What the end of Roe v. Wade will mean for people on probation and parole

On any given day in the U.S., 666,413 women are on probation or parole.

by Wanda Bertram and Wendy Sawyer, June 30, 2022

We’ve produced an updated version of this briefing to mark the two-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision. We recommend reading our new briefing instead.

With several states preparing to criminalize abortion now that Roe v. Wade is over, and some states talking about criminalizing traveling out of state to get an abortion, it’s worth remembering that for many people on probation and parole, traveling out of state for abortion care is already next to impossible. On any given day in the U.S., 666,413 women¹ are on probation (a community-based alternative to incarceration) or parole (the part of a prison sentence that someone serves in the community). In many jurisdictions — for instance, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Idaho, Texas, and the federal system, as well as some juvenile probation systems — it’s common for people on probation and parole to face restrictions on where they can travel, whether they can move to another county or state, and with whom they can “associate” (including, potentially, people who assist in coordinating abortion access, where such help is criminalized). All of these restrictions will make it harder for people under supervision to get abortion care.

In the last few days, many news outlets have reported on how people in prison can be blocked from seeking an abortion, especially in states where abortion is already illegal. (Ironically, as we’ve discussed before, prisons deny people quality pregnancy care even as they deny abortion access.) The end of Roe v. Wade will create new barriers to abortion care for incarcerated people, since it will likely trigger the criminalization of abortion in thirteen states.

But an even greater number of people on probation and parole stand to be affected: About 231,000 women are in prison or jail on any given day, but several times as many women are on probation and parole, the result of gendered differences in offense types: women are more likely than men to be serving sentences for lower-level property and drug crimes

In the thirteen states with abortion ban “trigger laws” on the way, more than 200,000 women are under probation and parole supervision, which will make it difficult or impossible for many of them to travel out of state for an abortion, or potentially even talk to people coordinating abortion care, given the typical restrictions of probation and parole.

Nationwide, the average probation term is just under two years — far too long for the average individual to “wait it out” until they are no longer under supervision and can seek abortion care across state lines. Meanwhile, parole sentences can be several months to years — typically, up to the remaining time on an individual’s sentence after they are released from prison. Some people are even subject to lifetime supervision, depending on the state and the underlying offense.

A number of probation and parole “conditions” curtail the freedoms of people on supervision: Even though breaking these rules would not be a “crime” in any other context, parole or probation officers are empowered to — and often do — send people back to jail or prison for these noncriminal “technical” violations. (In 2020, at least 67,894 people on probation and 45,878 people on parole went to prison or jail because of a noncriminal violation.) Conditions of supervision can be extremely burdensome, and they fall on people who are already disadvantaged, struggling with unemployment, poverty, and housing insecurity. As we explored in a previous report, conditions of supervision can force people to accept a bad deal in the job market. In the same way, travel restrictions — which are “standard” conditions in many places — will soon force many of these individuals to accept the impossibility of getting an abortion.

People on probation and parole typically have some options for interstate travel, but they have to get formal approval from their supervision officer in order to make specific trips. With the sole authority to approve or deny a trip across state lines for abortion care, a probation or parole officer might choose to prioritize their own personal beliefs about abortion over the desires of the individual under their control. They might also choose to delay the decision until it’s no longer possible — or safe — for the individual they’re supervising to terminate a pregnancy.

These restrictions on travel aren’t the only barriers that might stop someone from getting, or seeking, an abortion. People on probation and parole have low average incomes, and they’re often under-insured: Going to prison usually results in losing one’s health insurance coverage, meaning that formerly incarcerated people face an uphill battle to regain health insurance after their release. They may also struggle to get the time off work necessary to have an abortion — especially since maintaining steady employment is often itself a condition of supervision.

For people on supervision considering moving out-of-state to avoid their own state’s abortion laws, transfer is possible, but not guaranteed, and it’s often very slow: getting the new state to approve the transfer can take six weeks, and that’s in addition to however long the “sending” state takes to review the application. Even then, applicants will need to show their family and/or employment connections to the new state; even if they have the funds, they can’t just move on a whim.

As many others have already noted over the last few days, the growing criminalization of abortion won’t impact everyone equally. The abortions that these new post-Roe laws prevent will disproportionately be among people who are poor and lack access to transportation across state lines. People on probation and parole are a key segment of this demographic. Far too many individuals, having been swept into the criminal legal system by laws that criminalize poverty, will now find themselves without recourse for accessing what should be basic healthcare.

Since you asked: Can our recent series of reports about where incarcerated people call home be adapted to talk about other populations?

The data can help researchers better understand the harms of mass incarceration.

by Peter Wagner and Emily Widra, June 30, 2022

Now that we’ve started publishing a series of reports about where incarcerated people call home in each of the states that have ended prison gerrymandering, that raises the common question: Can you also do this for other populations under criminal justice system control, such as people on probation or parole? This comes up in a number of contexts, but to pick one example, someone might be running a campaign to change a state law that denies people on parole the right to vote, and they might want to make the numerical impact a little more clear for specific legislators who might support or oppose the legislation.

The short answer is: Because this data is about people in prison — not people on probation or parole — it can’t precisely answer this question, but it can illuminate the patterns and scale of correctional control in an area.

A simple strategy to apply our data to other populations — and one that might be enough for your purposes or a proof of concept for more in-depth research¹ later — would be to make the relatively safe assumption that parolees (for example) are spatially distributed across the state in a way that is roughly similar to the distribution of incarcerated people. (If you have reasons to believe that the distribution is different, then this of course won’t work.)

In order to estimate the number of parolees in a particular geography, all you would need to know is the state-level ratio of parolees (or another relevant population) to incarcerated people and then apply that ratio to each geography in our report. For example, in New York State there were 44,917 people² on parole in 2020 and our report says that 39,027 people were reallocated³ to their home addresses from state prisons that year, for a ratio of 115%. You simply need to multiply the number of incarcerated people in each legislative district, neighborhood, etc. by that ratio to get a fair estimate of the number of parolees in that area. A similar approach could be used for people on probation or any other population that you have good reason to believe is distributed similarly to people in prison.

If you find this general methodology helpful, here are two other suggestions and warnings as you proceed:

• Multiplying whole numbers of people by a percentage will almost surely result in fractional people. You’ll need to decide whether to round the numbers to keep this simpler or to keep the fraction as a way to emphasize that it’s an estimate. Both choices are fine and just depend on your intended use.
• As your geographies get smaller, the accuracy of a state-level ratio between parolees and the incarcerated people will become less accurate. How small is too small is a value judgement you’ll need to make based on your knowledge of your state and your own goals, but if you wanted a starting point, in our series of reports we generally didn’t rely on or highlight incarceration rate data where the total number of incarcerated people in that geography was less than 10.

New data reveals where people in Maryland prisons come from

Report shows every community is harmed by mass incarceration

June 27, 2022

Today the Prison Policy Initiative and Justice Policy Institute released a new report, Where people in prison come from: The geography of mass incarceration in Maryland, that gives an in-depth look at where people in Maryland state prisons come from. The report also provides 9 detailed data tables — including neighborhood-specific data for Baltimore City and Montgomery County — that serve as a foundation for advocates, organizers, policymakers, data journalists, academics, and others to do their own analysis of how incarceration relates to other factors of community well-being.

The report shows:

• Every single county — and every legislative district — is missing a portion of its population to incarceration in state prison;
• No city is harmed by mass incarceration as much as the city of Baltimore. It is home to 9% of the state’s residents, but 40% of people in its state prisons.
• Smaller and traditionally under-resourced Eastern Shore communities are particularly hard hit by mass incarceration; and
• The worst impacts of mass incarceration are often concentrated in specific neighborhoods that are already systematically under-resourced. For example, over a third of the people from the city of Baltimore in state prison come from just 10 of the cities 55 neighborhoods.

Data tables included in the report provide residence information for people in Maryland state prisons at the time of the 2020 Census, offering the clearest look ever at which communities are most impacted by mass incarceration. They break down the number of people locked up by county, city, town, zip code, legislative district, census tract, and other areas.

The data show the counties with the highest state prison incarceration rates are Wicomico, Dorchester, and Somerset, all with incarceration rates greater than 500 people in state prison per 100,000 residents. For comparison, Montgomery County has the lowest prison incarceration rate, at 61 people in state prison per 100,000 residents, roughly 10 times lower than the highest counties.

“The nation’s 40-year failed experiment with mass incarceration harms each and every one of us. This analysis shows that while some communities are disproportionately impacted by this failed policy, nobody escapes the damage it causes,” said Emily Widra, Senior Research Analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative. “Our report is just the beginning. We’re making this data available so others can further examine how geographic incarceration trends correlate with other problems communities face.”

A previous analysis from the Prison Policy Initiative and Justice Policy Institute showed a strong correlation between high rates of incarceration in Maryland and high unemployment rates, long commute times, low household incomes, decreased life expectancy, and other markers of low community well-being.

The data and report are made possible by the state’s landmark 2010 law that requires that people in prison be counted as residents of their hometown rather than in prison cells when state and local governments redistrict every ten years. Maryland was the first state in the nation to end the practice of “prison gerrymandering,” which gave disproportional political clout to state and local districts that contain prisons at the expense of all of the other areas of the state. Since then, more than a dozen states and 200 local governments have taken steps to end the practices. In total, roughly half the country now lives in a place that has taken action to address prison gerrymandering.

New report, Chronic Punishment, reveals the unmet health needs of people in state prisons

June 22, 2022

A new report from the Prison Policy Initiative offers the most recent national data on incarcerated people’s health, and shows that U.S. state prisons are continuing to ignore the plight of people in their care. The report, Chronic Punishment: The unmet health needs of people in state prisons, examines the Bureau of Justice Statistics’s Survey of Prison Inmates and breaks down the prevalence of several chronic conditions in this country’s 1,566 state prisons. The report also takes a deep dive into the medical histories of people behind bars.

Key findings in Chronic Punishment include:

• People in state prisons suffer disproportionately from asthma, hepatitis C, HIV, and substance use disorder.
• Significant numbers of people in state prisons also suffer from illnesses such as heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes, which are exacerbated behind bars.
• Half (50%) of people in state prisons lacked health insurance upon the arrest that led to their incarceration, and those with insurance disproportionately received Medicaid, a sign that poverty, exclusion from the healthcare system, and incarceration overlap significantly in this country.

Other standout findings in the report suggest that state prisons, nationally, are not treating medical problems among incarcerated people:

• Four in 10 (43%) people in state prison report one or more diagnosed mental health conditions, and women’s rates are even higher. Yet only about one-fourth (26%) have received some sort of professional help for their mental health since entering prison.
• 19% of people in state prisons report having gone without a single health-related visit since entering prison.
• Existing research suggests that many people who go to prison die prematurely: Cancer is more deadly in prison than on the outside, and people recently released from prison have a higher risk of hospitalization and death from heart disease than the average person. In the first two weeks after release from prison, individuals face a risk of death that is more than 12 times higher than for non-incarcerated individuals.

The report, which includes 15 powerful data visualizations, analyzes how the typical individual in state prison lacked healthcare long before their incarceration and how prison doctors often diagnose problems that prisons lack the capacity to treat. The report takes a particularly close look at how incarcerated women fare medically, including a section about the treatment of people who are pregnant.

Chronic Punishment is the second installment in the Prison Policy Initiative’s analysis of the 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, a national dataset released last year that offers the most thorough and recent demographic picture of people behind bars in the U.S. This report follows the Prison Policy Initiative’s recent report Beyond the Count about the adverse life experiences of people behind bars. The data cannot be disaggregated by state.

The full report is available at: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/chronicpunishment.html

New data reveals where people in New Jersey prisons come from

Report shows every community is harmed by mass incarceration

June 16, 2022

Today the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice and the Prison Policy Initiative released a new report, Where people in prison come from: The geography of mass incarceration in New Jersey, that provides an in-depth look at where people incarcerated in New Jersey state prisons come from. The report also provides eight detailed data tables — including neighborhood-specific data for Newark and Jersey City — that serve as a foundation for advocates, organizers, policymakers, data journalists, academics and others to analyze how incarceration relates to other factors of community well-being.

The data and report are made possible by the state’s landmark 2020 law that requires that people in prison be counted as residents of their hometown rather than in prison cells when state and local governments redistrict every ten years.

The report shows:

• Every single county — and every state legislative district — is missing a portion of its population to incarceration in state prison.
• Many of the state’s smallest counties, including Cumberland, Cape May and Salem, have among the highest incarceration rates in the Garden State.
• There are dramatic differences in incarceration rates within communities. For example, in Newark, one of the most racially segregated cities in the nation, residents of the Belmont neighborhood are more than four times as likely to be imprisoned than residents of neighboring University Heights.

Data tables included in the report provide residence information for people in New Jersey state prisons at the time of the 2020 Census, offering the clearest look ever at which communities are most impacted by mass incarceration. They break down the number of people locked up by county, city, town, zip code, legislative district, census tract and other areas.

The data show the counties with the highest state prison incarceration rates are Cumberland (444 per 100,000 residents), Atlantic (364 per 100,000 residents) and Essex (351 per 100,000 residents). For comparison, Hunterdon County has the lowest prison incarceration rate, at 28 people in state prison per 100,000 residents, which is nearly 16 times lower than Cumberland County.

“The nation’s 40-year failed experiment with mass incarceration harms each and every one of us. This analysis shows that while some communities are disproportionately impacted by this failed policy, nobody escapes the damage it causes,” said Emily Widra, Senior Research Analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative. “Our report is just the beginning. We’re making this data available so others can further examine how geographic incarceration trends correlate with other problems communities face.”

The report cites studies that show that incarceration rates correlate with a variety of negative outcomes, including higher rates of asthma, depression, lower standardized test scores, reduced life expectancy and more. The data included in this report gives researchers the tools they need to better understand how these correlations play out in New Jersey.

“Eliminating prison-based gerrymandering in New Jersey was not only a huge win for achieving fairer representation for incarcerated people, but it also allows us to see, down to the neighborhood-level, the true costs of mass incarceration in New Jersey,” said Henal Patel, Director of the Democracy & Justice Program at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. “The availability of this new data makes room for much more targeted and robust policy solutions to some of the often race-related inequities in the Garden State.”

This is the second in a series of reports examining the geography of mass incarceration in America.

New Jersey is one of more than a dozen states and 200 local governments that have addressed the practice of “prison gerrymandering,” which gives disproportional political clout to state and local districts that contain prisons at the expense of all of the other areas of the state. In total, roughly half the country now lives in a place that has taken action to address prison gerrymandering.

New data reveals where people in New York prisons come from

Report shows every community is harmed by mass incarceration, particularly in upstate New York

June 6, 2022

Today, the Prison Policy Initiative and VOCAL-NY released a new report, Where people in prison come from: The geography of mass incarceration in New York, that gives an in-depth look at where people in New York state prisons come from. The report also provides 13 detailed data tables — including neighborhood-specific data for New York City, Buffalo, Syracuse, and Yonkers — that serve as a foundation for advocates, organizers, policymakers, data journalists, academics, and others to do their own analysis of how incarceration relates to other factors of community well-being.

The report shows:

• Every single county — and every Assembly and Senate district — is missing a portion of its population to incarceration in state prison;
• Upstate communities, including some of the least populous counties, have disproportionately high state prison incarceration rates; and
• The worst impacts of mass incarceration are often concentrated in specific neighborhoods that are already systematically under-resourced. For example, more than a quarter of everyone in state prison from Syracuse comes from just 4 of that city’s 32 neighborhoods.

Data tables included in the report provide residence information for people in New York State prisons at the time of the 2020 Census, offering the clearest look ever at which communities are most impacted by mass incarceration. They break down the number of people locked up by county, city, town, zip code, legislative district, census tract, and other areas.

The data show the six counties with the highest state prison incarceration rates are upstate: Schenectady, Albany, Monroe (Rochester), Oneida (Utica), and Onondaga (Syracuse). Additionally, New York City had a state imprisonment rate below the state average, more than five times lower than Rochester, and more than four times lower than Syracuse and Albany.

“The nation’s 40-year failed experiment with mass incarceration harms each and every one of us. This analysis shows that while some communities are disproportionately impacted by this failed policy, nobody escapes the damage it causes,” said Emily Widra, Senior Research Analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative. “Our report is just the beginning. We’re making this data available so others can further examine how geographic incarceration trends correlate with other problems communities face.”

The report also highlights other studies that show a correction between areas in the state with high incarceration rates and a wide range of negative consequences, including lower life expectancy, increased rates of asthma (including in children), and lower standardized test scores.

“This data allows us better understand the full scale of the devastation mass incarceration has brought to communities across New York,” said Nick Encalada-Malinowski, of VOCAL-NY. “More importantly though, it can be used as a roadmap for leaders who are committed to breaking the cycle of incarceration by investing in the communities that need it most.”

The data and report are made possible by the state’s landmark 2010 law that requires that people in prison be counted as residents of their hometown rather than in prison cells when state and local governments redistrict every ten years. New York was among the first states in the nation to end the practice of “prison gerrymandering,” which gave disproportional political clout to state and local districts that contain prisons at the expense of all of the other areas of the state. Since then, more than a dozen states and 200 local governments have taken steps to end the practices. In total, roughly half the country now lives in a place that has taken action to address prison gerrymandering.