New data: The revolving door between homeless shelters and prisons in Connecticut

New statewide data from the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness underscore the harms of criminalizing homelessness and the destabilizing effects of incarceration.

by Alexi Jones, February 10, 2021

In December, officials in Seattle drew the ire of activists when they decided to sweep a homeless encampment in Cal Anderson park despite warnings from public health officials. Dozens of people experiencing homelessness were displaced and 24 people were arrested just a week before Christmas. Seattle is not alone. At the same time that cities around the country, including Denver and Reno, continue police sweeps of homeless encampments during the pandemic, researchers in Connecticut have compiled recent data showing that this criminalization of homelessness – together with barriers to housing upon re-entry – has created a revolving door between prisons and homeless shelters.

Research has consistently shown a strong link between incarceration and homelessness. Our 2018 report found that formerly incarcerated people are almost 10 times more likely to be homeless than the general public. Other national data shows 50,000 people enter shelters directly from correctional facilities per year.¹ And homelessness is a major predictor of involvement with the juvenile justice system, which means that for many youth, the cycle of incarceration and homelessness starts early.

To date, there has been no national data on how many people experiencing homelessness have had prior criminal justice involvement. New data from the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness helps fill this gap. The study was also able to parse how many people experienced homelessness before incarceration versus how many experienced homelessness after release – underscoring both the harms of criminalizing homelessness and the destabilizing effects of incarceration. Above all, the findings illustrate the importance of including stable housing in states’ public safety agendas.

The study’s main findings

The Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness (CCEH) matched data from the 450,000 people who have been admitted to the Connecticut Department of Corrections (DOC), the state’s joint prison and jail system, and the 17,226 people who used a shelter in their network between Jan. 2016 and Jan. 2019, finding that half of the people (8,187) who used homeless shelters were formerly incarcerated. Moreover, they found that 1 in 5 people who used homeless shelters had been released from prison in the past three years. The CCEH network includes 88% of all emergency shelters in the state.

The study found stark racial disparities among the population of formerly incarcerated people using homeless shelters. Of the 8,187 formerly incarcerated people experiencing homelessness, 35% were Black, compared to just 10% of the general population in Connecticut.² This reflects the fact that Black Americans are disproportionately impacted by both incarceration and homelessness, and is in line with our national finding that Black formerly incarcerated people are significantly more likely to experience homelessness than white formerly incarcerated people.

The criminalization of homelessness

To get a better picture of those with relatively recent experience with both homelessness and incarceration, the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness zeroed in on people who both used homeless shelters in their network and who were released from the Department of Corrections in the past three years (Jan. 2016 to Jan. 2019). They found most formerly incarcerated people (69%) in the sample were homeless before their incarceration. The data also indicates that they were typically incarcerated for relatively minor offenses: 80% of those sentenced were released at the end of their sentence (as opposed to going to a halfway house or to parole supervision), which suggests many served shorter sentences, which in turn are indicative of lower-level offenses. And among those who were held pretrial, 75% were released by the court without bond, also suggesting relatively minor offenses.³

These findings reflect the pervasive criminalization of homelessness in Connecticut. As researchers at Yale Law School explain, “Laws in cities throughout Connecticut prohibit a person without a bed from sleeping on a park bench, ban someone without a place to be during the day from standing in a public plaza, and restrict the ability of a person without access to food to ask for money to buy something to eat.” This puts people experiencing homelessness at high risk for arrest and incarceration, even though these “offenses” pose no threat to public safety. It’s both inhumane and counterproductive: Arresting and incarcerating people experiencing homelessness makes it harder for them to secure housing, jobs, and public assistance by saddling them with a criminal record and fines and fees that are impossible for them to pay. It only serves to fuel the revolving door between prisons and homeless shelters.

Barriers to successful re-entry

However, over a quarter (28%) of people who had both used the networks’ homeless shelters and been released from the Department of Corrections from Jan. 2016 to Jan. 2019 reported becoming homeless only after their last release from the Department of Corrections. This finding underscores how destabilizing and counterproductive incarceration is, and how little support incarcerated people have once released. Upon incarceration, most people lose their jobs and housing, and it is extremely difficult for people to regain their footing upon release. The unemployment rate for formerly incarcerated people is nearly five times higher than the unemployment rate for the general population in the U.S. Formerly incarcerated people face widespread discrimination in both unemployment and housing, making it extremely difficult to succeed post-release.

Finally, the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness conducted an in-depth investigation of formerly incarcerated people experiencing homelessness in the city of New Haven, which offers an even more detailed analysis. Most notably, over half (54%) of formerly incarcerated homeless people in New Haven have been admitted to prison on 6 or more occasions, further illustrating the fruitlessness of using incarceration – or criminal legal responses more broadly – to address people’s underlying needs or to deal with the problem of homelessness. Rather than “rehabilitating” people, incarceration simply makes it harder for people to succeed upon release. Instead of investing in policing and incarcerating people experiencing homelessness, cities and states should instead invest in stable housing, healthcare, and other social services that address people’s unmet needs.

Closing the “revolving door”

The Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness’ data show clearly that responding to homelessness with policing and incarceration is not just immoral, but also ineffective. To “close the revolving door,” CCEH is working with the Connecticut Department of Corrections to launch the DOC’s Re-entry Housing Assistance Program,⁴ locating housing options before release for individuals they identify as at-risk of becoming homeless. For cases where the DOC can’t find a housing alternative, CCEH’s network of service providers is available to create and implement housing plans, again starting before release.

Other states and cities can follow Connecticut’s lead and stop the revolving door between homelessness and incarceration by creating clear-cut systems to help recently-released individuals find homes, “banning the box” on housing applications to prevent discrimination against people with criminal records, ending the criminalization of homelessness, and expanding social services for the homeless, focusing on “Housing First.”

Food insecurity is rising, and incarceration puts families at risk

Several studies show that formerly incarcerated people - and the children of currently incarcerated people - are at especially high risk of experiencing food insecurity.

by Jenny Landon and Alexi Jones, February 10, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic – and the government’s insufficient response in providing economic relief – has led to an enormous increase in food insecurity in this country. At least 54 million people are facing experiencing food insecurity (meaning they don’t have access to healthy food), and past research suggests that formerly incarcerated people, and the children of currently incarcerated people, are at especially high risk. This briefing summarizes and explains this research.

Food insecurity is an often-overlooked consequence of incarceration, and it can’t be separated from the more well-known problems of homelessness and unemployment. While the estimates vary somewhat, researchers consistently find that food insecurity is more common among formerly incarcerated people — and families with an incarcerated parent — than among the general population:

• In a 2013 survey of recently released individuals in three states, 91% of respondents reported food insecurity, and 37% reported not having eaten for an entire day because they could not afford food.
• A 2019 study found that 20% of formerly incarcerated people report suffering from food insecurity — double that of the general population — with even higher rates among formerly incarcerated women and Black individuals.
• Young children who live with their father before his incarceration are three times as likely to experience food insecurity, according to a study focused on the impact of paternal incarceration.
• Finally, a 2012 study found that the incarceration of either parent increases the likelihood of food insecurity for adults and households with children by up to 15 percentage points.

These last two studies offer further, direct evidence of how incarceration punishes entire families and communities, not just people who are locked up. Most incarcerated people are parents; their absence while incarcerated – and the barriers they face when they come home – have ramifications for their entire families, particularly children. The potentially severe and lifelong consequences of experiencing food insecurity in childhood are among the many injustices visited upon the families and communities most impacted by mass incarceration.

The high levels of food insecurity among formerly incarcerated people also underscores the difficulty of reentry, and the lasting, life-threatening effects of incarceration. Apart from the obvious policy choice of incarcerating fewer people, states and counties must provide more robust support for recently released people. States that still limit access to food programs like SNAP (or food stamps) because of former convictions must immediately abandon this discriminatory practice, and invest in infrastructure so that formerly incarcerated people and food-insecure families have access to transportation, housing, and employment opportunities.

Decarceration—and support on the outside—is the answer, not therapy behind bars

A new report finds little evidence supporting the idea that building new prisons for women will lead to better outcomes, even with gender-responsive and trauma-informed programming.

by Prison Policy Initiative, February 3, 2021

In January, as the United States government prepared to execute Lisa Montgomery, news stories described the horrific sexual and physical abuse Montgomery experienced throughout her childhood and adult life. These accounts are shocking — but devastatingly, not so unusual. Studies suggest that more than half of women in state prisons survived physical and/or sexual abuse prior to their incarceration.

Prison is a horrible place for people struggling with symptoms of past trauma, as well as those with histories of mental illness and substance abuse. Well-meaning policymakers sometimes suggest building “kinder, gentler” prisons that offer needed counseling — and indeed, one such project has recently been proposed for convicted women in Massachusetts — but in practice, prisons themselves are fundamentally in opposition with goals of supportive programming.

In fact, Professor Susan Sered, along with Erica Taft and Cherry Russell, have just published an extensive review of the research on the outcomes of existing, prison-based therapeutic treatments — particularly for women. They conclude that the value gained from prison-based trauma, mental health, and substance abuse interventions are far outweighed by the harms caused by incarceration. Instead, they argue, alternatives outside of prisons that provide trauma-informed support, alongside practical interventions such as housing assistance and health care, are far more beneficial than anything that can be offered in a prison setting.

Prison is inherently traumatizing

Incarceration itself is retraumatizing and damaging to mental health. “Prisons are full of trauma-triggers,” Sered and her co-authors write, “such as unexpected noises, sounds of distress from other people, barked orders, pat-downs, strip searches, and looming threats of punishment for breaking any one of myriad rules.” Incarcerated women often experience new traumas and indignities, including the loss of their children and families, their bodily privacy, and their freedom of movement, time, and personal space. Meanwhile, “prison conditions including noise, crowding, lack of privacy, substandard diet, insufficient fresh air, harassment and ongoing threats of violence and punishment are further associated with negative health impacts.”

Even the most well-designed and decorated prison is still a prison, and inherently unconducive to trauma-informed therapeutic programs, where participants are encouraged to acknowledge their trauma and engage in practices that promote recovery and wellness. “Treatment can retraumatize clients when authoritative or coercive methods are used,” the authors explain. “Ideally, trauma-informed treatment should take place in a warm, welcoming and uncrowded space that provides room for a ‘time-out’ option. These conditions are difficult to meet in a prison context.”

There is insufficient study of the long-term benefits of prison-based therapy

Prison-based therapy programs show some benefits: The review notes that “a meta-analysis of studies published between 2000 and 2013 identified reduced recidivism rates for women who participated in gender-informed correctional interventions.”

However, the authors also point out that there has been little study of long-term benefits. This is in part due to logistical challenges: It can be difficult to locate and follow up with study participants post-release. Summarizing a study from 2020, they write: “while mental health services in prison can partially protect some women from some of the strains of being in prison, there is little evidence that these services are of much benefit after they leave prison.” They further note that they “could not identify any studies that evaluate program impact in terms of variables such as post-incarceration employment, health or family reunification.”

What’s more, while gender-sensitive prison-based programs may benefit participants in some ways in the short term (a welcome effect in a prison setting), troublingly, at least one cited study suggests that these programs may over-emphasize “individual pathology.” Along the same lines, another study finds that staff often urge incarcerated women to see the error of their ways and “self-improve.” Incarcerated men, meanwhile, are more likely to report more practical supports, such as staff helping them gain real-world job and educational skills.

Similar problems plague drug treatment in prisons

Prisons are also inherently difficult places to participate in substance abuse treatment. “The prison environment itself creates added stress which may lead some people to seek psychotropic substances—both prescribed and illicit,” the authors write, noting that many prisons also resist evidence-driven, medication-assisted substance abuse treatment.

To study the results of compulsory drug treatment, the authors point to a 2018 Canadian review of court-mandated drug programs, which found that “forced treatment did not improve outcomes for substance use. Instead, findings showed higher levels of mental duress, homelessness, relapse and overdose among adults after discharge from mandated treatment.” They also quote a 2016 meta-analysis of compulsory drug treatments, which concluded: “Evidence does not, on the whole, suggest improved outcomes related to compulsory treatment approaches, with some studies suggesting potential harms.”

Recommendations:

Unfortunately, while there are numerous models for community-based alternatives to incarceration, they generally suffer from a similar lack of rigorous, long-term research as prison-based therapies. Therefore, the authors cannot recommend specific programs.

They do note, however, that studies suggest successful prison alternatives would “set realistic expectations for participants, avoid using threats of punishment to obtain compliance, and refrain from sending participants to prison because of drug use.” Research into the reentry needs of formerly incarcerated women shows that justice-involved women often benefit from support in the areas of economic marginalization and poverty, housing, trauma, and family reunification.

This fits with the recommendations of Sered and her coauthors: They suggest that alternatives-to-prison programs for women provide practical support, including housing assistance, family reunification, help establishing community relationships, health care and substance abuse support, and restorative justice programs. When executed correctly, the authors argue that community-based alternatives could be cost-effective and help keep women out of prison in the first place.

How much have COVID-19 releases changed prison and jail populations?

The good news is that jail and prison populations remain lower than they were before COVID-19, but it’s not obvious just how much of that is attributable to additional releases.

by Emily Widra, February 3, 2021

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.

Families and advocates want to know: How many people have been released from prisons and jails specifically because of efforts to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in correctional facilities and surrounding communities? Despite our ability to track overall correctional populations during the pandemic, the answer to this crucial question isn’t clear. Because of the disparate, disjointed nature of our local, state, and federal criminal justice systems, it is always difficult to track the effects of specific reforms, or to determine which policies are driving changes in the overall number of incarcerated people. During the current pandemic, this makes it impossible to pinpoint just how much of the recent population reductions were the result of special efforts to release people due to COVID-19 — as opposed to “normal” releases or changes in incoming admissions. But what is clear is that there are plenty of ways to reduce correctional populations, and that states and local governments are not using these tools to their full potential.

Prisons

Even in states where prison populations have dropped, there are still too many people behind bars to accommodate social distancing, effective isolation and quarantine, and increased health care requirements. For example, although California has reduced the state prison population by about 22% in the past 12 months, it has not been enough to prevent large COVID-19 outbreaks in the state’s prisons. In fact, as of January 20th, 2021, California’s prisons were still holding more people than they were designed for, at 103% of their design capacity.

Figure 1. Prison population data for 30 states where sufficient population data was readily available from January 2020 to January 2021, either directly from the state Departments of Correction or the Vera Institute of Justice. See our COVID-19 response tracker for more information on many of the most important policy changes that led to these (generally small) reductions in some states. For the population data for these 30 states, see Appendix A.
Sharp-eyed readers may wonder if Connecticut and Vermont are showing larger declines than most other states because those two states have “unified” prison and jail systems, and pretrial populations typically respond to policy changes more quickly than prisons. However, data from both states show that the bulk of their population reduction is coming from within the “sentenced” portion of their populations. (For the Connecticut data, see the Correctional Facility Population Count Report, and for Vermont, see the daily population reports.)

Many states’ prison populations are the lowest they’ve been in decades, but this is not because more people are being released from prisons. The limited data available from a handful of states shows that the number of prison releases did not change much between 2019 and 2020, suggesting that most of the population drops that we’ve seen over the past year are due to reduced prison admissions. (Certainly, reducing the number of people admitted to correctional facilities is critical to reducing the number of people behind bars, but to quickly decarcerate, states should be releasing far more people, too.)

Figure 2. These four states publish monthly release and admission data for 2018, 2019, and most of 2020. Although we cannot be certain that this analysis is representative of the other 42 state prison systems and the federal Bureau of Prisons, these data do begin to show us a pattern of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic: reducing prison admissions, while maintaining the status quo of prison releases. (We’ll be collecting this data going forward and in additional states to build an even more comprehensive picture of how federal and state prison systems have responded to COVID-19.)

Figure 3. These eight states published monthly release data for 2019 and for most of 2020. While not nationally representative, these eight states show that fewer people have been released from these state prisons in response to COVID-19 than in the previous year.

Despite evidence that large-scale releases do not inherently endanger public safety, states have elected to release people from prison on a mostly case-by-case basis, which an October 2020 report from the National Academies described as “procedurally slow and not well suited to crisis situations.”

Thankfully, some states have recognized the inefficiency of case-by-case releases and the necessity of larger-scale releases. For example, in New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy signed bill S2519 in October, which allowed for the early release of people with less than a year left on their sentences.¹ A few weeks after the bill was signed, more than 2,000 people were released from New Jersey state prisons on November 4th.²

Jails

Jail populations, like prison populations, are lower now than they were pre-pandemic. Initially, many local officials — including sheriffs, prosecutors, and judges — responded quickly to COVID-19 and reduced their jail populations. In a national sample of 429 county jails of varying sizes, most (87%) decreased their populations from March to July, resulting in an average population reduction of 23% across all 429 jails.³ These population reductions came as the result of various policy changes, including police issuing citations in lieu of arrests, prosecutors declining to charge people for “low-level offenses,” courts reducing cash bail amounts, and jail administrators releasing people detained pretrial or those serving short sentences for “nonviolent” offenses.

But the data now tells a different story about the latter part of the pandemic. Since July, 66% of the jails in our sample had population increases, suggesting that the early reforms instituted to mitigate COVID-19 have largely been abandoned. For example, by mid-April, the Philadelphia city jail population reportedly dropped by more than 17% after city police suspended low-level arrests and judges released “certain nonviolent detainees” jailed for “low-level charges.” But on May 1st — as the pandemic raged on — the Philadelphia police force announced that they would resume arrests for property crimes, effectively reversing the earlier reduction efforts. Similarly, on July 10th, the sheriff of Jefferson County (Birmingham), Alabama, announced that the jail would limit admissions to only “violent felons that cannot make bond.”⁴ That effort was quickly abandoned when the jail resumed normal admission operations just one week later. The increasing jail populations across the country suggest that after the first wave of responses to COVID-19, many local officials have allowed jail admissions to return to business as usual.

Figure 4. Despite the rising national case rate of COVID-19, the number of people held in our sample of 429 county jails across the country has not continued to decrease over the past six months, following early initial reductions. This graph contains aggregated data collected by NYU’s Public Safety Lab and updates a graph in our December 2nd briefing. It Includes all jails where the Lab was able to report data on March 10th and for at least 75% of the days in our research period, which ended Jan. 20, 2021. (The Public Safety Lab is continuing to add more jails to its data collection and data is not available for all facilities for all days.) This graph presents the data as 7-day rolling averages, which smooths out most of the variations caused by individual facilities not reporting population data on particular days. The temporary population drops during the last weeks of May,August, and November are the result of more facilities than usual not being included in the dataset for various reasons, rather than any known policy changes. To see county level data for all 429 jails included in this analysis, see Appendix B.

Why is it so hard to identify the cause of population shifts?

Even under normal circumstances, prison and jail populations fluctuate frequently due to a variety of factors, making it difficult to pinpoint what is causing specific changes. In a way, visualizing shifts in the number of people confined is a bit like talking about how much water is in a bathtub that has multiple faucets and multiple drains, each controlled by different people who don’t necessarily communicate with each other. Measuring the depth of the water (or the number of people locked up) is easy, but determining why the water level changes is complicated. The criminal justice system is not so different, in that different agencies affect the number of incoming incarcerated admissions via arrest, prosecution, conviction, and sentencing policies. At the same time, there are many ways that people can leave prison or jail, too — which are also controlled by various agencies — such as release without bail, maxing out a sentence, parole, clemency (including mass clemencies), retroactive sentence reductions by a legislature, compassionate release, or death.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of people incarcerated across the country is clearly down, but it is not immediately clear how much of that reduction we can attribute to admission mechanisms, as opposed to release mechanisms. For example, changes to the admission mechanisms that we have seen enacted to reduce jail and prison populations include:

• Reduced arrests,
• Fewer prosecutions,
• Slower — or even suspended — court systems, and
• Fewer incarcerations for probation and parole violations.

On the other hand, public health officials have emphasized the need to increase the number of people being released from prison and jail. These releases can occur via changes to any number of release mechanisms, including:

• Reduced pretrial detention,
• Increased commutations and pardons,
• Adding good time credits to hasten release dates,
• Judicial orders for administrative releases, and
• Releases for people who are:
  • Nearing the end of their sentence in prisons or jails,
  • Serving short sentences for misdemeanors in jails, and
  • Medically vulnerable to COVID-19.

Prisons and jails are notoriously dangerous places during a viral outbreak, and continue to be a major source of a large number of infections in the U.S. The COVID-19 death rate in prisons is three times higher than among the general U.S. population, even when adjusted for age and sex (as the prison population is disproportionately young and male). Since the early days of the pandemic, public health professionals, corrections officials, and criminal justice reform advocates have agreed that decarceration is necessary to protect incarcerated people and the community at large from COVID-19. The best way to decarcerate is to release more people from prisons and jails. Despite this knowledge, state, federal, and local authorities have failed to release people from prisons and jails on a major scale, which continues to put incarcerated people’s lives at risk — and by extension, the lives of everyone in the communities where incarcerated people eventually return, and where correctional staff live and work.

*Some jails did not have population data in the NYU database for the first Monday in July. We used the population for the closest date available for those jails.

Parole boards approved fewer releases in 2020 than in 2019, despite the raging pandemic

Instead of releasing more people to the safety of their homes, parole boards in many states held fewer hearings and granted fewer approvals during the ongoing, deadly pandemic

by Tiana Herring, February 3, 2021

Prisons have had 10 months to take measures to reduce their populations and save lives amidst the ongoing pandemic. Yet our comparison of 13 states’ parole grant rates from 2019 and 2020 reveals that many have failed to utilize parole as a mechanism for releasing more people to the safety of their homes. In over half of the states we studied—Alabama, Iowa, Michigan, Montana, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina – between 2019 and 2020, there was either no change or a decrease in parole grant rates (that is, the percentage of parole hearings that resulted in approvals).

Granting parole to more people should be an obvious decarceration tool for correctional systems, during both the pandemic and more ordinary times. Since parole is a preexisting system, it can be used to reduce prison populations without requiring any new laws, executive orders, or commutations. And since anyone going before the parole board has already completed their court-ordered minimum sentences, it would make sense for boards to operate with a presumption of release.¹ But only 34 states even offer discretionary parole, and those that do are generally not set up to help people earn release. Parole boards often choose to deny the majority of those who appear before them.

Of the 34 states with discretionary parole, we were able to find parole data for both 2019 and 2020 for these 13 states. Four states – Alabama, Hawaii, Iowa, and New Jersey – report their parole data by the fiscal year instead of the calendar year. Thus, the impact of the pandemic on parole releases may appear less extreme in these four states. (Fiscal Year 2020 data from Alabama reflects hearings held between Oct 1, 2019 and Sept 1, 2020, while Fiscal Year 2020 data in the other three states reflects hearings held between July 1, 2019 and June 30, 2020.) We’ve still included these states, however, as they capture early parole responses to the pandemic.

We also found that, with the exception of Oklahoma and Iowa, parole boards held fewer hearings in 2020 than in 2019, meaning fewer people had opportunities to be granted parole. This may be in part due to boards being slow or unwilling to adapt to using technology during the pandemic, and instead postponing hearings for months. Due to the combined factors of fewer hearings and failures to increase grant rates, only four of the 13 states – Hawaii, Iowa, New Jersey, and South Dakota – actually approved more people for parole in 2020 than in 2019.

Denying people parole during a pandemic only serves to further the spread of the virus both inside and outside of prisons. As the number of cases and deaths in prisons due to COVID-19 continue to rise, parole boards still have the opportunity to help slow the spread of the virus by releasing more people in 2021.

We list 27 “winnable, high-impact” state legislative reforms that would change the justice system and save lives in 2021

Our new “Winnable Criminal Justice Reforms” report lists 27 policy ideas for state legislators, as well as model bills and links to more information on each policy.

by Wanda Bertram, January 27, 2021

This report has been updated with a new version for 2022.

The new president and new Congress are stirring hopes for federal criminal justice reform, but in 2021 — just like every other year — it is state legislators who will have the power to free the most people from prisons and jails.

Because the vast majority of people locked up in this country are held in facilities controlled by state and local lawmakers, we’ve just published a report about 27 winnable criminal justice reforms that state legislators can take on. Our report includes links to model bills and studies supporting each of our recommended reforms.

Getting people out of prisons and jails — and out of the “nets” of constant surveillance that can get them thrown back in prison for minor violations — is a matter of life and death this year, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to kill people behind bars. Our list of reforms ripe for legislative victory includes many policy changes that will save lives during the pandemic, including:

• Funding non-police responses to crises involving people with disabilities or mental illnesses
• Decriminalizing youth offenses and ending the prosecution of youth as adults
• Radically reducing pretrial detention and ending money bail
• Updating the dollar threshold for felony theft
• Ending incarceration for noncriminal violations of probation and parole
• Ending driver’s license suspensions for nonpayment of fines and fees
• Eliminating medical copays in prisons and jails

Our full report on winnable criminal justice reforms includes more ideas for reducing state prison populations, eliminating burdensome costs for incarcerated people, supporting people leaving prison, and promoting public health and community safety.

This week, we’re mailing our report to hundreds of state legislators and urging them to introduce these critical reforms. Will your state make criminal justice reform a priority in 2021?

People in jails are using more phone minutes during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite decreased jail populations

Our study of 14 jails finds that there were 8% more overall minutes used during the pandemic, despite the fact that nationwide jail populations have fallen about 15%.

by Andrea Fenster, January 25, 2021

People in jails spent 8% more time on the phone over a three-month period of 2020 than in the same timeframe of 2019, according to data gathered from facilities around the country. This may come as a surprise, considering that there were fewer people behind bars to make these calls: jail populations have fallen about 15% on average since March, thanks to modest COVID-19 protection measures.

But, like the jail population reductions, the increase in phone minutes is attributable to COVID-19. Across the country, COVID-19 cases have ballooned in prisons and jails. Insufficient medical care, aging populations, poor preparedness, inability to social distance, and lack of sanitation combine in correctional facilities to create deadly conditions amidst a global pandemic. As a result, many jails have suspended in-person visitation, leaving phone and video calls as the main way for people to communicate with loved ones.

It makes sense, then, that more minutes were used in 2020 than 2019. This increase was attributable to both longer and more frequent calls: the number of calls increased by 3% and calls, on average, were 5% longer. These increases came despite the fact that many correctional facilities have used lockdowns as a COVID-19 prevention measure, which generally limit movement and phone access.

Calls from jails can be costly. For example, in one of the jails that provided data, in Pierce County, ND, a 15-minute call can cost $8.36. So when call volumes go up, billion-dollar companies like Securus–and the jails themselves–rake in the profits. Families around the country were already stretching their wallets to afford calls from their incarcerated loved ones. Now, during a pandemic that has caused mass unemployment, these phone bills are increasing as people accept longer and more frequent calls to help their loved ones maintain a lifeline to the outside world.

Methodology

To calculate changes in call volumes, we studied Securus Call Commission Reports from 2019 and 2020 in city and county jails across the nation. (We chose Securus both because it is the second-largest phone provider in prisons and jails, and because its reports are standardized across facilities, making them easy to compare.) To ensure that changes in the rates would not impact our results, we first identified Securus facilities where the per-minute call rates had not changed between our 2018 Phone Rates Survey and December 2020. We then sent record requests to 23 randomly-selected jails of varying populations, as well as 14 of the largest jails in the country, requesting each facility’s three most recent Call Commission Reports, as well as those for the same time period one year prior.

Ultimately, we received 14 complete responses as of January 21, 2021, from facilities ranging in average daily population from 12 to 3,844. ¹ (The average daily population for each facility was gathered from Securus’s 2019 Annual Report to the FCC, filed October 23, 2020.)

More states need to use their “good time” systems to get people out of prison during COVID-19

Most states have statutes that allow incarcerated people to earn time off of their sentences. Why aren't more states using this tool to safely reduce prison populations during COVID-19?

by Emily Widra and Wanda Bertram, January 12, 2021

With the COVID-19 infection rate in prisons four times that of the general U.S. population, public health and medical experts are urging prisons to reduce their populations to save lives. But governors and corrections officials are still passing the buck — almost a year into the pandemic. Overlooking existing mechanisms that could be used to release people, states have instead imposed a number of policy changes that have caused further harm to the incarcerated people they are supposed to protect:

• Correctional agencies have suspended programs, classes, and other valuable resources for incarcerated people. Not only does suspending programming make life in prison more difficult; it also slows down upcoming releases: People who have been approved for parole are still waiting behind bars to complete programs required for their release.
• Shockingly, despite clear evidence that solitary confinement is not a suitable replacement for medical isolation or quarantine, the use of solitary confinement has increased 500% during the pandemic.
• Visitation has been limited or completely suspended in all 50 states and the federal prison system, and only some states have provided free video and phone calls while visitation is suspended.
• Prison systems have delayed thousands of releases scheduled for 2020, scrambling to balance the need for fewer people behind bars with the need to connect people to community health resources if they have been exposed to COVID-19 prior to release.
• Transfers have slowed, and in some places, completely halted to prevent the spread of COVID-19 between facilities. As a result, people have been stuck in limbo at transitional facilities that are not designed to house people for months at a time, or imprisoned in higher security facilities than are necessary.
• Corrections staff are reprimanding incarcerated people for inadequate social distancing, even though maintaining physical distance from others is impossible in prison.

What states need now is a simple, equitable way of getting lots of people out of prison safely, rather than continuing to incarcerate them in ever more dangerous and cruel conditions. A solution — albeit one that will require legislative action in most states — is for states to immediately change their “good time” policies.

“Good time” — also called “earned time,” “meritorious credit,” or similar — is a system by which people in prison can earn time off their sentences. States award time “credits” to incarcerated individuals to shorten the time they must serve before becoming parole-eligible or completing their sentences altogether. Good time systems vary between states (see the National Conference of State Legislatures’ detailed table) but time credits are often given out for participating in programs. For example, New York offers a six-month credit for completion of the GED. 26 states have a good time program that offers credits for certain educational programs and attainments, while 23 states offer credits for vocational training, 17 for participation in mental health or substance abuse treatment, 16 for work, 21 for other programming, and five for participating in disaster response (like firefighting). Almost none of these kinds of programs are being offered consistently during the pandemic, effectively eliminating the option for incarcerated individuals to reduce their sentences while in prison during COVID-19.

People in prison can also often earn time off their sentences by complying with prison rules. During the pandemic, people in prison have had to comply with much stricter rules than usual, including lockdowns that subject entire prisons to conditions “akin to solitary confinement.” Yet most have not been rewarded with additional “good time” for compliance with these harsher conditions.

Rather than holding people back from accruing good time credits during the pandemic, states should give out more of those credits, not just because it’s the fair thing to do but because it will allow some people to leave prison immediately. At least one state — New Jersey — has already used time credits to get people safely out of prison, with impressive results.

In October, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed Bill No. 2519 into law to shorten sentences and allow for early releases during the COVID-19 crisis. The bill mobilized “public health emergency credits” and “compliance credits” to shorten sentences, similar to the way good time credits can reduce sentence lengths. Almost immediately after the bill was implemented, more than 2,000 people were released from New Jersey state prisons, signifying one of the first large-scale releases during COVID-19.

New Jersey is not the only state changing its good time policies during the pandemic. Stateline reports that in August, California gave 12 weeks of good time to people who had no rules violations on their records. (This policy only benefited 7,000 people out of the hundreds of thousands in California prisons, however — possibly because it is easy to accrue violations for disobeying the most minor rules.) And the New Hampshire Department of Corrections recently created new opportunities for people to earn time credits. Even more impressive is a recently-introduced bill in Delaware, which “would award six months of credit toward every month served during the public health emergency, with a maximum sentence reduction of one year.”

Changing good time policies has advantages over other mechanisms that states can use to release people. For example, 16 states have revoked the right to parole for most people in prison (the disastrous result of Truth in Sentencing laws). These states should bring back parole as soon as possible, but in the meantime, they can use good time credits to hasten decarceration. Awarding more good time credits is also efficient, as it leads to immediate release for people who were already close to their release dates anyway.

It is likely that other states will also have to pursue these efforts through new legislation, which is not ideal during a public health crisis. But New Jersey has demonstrated is that it is possible to enact such a bill quickly (Bill No. 2519 was passed in mid-October, and the 2,000 people were released shortly after, during the first week of November).

New Jersey’s release of thousands of incarcerated people is a good start, but states looking to use their legislation as an example should expand upon the work New Jersey began. For example, the New Jersey legislation excludes people who are serving sentences for specific offenses and only applies to people who are within a year of their scheduled release dates. States should award credits to shorten the sentences of all people incarcerated during COVID-19, regardless of offense type or sentence length.

Specifically, we recommend that state prison systems with existing good time systems make these permanent reforms immediately:

1. Grant additional good time credits to all incarcerated people for serving time during the pandemic.
2. At a minimum, people who would be earning good time through a program that has been suspended during the pandemic should be credited with that time, since they lost the opportunity through no fault of their own.
3. Expand eligibility to all incarcerated people, regardless of offense type or sentence length.
4. Refrain from revoking good time credits that people in prison have already accrued, except for the most serious of offenses.
5. Protect good time that people have already earned by making time earned credits vested and immune from forfeiture after five years.

States that do not have systems that allow people to earn time off their sentences should create those systems, and give all incarcerated people a meaningful opportunity for release. Good time is one of the most effective mechanisms that states can use to release incarcerated people in a timely manner (we wrote about the other seven in our report Eight Keys to Mercy). As a pandemic continues to turn prison sentences into death sentences, it has never been more urgent that state prison systems strengthen their levers of mercy.