks than correctional staff may reflect some reluctance to create conflict with incarcerated people over potential enforcement issues. (A more cynical view might interpret this hands-off approach as a callous lack of concern about incarcerated people’s lives and health.) But if correctional agencies care about protecting incarcerated people and staff, they could craft policies that reward those who wear masks, instead of policies that threaten disciplinary action for non-compliance.

We know that reducing the number of people behind bars is the best way to slow the spread of COVID-19 through prisons, jails, and their surrounding communities, but this analysis finds that many states are not even practicing the most basic preventative measure: requiring face masks in prisons, just as they are required by many states in other public spaces. State prison systems need to catch up before it’s too late.

Appendix table

Jails and prisons have reduced their populations in the face of the pandemic, but not enough to save lives

Our updated analysis finds that the initial efforts to reduce jail populations have slowed, while the small drops in state prison populations are still too little to save lives.

by Emily Widra and Peter Wagner, August 5, 2020

This article was updated on October 21st, 2021 with more recent jail and prison population data. That version should be used instead of this one.

At a time when more new cases of the coronavirus are being reported each day, state and local governments should be redoubling their efforts to reduce the number of people in prisons and jails, where social distancing is impossible and the cycle of people in and out of the facility is constant. But our most recent analysis of data from hundreds of counties across the country shows that efforts to reduce jail populations have actually slowed — and even reversed in some places.

Even as the pandemic has spiked in many parts of the country, 71% of the 668 jails we’ve been tracking saw population increases from May 1st to July 22nd, and 84 jails had more people incarcerated on July 22nd than they did in March. This trend is particularly alarming since we know it’s possible to further reduce these populations: in our previous analysis, we found that local governments initially took swift action to minimize jail populations, resulting in a median drop of more than 30% between March and May.

Meanwhile, state prisons — where social distancing is just as impossible as in jails, and correctional staff still come and go every day — have been much slower to release incarcerated people. Since January, the typical prison system had reduced its population by only 5% in May and about 13% as of July 27th. Below, we compare the population cuts in local jails to those in state prisons, focusing on just how little states are doing to keep their residents safe. (And note, our use of the term “reduction” is different from “release,” as we have found that there are multiple mechanisms impacting populations, and releases are but one part.)

Jail populations dropped quickly at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the local authorities who run jails have not sustained those efforts and populations have started to rise over the last two months. This recent increase is most dramatic in small jails (third slide) but is also true for larger jails (second slide.)

These graphs aggregate data collected by NYU’s Public Safety Lab. The Public Safety Lab is continuing to add more jails to their data collection and data was not available for all facilities for all days, so these graphs show jails where the Lab was able to report data for at least 120 of the 135 days in our research period. To smooth out most of the variations caused by individual facilities not being reported on particular days, we chose to present the data as 7-day rolling averages. The temporary population drop during the last week of May is the result of more facilities than usual not being included in the dataset, rather than any known policy changes.

The strategies jails used to reduce their populations in March and April varied by location, but they added up to big changes. In some counties, police issued citations in lieu of arrests, prosecutors declined to charge people for some low-level offenses, courts reduced the amounts of cash bail, and jail administrators released people detained pretrial or those serving short sentences for nonviolent offenses.

Just a few months later, many local jurisdictions have slowed — and in some cases, completely reversed — their efforts to reduce jail populations. Of the 668 jails we analyzed population data for, 71% of jails had population increases from May 1st to July 22nd, and 84 jails had more people incarcerated on July 22nd than they did in March.

For example, in Philadelphia, judges released “certain nonviolent detainees” held in jails for unspecified “low-level charges” and the Philadelphia police suspended low-level arrests reducing the city’s jail population by more than 17% by mid-April. But on May 1st, the Philadelphia police force announced that they would resume arrests for property crimes, effectively reversing the earlier reduction efforts.

Table 1: Largest known population reductions in large local jails

Meanwhile, in the spring, state Departments of Correction began announcing plans to reduce their prison populations — by halting new admissions from county jails, increasing commutations, and releasing people who are medically fragile, elderly, or nearing the end of their sentences. But these population reductions were small, amounting to only about 5% in the first two months and now about 13%, still significantly less than what jails accomplished in just the first few weeks. However, prisons may be seeing more “slow and steady” progress than jails are: while many jails have reversed course and are increasing their populations again, prison populations have continued on a downward trend since May. Unfortunately, that’s about as optimistic as we can be with these numbers. The drops aren’t significant enough to make social distancing possible inside prisons nor to ensure that all of the most vulnerable people have been released to safer conditions.

Table 2: Most state prison systems show only very modest population reductions since January (showing 17 states where recent data was readily available)

Some states’ prison population cuts are even less significant than they initially appear, because the states achieved those cuts partially by refusing to admit people from county jails. (At least two states, California and Oklahoma, did this.)
While refusing to admit people from jails does reduce prison density, it means that the people who would normally be admitted are still incarcerated, but in different correctional facilities that have more population turnover and therefore more chances for the virus to spread.

Other states are indeed transferring people in prison to outside the system, either to parole or to home confinement, but these releases are not enough to protect vulnerable incarcerated populations from COVID-19. For example, in California, thousands of people have been released weeks and months early, but the state’s prison population has only decreased by about 11% since January, leaving too many people behind bars in the face of a deadly disease. In fact, as of July 29, California’s state prisons were still holding more people than they were designed for, at 117% of their design capacity.

Every state prison system we’ve examined, except for North Dakota, has made smaller reductions than the typical jail. While jails made quick changes at the start of the pandemic and then leveled off or even reversed course, state prisons are at least making sustained, if far too small, steps.

Of the states with available data, the smaller systems have reduced their populations the most drastically. North Dakota’s prison population had already dropped by 19% in May. (North Dakota was also the state that we found to have the most comprehensive and realistic COVID-19 mitigation plan in our April 2020 survey.) Two months later, North Dakota has continued these efforts, reducing its prison population by a total of 25% since January, a greater percent change than any other state.

State and local governments clearly need to do more to reduce the density of state prisons and county jails. For the most part, states are not even taking the simplest and least controversial steps, like refusing admissions for technical violations of probation and parole rules, or releasing people that are already in confinement for those same technical violations. (In 2016, 60,000 people were returned to state prison for behaviors that, for someone not on probation or parole, would not be a crime.) Other obvious places to start: releasing people nearing the end of their sentence, those who are in minimum security facilities and on work-release, and those who are medically fragile or older.

Decision- and policy-makers need to recognize the dangers of resuming unnecessary jail incarceration during the pandemic, which is exactly what is indicated by the slowing and reversing of population reductions. Just as many states are seeing the tragic effects of “reopening” too soon, counties and cities that allow jail populations to return to pre-pandemic levels will undoubtedly regret it. If the leadership and success of local jails in reducing their populations early in the pandemic isn’t enough of an example for continuing these efforts at the state and local levels, officials may find some inspiration in the comparative success of other countries:

Table 3: Countries that immediately reduced their incarcerated populations in the face of the pandemic (showing 13 countries where current population data was readily available)

Prisons and jails are notoriously dangerous places during a viral outbreak, and public health professionals, corrections officials, and criminal justice reform advocates agree that decarceration will help protect both incarcerated people and the larger communities in which they live. It’s past time for U.S. prison and jail systems to meaningfully address the crisis at hand and reduce the number of people behind bars.

This article updates one published on May 1st and another published on May 14th with an updated dataset of local jail and state prison population reductions. Updated prison population data collected by the Prison Policy Initiative for 17 states from Departments of Correction July population reports. Updated jail reduction figures collected by the NYU Public Safety Lab.

Visualizing the racial disparities in mass incarceration

Racial inequality is evident in every stage of the criminal justice system - here are the key statistics compiled into a series of charts.

by Wendy Sawyer, July 27, 2020

Recent protests calling for radical changes to American policing have brought much-needed attention to the systemic racism within our criminal justice system. This extends beyond policing, of course: Systemic racism is evident at every stage of the system, from policing to prosecutorial decisions, pretrial release processes, sentencing, correctional discipline, and even reentry. The racism inherent in mass incarceration affects children as well as adults, and is often especially punishing for people of color who are also marginalized along other lines, such as gender and class.

Because racial disparity data is often frustratingly hard to locate, we’ve compiled the key data available into a series of charts, arranged into five slideshows focused on policing, juvenile justice, jails and pretrial detention, prisons and sentencing, and reentry. These charts provide a fuller picture of racial inequality in the criminal justice system, and make clear that a broad transformation will be needed to uproot the racial injustice of mass incarceration.

Following the slideshows, we also address five frequently asked questions about criminal justice race/ethnicity data.

There are racial disparities in policing and arrests:

There are racial disparities in the arrest and confinement of youth:

There are racial disparities in local jails and pretrial detention:

There are racial disparities in prisons, extreme sentences, and solitary confinement:

There are racial disparities in homelessness, unemployment, and poverty after release:

Frequently asked questions about race and ethnicity in criminal justice data

Q: Why are terms used inconsistently, such as “Hispanic” and “Latino/a”?

A: Sharp-eyed readers will notice some inconsistency in the terms used in the charts above, and across the literature more generally. For example, the Census Bureau and most national criminal justice data uses the category “American Indian or Alaska Native” to describe indigenous people in the U.S., but the juvenile justice system data uses the term “American Indian.” Likewise, “Hispanic” is used most frequently in various national data sets to refer to those with Spanish-speaking ancestry, but some sources use Latino/a (or Latinx), which specifically refers to those with Latin American ancestry. In these charts (and in most of our publications), we use the terminology of the original data sources.

Q: Why are some racial/ethnic categories not represented in the data?

A: The question of how accurately race and ethnicity data reflect justice-involved populations goes beyond inconsistent labels. Most obviously, not all racial or ethnic groups are consistently represented in the data; less populous Census-identified groups, such as Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, Asian, and American Indian or Alaska Native – as well as the sizable but less specific “Two or more races” and “Some other race” – are very often excluded in publications, even when they are collected. Moreover, all of these categories are so broad that they lump together groups with very different experiences with the U.S. justice system. They disregard tribal differences, sweep people of East Asian and South Asian origins into one category, and somehow ignore Arab Americans entirely. As a result, our observations of racial and ethnic discrimination are limited to these broad categories and lack any real nuance.

Q: Where can I find data about racial disparities in my state’s criminal justice system?

A: Unfortunately, the more specific you want to get with race/ethnicity data, the harder it is to find an answer, especially one that’s up-to-date. State-level race and ethnicity data can be hard to find if you are looking to federal government sources like the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). BJS does publish state-level race and ethnicity data in its annual Prisoners series (Appendix Table 2 in 2018), but only every 6-7 years in its Jail Inmates series (most recently the 2013 Census of Jails report, Table 7). The Vera Institute of Justice has attempted to fill this gap with its Incarceration Trends project, by gathering additional data from individual states. Individual state Departments of Correction sometimes collect and/or publish more up-to-date and specific data; it’s worth checking with your own state’s agencies.

Q: Where can I find criminal justice race/ethnicity data disaggregated by sex?

A: Disaggregating racial/ethnic data by sex is unfortunately not the norm in reports produced by the federal government (i.e. BJS). For people able to access and analyze the raw data, such analyses are often possible, but most people rely on the reports published by government agencies like BJS. As you can see in the chart showing prison incarceration rates by sex and race/ethnicity, BJS does sometimes offer this level of detail. But again, the same level of detail is not available for jails, and an analysis of both race/ethnicity and sex by state is all but unheard-of – even though it is precisely this level of detail that is most useful for advocates trying to help specific populations in their state.

Q: How are the data collected, and how accurate are the data?

A: Finally, the validity of any data depends on how the data are collected in the first place. And in the case of criminal justice data, race and ethnicity are not always self-reported (which would be ideal). Police officers may report an individual’s race based on their own perception – or not report it at all – and the surveys that report the number of incarcerated people on a given day rely on administrative data, which may not reflect how individuals identify their own race or ethnicity. This is why surveys of incarcerated people themselves are so important, such as the Survey of Inmates in Local Jails and the Survey of Prison Inmates, but those surveys are conducted much less frequently. In fact, it’s been 18 years since the last Survey of Inmates in Local Jails, which we use to analyze pretrial jail populations, and 16 years since the last published data from the Survey of Inmates were collected.

How to link to specific images

Because some readers might want to link to specific images in this briefing out of the context of these slideshows, we’ve created these special URLs so you can link directly to a specific image:

Black people are disproportionately stopped on the street by police, while white people are much more likely to call the police for help

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow1/1

Among individuals who have any contact with police, people of color disproportionately experience the use of force

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow1/2

Black people are disproportionately likely to be arrested, and to be arrested repeatedly in the same year

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow1/3

Black youth are arrested far out of proportion to their share of all youth in the U.S.

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow2/1

The juvenile justice system confines Black youth at over 4 times the rate of white youth

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow2/2

For the lowest level offenses, Black and American Indian youth are confined at rates over 3 times the rate of white youth

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow2/3

Racial disparities in local jail incarceration rates

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow3/1

Pretrial populations, disproportionately Black and Hispanic, have more than doubled over 15 years

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow3/2

People detained pretrial because they can’t pay bail are much poorer than their peers – and the income gaps are widest for Black people

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow3/3

Racial disparities in prison incarceration rates, by sex, 2018

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow4/1

Most people in prison are poor,
 and the poorest are women and people of color

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow4/2

Black people are disproportionately serving sentences of life, life without parole, or “virtual life”

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow4/3

Black people are overrepresented on death row, while white people are underrepresented

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow4/4

Black men and women are overrepresented in solitary confinement, when compared to total prison populations

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow4/5

The “prison penalty” in unemployment disproportionately punishes formerly incarcerated Black men and women

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow5/1

Formerly incarcerated people have very high rates of homelessness, especially women and people of color

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow5/2

Incarceration and wealth accumulation, by race and ethnicity

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow5/3

Welcome Tiana Herring!

Please welcome Tiana Herring, our newest Research Associate!

by Jenny Landon, July 22, 2020

We’re super excited to welcome our newest Research Associate, Tiana Herring. Tiana is a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she studied Political Science and Contemporary European Studies. For her honors thesis, she conducted research on state laws regarding prison reentry services and their impact on recidivism rates. In the few short months that she has been with us, Tiana has already published How inflation makes your state’s criminal justice system harsher today than it was yesterday and contributed heavily to our Virus Response work. In her spare time, Tiana is into furniture restoration and painting.

Welcome, Tiana!

Why the Senate should pass the Driving for Opportunity Act

Suspending drivers license for unpaid fines and fees creates an unnecessary cycle of punishment and poverty.

by Jenny Landon, July 22, 2020

When someone’s driver’s license is revoked, you might assume that it’s because they committed a serious driving-related offense, like reckless driving, leaving the scene of an accident, or driving while impaired. While that is often the case, a full 40% of license suspensions are for reasons totally unrelated to driving. Most states suspend driver’s licenses for unpaid court fines and fees or for failure to pay child support. (Some states even suspend licenses for littering, burning trash, skipping school, unpaid student loans, and – as we have written about before – drug offenses unrelated to driving).

11 million people have had their licenses suspended because they could not afford to pay court fines and fees. The Driving for Opportunity Act would encourage states to stop suspending driver’s licenses for unpaid fines and fees.

License suspensions create a cycle of punishment:

1. A person loses their license because they can’t afford court fines or fees.
2. The loss of a license makes it harder to get to work to earn the money needed to pay off their debt. Of course, it also makes it harder to take children to school, shop for groceries, get to medical appointments, make court dates, etc.
3. To meet these basic needs, 83% of people with suspended licenses continue to drive. Driving with a suspended license puts them at risk for even greater fines, or even incarceration, which is incredibly expensive for the individual as well as the taxpayer.

Suspending licenses for unpaid court fines and fees punishes people for being poor and traps them in a cycle of debt. Suspension laws disproportionately impact poor communities, communities of color, and communities that have few alternative means of transportation. Research in New Jersey found that while only 16% of the state population is low-income, 50% of the people who have their driver’s licenses suspended are low-income. And more than 40% of drivers lost their jobs after their license was suspended.

The harms of driver’s license suspensions extend beyond the individuals who lose their licenses. Motor vehicle administrators and law enforcement officials themselves have argued that “our limited resources should be focused on dangerous drivers.” Yet thousands of taxpayer dollars are spent punishing safe drivers who simply can’t afford to pay certain fines.

The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators collected data from their members on the hidden costs of suspending driver’s licenses:

• Colorado found that suspending driver’s licenses for offenses unrelated to driving consumed 8,566 hours per year of staff time — the equivalent of four full-time employees.
• Florida estimated that $72,000 a year is spent on paper, envelopes, and postage in order to correspond with people whose licenses were suspended for non-driving reasons.
• Georgia expected that reforming its non-driving suspension laws would save $80,000 a year in postage costs alone.

License suspension also doesn’t work as a means to get people to pay off their debt: The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators evaluated this claim, concluding: “there is no evidence which indicates that suspending a person’s driving privileges for social non-conformance reasons is effective in gaining compliance with the reason for the original non-driving suspension.”

For years, we’ve been successfully campaigning to get states to end the practice of suspending drivers licenses for drug offenses. You can learn more about that work in our report Reinstating Common Sense.

For these reasons and more, we gladly signed on to a letter (written by the Free to Drive Campaign) urging U.S Senate leaders to pass the Driving for Opportunity Act.

4 bills you should know about if you support criminal justice reform in Massachusetts

These four bills relate to decarceration in response to COVID-19, making phone calls from prison and jail free, strengthening visitation, and "raising the age."

by Jenny Landon, July 17, 2020

Uprisings for racial justice across the country have called for a long-overdue reckoning with the ways we police and punish. In Massachusetts, where the Prison Policy Initiative is based, there are a number of reform bills currently being considered (some better than others). In particular, there are four bills pending that relate directly to our current and past work, including decarceration in response to COVID-19, making phone calls from prison and jail free, strengthening visitation, and “raising the age” of juvenile court jurisdiction.

• H.4652: An Act regarding decarceration and COVID-19, which proposes to release people who are held pretrial or who are medically vulnerable to COVID-19. As of July 2020, nine of the ten largest outbreaks of COVID-19 in the country are in prisons and jails, and people in prison are dying from COVID-19 at a rate 3 times higher than the general population. In Massachusetts, thousands of people are held pretrial while legally innocent, and 15% of the prison population is over 55. The state must act now to prevent further tragedy inside our prisons and jails. See our letter of support here.
• S.2846 (previously S.1372): An Act relative to inmate telephone calls, which would make phone calls free for people in prisons and jails. In Massachusetts, phone calls from jail are almost 3 times more expensive than from state prisons, making it difficult for the thousands of pretrial defendants to prepare a successful defense while detained. Meanwhile, prison phone rates continue to strain the pocketbooks of many of our Commonwealth’s poorest residents.For more information, check out our past work on phone justice. See our letter of support here.
• H.2047: An Act to strengthen inmate visitation, which would loosen restrictions on visits, including irrational practices like turning away visitors based on dress code violations that pose no threat to security, refusing visitors solely because of their status as formerly incarcerated, or prohibiting incarcerated people from holding their children. As we have argued before, these unnecessary restrictions actually diminish public safety and punish family members— face-to-face visits with loved ones are shown to reduce recidivism. Incarcerated people who successfully maintain strong bonds with community members are more likely to succeed upon reentry. See our letter of support here.
• H.3420: An Act to promote public safety and better outcomes for young adults, which would shift young adults between the ages of 18-20 into the juvenile system, rather than the adult criminal justice system. Because juvenile courts are more likely to hand down sentences other than incarceration, the passage of this reform bill would reduce the number of people held in jail or prison. Moreover, brain development research shows that people in this age bracket (emerging adults) are still maturing, and are more effectively served by the more rehabilitation-oriented juvenile system. Young people in Massachusetts deserve a chance to develop into full adulthood without the additional trauma of incarceration or the stigma of a public criminal record. See our letter of support here.

Are you in Massachusetts and want to support the passage of these bills? Check out this guide for calling your legislators from the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition.

New research: Adjusted for age and sex, the COVID-19 death rate in prisons is 3 times higher than in the general population

New research in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows the tragic results of states' negligence of incarcerated people.

by Emily Widra, July 8, 2020

Today we tweeted about new research using data from the UCLA School of Law’s COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project. The findings, published today in JAMA, present a startling picture of just how widespread COVID-19 is behind bars, especially compared with national COVID-19 infection and death rates:

A new study in @JAMA_current using data from @uclaprisondata has findings that should alarm you:

The #covid19 death rate in prisons is 39 deaths per 100,000 people. Much higher than the death rate in the U.S. population (29 per 100,000). 1/4https://t.co/6kAYXkhxFv

— Prison Policy Init. (@PrisonPolicy) July 8, 2020

When the authors adjusted the death rate for age and sex (because the prison population is disproportionately young and male), the death rate in prisons was THREE TIMES higher than would be expected in the U.S. population. 2/4

— Prison Policy Init. (@PrisonPolicy) July 8, 2020

On April 14, the rate of COVID-19 in prisons surpassed the national rate. Since then, it has continued to grow. The case rate in the U.S. grows ~3.4% every day; meanwhile, the case rate in prisons increases ~8.3% every day. 3/4

— Prison Policy Init. (@PrisonPolicy) July 8, 2020

At least 530 incarcerated people have died from #covid19 so far, according to https://t.co/ndOT9oNaSY. People behind bars are begging states to save their lives. But states are taking very little action. This tragedy is only going to get worse. 4/4https://t.co/bl7wnzvS15

— Prison Policy Init. (@PrisonPolicy) July 8, 2020

What do we know about the spread — and toll — of the coronavirus in state prisons?

Wide variation in the rates of reported infections and deaths in state prisons reflect the uneven spread of the virus and disparate responses by state criminal justice systems.

by Emily Widra, June 24, 2020

We’re frequently asked about the number of infections and deaths in prisons from the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The UCLA COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project is helpfully collecting all of the official reports of infections and deaths into a single Google Sheet. But state prison systems are vastly different sizes, so it’s impossible to make direct comparisons using only the counts provided in the UCLA spreadsheet. So we’ve calculated the rates of infection and deaths in state prison systems, which allow us to compare the impact of the pandemic across all 50 states’ prison populations. Our findings, presented in the table below, suggest three possible – and troubling – conclusions:

1. Some states may not be properly testing or may not be accurately reporting infections and deaths;
2. People incarcerated in different states may face very different odds of infection and death from COVID-19, depending on how their state responds to the crisis; and/or
3. Some states have been lucky in that the virus has been slow to reach their facilities. But, as we’ve seen with the uneven spread of the pandemic across states, this likely means the full force of the virus has yet to hit these facilities, so they need to redouble their efforts at population reduction and other preparations.

An important disclaimer: It would be a mistake to use this table as an indication of “how good a job” any state has done in responding to the threat of the pandemic behind bars. No state has even come close to adequately protecting its incarcerated people. Certainly, some states have done more than others to release more medically vulnerable people, and some states’ correctional healthcare systems are less terrible than others, which may increase the odds of surviving COVID-19 in some prisons. We also acknowledge that some states have taken small steps to reduce the population density of their facilities; still, none have done so on a scale that would make social distancing possible or otherwise slow the spread of the virus.

We are skeptical of the officially reported data for several reasons, but especially because of the wide variation in the “case-fatality rates” – that is, the number of deaths relative to the number of infections reported by each state. Why does Tennessee report 785 infections for every death and Alabama reports 10 infections for every death? Both states have similarly-sized prison populations and both states report 4 confirmed COVID-19 deaths among incarcerated people. But it would appear that Tennessee is doing a lot of testing and Alabama is not.

Comprehensive and frequent testing offers the prison system – and the public – a clearer view of the virus spread. If correctional facilities are only testing people with extreme symptoms, we gain very little information about what to expect and how to protect vulnerable lives.

The number of reported deaths may also reflect undercounts for other reasons. For example, unless a state tests everyone who dies in custody, it is likely excluding a number of deaths that were caused by COVID-19 but were not confirmed by testing. Especially where states are severely under-testing, people will be dying of COVID-19 but left out of the official death counts because they were never tested. Similarly, it would be appropriate to classify people who “recover” from COVID-19, but remain weakened and then die of another cause, as COVID-19 deaths. We have not heard of any state prison systems that are counting deaths other than those confirmed by tests, however.

The data, imperfect as it is, tells us that people incarcerated in different states may face vastly different odds of infection and death from COVID-19. The inaction of state prison systems is unconscionable given that, for months, the largest outbreaks of the coronavirus have been in correctional facilities. States put their residents at grave risk by failing to prevent the spread of the virus in the “petri dishes” that are prisons and jails. They should be using every tool available to ramp up efforts to protect incarcerated people, which includes widespread testing and using testing data to target resources to the people and places most at risk.

Table sources

• COVID deaths in prisons: UCLA Law School’s Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project
• COVID confirmed cases in prisons: UCLA Law School’s Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project
• Number of tests given: Covid Prison Data Table 2, as of June 19, 2020
• Prison population: Vera Institute of Justice’s People in Prison 2019, supplemented by correspondence between the Prison Policy Initiative and individual state Departments of Correction. All population counts are from May 2020 except for Maryland’s, which is from December 31, 2019.
• Deaths per 10,000 incarcerated people: Calculated by dividing the number of COVID deaths by the prison population, then multiplying by 10,000
• Infections per 10,000 incarcerated people: Calculated by dividing the number of COVID cases by the prison population, then multiplying by 10,000
• Deaths per confirmed case (“case fatality rate”): Calculated by dividing the number of deaths by the number of COVID cases, then multiplying by 100. For more information about case fatality rates and factors that affect the accuracy of these rates, see this New York Times article. The wide variation seen in the prison data suggests that these rates may reflect differences in testing more than differences in severity or treatment of the disease across different states.

Massachusetts should stop “committing” people to prisons and jails for drug treatment

The Prison Policy Initiative signs on to a letter urging Massachusetts state lawmakers to stop jailing people who need substance use treatment.

by Jenny Landon, June 23, 2020

In the midst of an uprising against police violence and racism, communities across the country are asking a simple question: why are police and jails used to treat social problems? Wouldn’t mental illness, substance use, homelessness, and poverty be better handled within the community, and without the threat of incarceration?

In Massachusetts, men who have substance use disorder can be put in jail or prison when they are committed for drug treatment (“committed” meaning involuntarily taken into state custody). This is not a rare occurance: in 2018, courts committed over 5,700 people under “Section 35.” Nearly two-thirds of those evaluated for commitment were men, and nearly a quarter were homeless. These men have not committed a crime, but wind up in jail nonetheless. As we know, jails have an abysmal track record when it comes to health care—and jail time is no substitute for substance use treatment.

Massachusetts is the last state in the country that locks people up when they’re committed for substance use, but now, the state’s Joint Committee on Health Care Financing is considering advancing a bill that would end this practice. We signed on to a letter written by Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts that supports H.4531, the bill that would ban the use of incarceration for men who are committed for drug treatment.

It is past time for Massachusetts to stop using the criminal justice system as a band-aid for social problems, and to stop punishing people with medical conditions. A good place to start would be to stop locking up people who need drug treatment.