New data confirms that prisons neglected COVID-19 mitigation strategies, putting public health at risk

New data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics summarizes state policies and prison population changes from March 2020 to February 2021

by Emily Widra, October 13, 2022

The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ August 2022 report Impact of COVID-19 on State and Federal Prisons, March 2020-February 2021 examines an inventory of measures each state prison system took to mitigate COVID-19, ranging from policies to reduce prison populations to efforts to provide vaccines and hand sanitizer to incarcerated people. The data reinforces what we already know about correctional settings during the pandemic: although crowded living spaces like prisons are generally hotspots for infection transmission, only some departments of corrections followed guidance from medical professionals, public health officials, and the CDC, while others ignored even the most basic recommendations. Below, we summarize the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ findings about state responses to various mitigation tactics and compile key findings about slowing prison admissions, increasing prison releases, testing for the virus, altering housing placements to prevent spread, and providing face masks.

Reducing prison admissions

In response to the recommendation from public health officials to reduce prison populations in the face of COVID-19, many jurisdictions slowed — and even temporarily suspended — prison admissions. Some departments of corrections responded relatively quickly: From January 2020 to April 2020, the number of people admitted to prison in Virginia, Tennessee, New York, Illinois, Michigan, and the federal Bureau of Prisons decreased by more than 90%.

On the other hand, some states responded particularly slowly to calls to reduce prison admissions: By April 2020, 14 states had only reduced their admissions by 45%. By September 2020, three states – Louisiana, South Carolina, Wyoming – were admitting more people to prison than they did before the pandemic.

January 2021 was the deadliest month of the pandemic: 60,000 people died of COVID-19 in the U.S. That same month, Wyoming admitted more people to state prison than they did in January 2020, before the pandemic. Just one month later, three more jurisdictions followed suit: more people were admitted to federal, North Dakota, and New Mexico prisons in February 2021 than in January 2020.

Expediting prison releases

Public health agencies advised prisons not just to slow admissions, but to release more people (particularly immunocompromised people) who were already inside. The new report shines a light on the extent to which prisons followed this advice. Unsurprisingly, the report shows that many states failed to actually use these expedited release policies to their intended effect. For example, although Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Vermont each had an expedited release policy, these departments of correction did not actually release anyone under these policies. In 10 states with expedited release policies, less than 5% of releases from January 2020 to February 2021 were expedited. An additional 21 states did not even have a policy for expediting releases from prisons during the pandemic.

Other states made better use of their expedited release policies to significantly reduce the number of people behind bars. Iowa appeared to make the most of their expedited release policy: 5,272 people were released from January 1, 2020 to February 28, 2021, 89% of which were expedited releases (4,700). There were other states where expedited releases were a significant portion of their total releases as well: New Jersey (36% of releases were expedited), Utah (31%), California (27%), Virginia (20%), and Arkansas (17%). Of course, every state could have gone further to safely release more people, but these states did at least the minimum in facilitating earlier releases amid an unprecedented public health emergency.

The new report also includes data on the measures that each jurisdiction used to determine eligibility for expedited releases. These criteria included offense types, health status, age, risk assessment scores, verified post-release housing, and time left on sentences. Across the 28 states that had a policy for expedited release, the combination of criteria required for eligibility varied greatly:

The Bureau of Justice Statistics asked departments of corrections about nine different criteria they might have used to determine who was eligible for expedited release. Some of these criteria, such as age, health status, and positive viral COVID-19 test were grounded in health logic: Older people and people with preexisting conditions were at higher risk of serious illness, and of course people who tested positive for COVID-19 were both at risk of serious illness and spreading the virus to others. But at least as many of these criteria, such as maximum time left on sentence, “non-violent” offense, and no prior “violent” convictions, were grounded in carceral logic that assumed the public safety risk posed by many incarcerated people, if released, would outweigh the extreme health risk these individuals were sure to face in prison during this health emergency.

These criteria for early release rely on tired stereotypes about incarcerated people, particularly that there are clear distinctions between “violent” and “non-violent” offenses and that people who have been convicted of “violent” offenses will pose a greater risk to society if released. In reality, we know that distinctions between “violent” and “non-violent” offenses are blurry and misleading. Further, those who are convicted of “violent” offenses are re-arrested at lower rates than those convicted of “non-violent” offenses. These offense-based eligibility criteria therefore reflect a continued commitment to punishment over health and safety, even in the midst of an unprecedented viral pandemic.

Interestingly, the data show that states that used a narrower set of eligibility criteria did not necessarily expedite fewer releases. Massachusetts, Montana, North Dakota, New Jersey, and Iowa all had high thresholds for eligibility. In spite of their inclusion on this list, Iowa and New Jersey expedited the highest percentages of their releases among all 50 state departments of corrections and the federal prison system in the time period studied. Meanwhile, Colorado used all nine of the criteria listed, yet only expedited about 6% of their releases from January 2020 to February 2021. We conclude that the data in this report show no clear correlation between how restrictive a state’s criteria were for expedited releases and the percentage of the state’s releases that were expedited. These inconsistencies across states’ expedited release policies, criteria, and actual implementation reveal a lack of foresight that departments of corrections must adjust in advance of future public health emergencies.

Testing for COVID-19

The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that COVID-19 testing protocols and frequency varied greatly between states and facilities, which both exacerbated the public health situation and hindered efforts to measure the pandemic’s spread. California and Michigan were responsible for 38% of all COVID-19 tests of people in state prisons, even though these two states held a combined total of just 14% of the country’s state prison population as of February 2020. Meanwhile, Texas held 12% of the country’s state prison population in February 2020, but only accounted for 7% of tests administered to people in state prisons from January 2020 to February 2021.

The broad disparities between testing strategies makes it challenging to compare rates of COVID-19 infection between states. States that tested people more than once (indicated by more tests administered than people in prison) — such as Vermont and New Jersey — tended to have lower positivity rates, while states that performed fewer tests (likely only testing people who were symptomatic or had known exposures) tended to have higher positivity rates. Seven of the 10 states with the highest positivity rates (Mississippi, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kentucky, Indiana, and Florida) performed fewer tests than the number of people in prison; clearly, not everyone in prison received a COVID-19 test.

The differences in testing strategies across states also had grave consequences for public health. Research from the Council on Criminal Justice in April 2021 found that states that did not use a mass-testing strategy (testing everyone at least once) in prisons actually had COVID-19 death rates at nearly eight times the death rate for non-incarcerated populations similar in age, gender, and race and ethnicity. But in states with mass testing, this disparity in death rates was halved. The number of tests performed in each state prison system included in this new report suggests that many states failed to heed the evidence that mass testing and retesting allows for better mitigation and ultimately better public health outcomes.

Other tactics to reduce transmission

In addition to reducing the incarcerated population and tracking the spread within that population, prison systems used a variety of other tactics to slow the spread of COVID-19 in prisons. The report includes information about these tactics, some of which were implemented in every prison system in the country: staff temperature checks at the start of the shift, quarantine of symptomatic prison population,¹ and providing face masks to incarcerated people and prison staff.

But many states missed opportunities to mitigate COVID-19 with obvious and simple interventions; moreover, the report finds inconsistent practices between facilities within the same prison systems. Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma, and Texas did not test new admissions to prisons, and six more states only tested on admission at some facilities. Nine states did not test people before release from prison, and an additional seven states only tested people before release at some facilities. We know that the transmission of COVID-19 between prisons and the surrounding communities is significant, so why, once testing became widely available, would departments of correction not test people leaving the prison and returning to the community?

Beyond testing, some states didn’t even take the minimal step of providing hand sanitizer: Nebraska, Connecticut, Georgia, and Tennessee. In Delaware, Hawaii, and Utah, hand sanitizer was only available at some prison facilities in the state. The successful distribution of hand sanitizer in all 43 other state prison systems and the federal prison system discredits concerns that alcohol-based hand sanitizer would not be safe in a prison environment.

Programming, in-person family visitation, and legal visitation were restricted across the country at various points during the pandemic. Twenty-three state prison systems suspended educational programming, drug and alcohol treatment, job programs, family in-person visits, legal visits, and religious programs. The federal Bureau of Prisons suspended all of those programs except for religious programming in some facilities. All 50 states and the Bureau of Prisons suspended some variety of these in-prison visits and programming. Only one state — Minnesota — did not universally suspend family in-person visits, though these visits were suspended at some facilities in the state.

It’s worth noting that 14 of the prison systems that suspended all programming and visitation also did not have any expedited prison releases. While it was important to limit transmission in group settings, it’s bad policy to sacrifice incarcerated people’s well-being by suspending visits while ignoring much more impactful strategies like reducing the population through expedited release. The impact of increased isolation and forgoing job training and educational programming (which can improve post-release outcomes) was a heavy toll to weigh against the physical health benefits of this mitigation tactic. And because it isn’t included in the report, we do not know if prison systems made any effort to provide resources to supplement in-person programming, especially in the critical period before vaccines were made accessible to incarcerated people.

Rolling out vaccines

The Bureau of Justice Statistics collected information on vaccine distribution policies in all 50 states and the federal Bureau of Prisons. Additional findings include that no jurisdictions mandated (or explicitly barred opting out of) vaccinations for staff or prison populations.

When states drafted their vaccine plans in December 2020, we knew that by any reasonable standard, incarcerated people should have ranked high on every state’s priority list. At the time, congregate living settings (prisons, jails, colleges, nursing homes) were high-risk environments and the case rate in prisons was four times higher than the general population. While most states (40) did address incarcerated people as a priority group at some point during the vaccination rollout plan, it was not always particularly clear how incarcerated people — and correctional staff — were categorized for vaccine prioritization. This meant that incarcerated people in some states and facilities were offered the vaccine weeks or months late.

As an illustration of the broad disparities in vaccine rollouts across states, by February 2021, some jurisdictions (Bureau of Prisons, New Mexico, and Alaska) had made the vaccine available to prison populations and staff for more than 70 days, while other state departments of correction (Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina) had not yet even received – let alone started administering – the vaccine by February 28, 2021.

Disorganized and inconsistent vaccine rollout strategies showed that distributing vaccines equitably to incarcerated populations was not a priority, at both the national and state levels. As of February 2021, Alaska, Oklahoma, Michigan, and South Dakota had access to the vaccine for more than three weeks, but had not yet vaccinated a single correctional staff member. Similarly, the vaccine was available for more than three weeks in Arkansas, Maine, Tennessee, West Virginia, Arizona, and Oklahoma without a single incarcerated person receiving a dose. Some of these states are still struggling to increase the number of people vaccinated across the state (not just in prisons), but for departments of corrections to report zero vaccinations after three weeks of availability is a frightening display of indifference to the lives of incarcerated people and correctional staff.

Conclusion

Throughout the first year of the pandemic, it’s clear that many state departments of corrections ignored clear advice to mitigate the virus’s spread: reduce prison populations; increase prison releases; provide masks, hand soap, and hand sanitizer at no cost; utilize appropriate medical isolation (not solitary confinement); expand the use of screening tools (like temperature checks); expand testing of people in prison and staff to universal testing; conduct pre-release testing; prioritize incarcerated people and correctional staff in state vaccination plans; and improve vaccination rates among incarcerated people and staff. While the Bureau of Justice Statistics has yet to publish COVID-19 response data from the last 19 months, reporting from other sources indicates that many jurisdictions’ responses to COVID-19 in prison did not become more comprehensive or expansive as COVID-19 restrictions loosened outside of prisons.

While the newest data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows us evidence of what we observed — state departments of corrections failing to implement even the most obvious mitigation efforts — the data do not give us a full picture of the consequences of these shortcomings. Because of the inconsistencies between departments’ testing protocols, it is challenging to conclude that states that were better about implementing public health measures saw lower infection and mortality outcomes than states that didn’t. Consequently, the truth about just how bad conditions were in certain state prison systems remains obscured. Along with improving and expanding virus mitigation tactics, standardizing data collection practices is an essential next step. Implementing clear public health emergency response policies and enhancing departments of corrections’ transparency about virus prevention and outcomes is necessary in order to keep incarcerated people safe and healthy.

New data reveals where people in Connecticut prisons come from

Report shows every community is harmed by mass incarceration

October 5, 2022

Today, Full Citizens Coalition, Common Cause in Connecticut, and the Prison Policy Initiative released a new report, Where people in prison come from: The geography of mass incarceration in Connecticut, that provides an in-depth look at where people incarcerated in Connecticut state prisons come from. The report also provides eleven detailed data tables — including neighborhood-specific data for Bridgeport, Hartford, Stamford, and Waterbury — 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 historic 2021 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:

• Almost every single city — and every state legislative district — is missing a portion of its population to incarceration in state prison.
• New Haven County, the third largest county in the state by population, sends the most people to prison and has the highest incarceration rate of all of the counties in the state.
• There are dramatic differences in incarceration rates within communities. For example, in Hartford, a city that is one of the starkest examples of redlining in the country, residents of the Upper Albany neighborhood are four times as likely to be imprisoned than residents of the nearby West End neighborhood.

Data tables included in the report provide residence information for people in Connecticut 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 cities with the highest state prison incarceration rates are Hartford (1,065 per 100,000 residents), Waterbury (931 per 100,000 residents) and Bridgeport (903 per 100,000 residents). For comparison, Shelton has the lowest prison incarceration rate of any city, at 102 people in state prison per 100,000 residents. The statewide incarceration rate is 288 per 100,000 residents.

“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.”

“This data and report put a spotlight on the deep and enduring wounds caused by mass incarceration in Connecticut,” said James Jeter of The Full Citizens Coalition. “As Connecticut looks to turn the page on the era of mass incarceration, it should make direct investments into the people, housing, education, and economic opportunities in those communities that have experienced the most pain.”

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 Connecticut.

“Every person locked behind bars in Connecticut represents a piece of the fabric of a community that is missing,” said Keshia Morris Desir, of Common Cause. “This report and its data help to show the deep damage that is done to communities large and small by mass incarceration, and more importantly, provides guidance on where and how resources and support should be allocated to end this devastation.”

The report is part of a series of reports examining the geography of mass incarceration in America.

Connecticut 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 report reveals how bail bond companies exploit legal systems to profit while avoiding risk

On top of a bail system that is set up to favor companies over courts, the bail industry has lobbied for several loopholes that make their business virtually risk-free - and highly lucrative.

October 4, 2022

Easthampton, Mass. — This morning, the Prison Policy Initiative published All Profit, No Risk: How the bail industry exploits the legal system, a report exposing how commercial bail companies and their deep-pocketed insurance underwriters almost always avoid accountability when they fail to do their one job: ensure their clients’ appearance in court. The report shows that the espoused purpose of the bail industry — that “it provides a public service at no cost to the taxpayer” — is a lie.

Piecing together evidence from 28 states where bail companies have routinely avoided paying bonds “forfeited” to courts due to their clients’ non-appearance, the report shows that these incidents are not isolated local scandals. Instead, they are part of a systematic problem with commercial money bail, a problem that has been intentionally created by the industry to protect its profits.

The report explains how the bail industry exploits — and works to expand — six loopholes in the system that allow it to avoid paying up when defendants don’t appear in court. For example, bail companies have carved out months-long “grace periods” during which they do not have to pay a forfeiture as long as their client returns to court during that time. These loopholes, combined with aggressive strategies employed by the industry, have helped it reap profits while taking little risk.

These “cracks” exist on top of a bail system that is already set up to favor companies over courts (and defendants) in several ways:

• Bail companies do not pay any actual cash or property to the court up front, meaning that the onus is on the court to get the money it is owed if a defendant does not appear.
• The bail system allows companies to select clients based on financial risk (i.e., their ability to cover the entire cost of their bail bond) rather than their risk of flight.
• Companies can pass along their financial risk to defendants and their loved ones by collecting collateral.
• Bail companies are backed by deep-pocketed insurance agencies that can (and do) aggressively fight forfeitures in court.

Rather than attempting to “fix” the money bail system, the Prison Policy Initiative calls for the end of the money bail system entirely (a system that has already received due criticism for penalizing people based on their personal financial resources). The organization notes that unwinding the deeply-ingrained loopholes carved out by the industry one by one is not realistic due to the powerful political influence of bail companies.

“The money bail system is dysfunctional and broken by design, and the bail bond industry helped make it that way,” said report author Wendy Sawyer. “Governments should replace money bail with non-commercial systems that ensure court appearance while removing the profit motive.”

The report also highlights three strategies state and local governments can adopt, short of ending money bail entirely, to reign in this industry:

• Release most defendants pretrial without monetary conditions, and adopt services that support attendance;
• When monetary conditions are necessary, rely on other forms of money bail that don’t involve profit motives, such as unsecured bonds; and
• When commercial bonds are used, require bond agents to operate in cash to ensure they have a financial stake in the outcome.

The Prison Policy Initiative’s new report also includes a detailed description of the bail forfeiture process, an appendix of relevant legal statutes for all 50 states, and an appendix of evidence the organization gathered from 28 states.

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

New data reveal where people in Pennsylvania prisons come from

Report shows every community is harmed by mass incarceration

September 28, 2022

Today the Public Interest Law Center and the Prison Policy Initiative released a new report, Where people in prison come from: The geography of mass incarceration in Pennsylvania, that provides an in-depth look at where people incarcerated in Pennsylvania state prisons come from. The report also provides 10 detailed data tables — including neighborhood-specific data for Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Allentown — 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 2021 Legislative Reapportionment Commission’s decision to address the practice of prison gerrymandering. Pennsylvania was the first state to address this problem through its redistricting commission. With this change, the Commonwealth — for the first time ever — counted most incarcerated people at their homes instead of in prison cells when drawing new legislative district lines.

The report shows:

• Every single county — and every state legislative district — is missing a portion of its population to incarceration in state prison.
• While Philadelphia County sends the most people to prison, the much smaller Venango County has the highest imprisonment rate of any county, at 452 per 100,000 residents.
• There are dramatic differences in imprisonment rates within communities. For example, in Philadelphia, one of the most racially segregated cities in the nation, residents of the Nicetown neighborhood are more than fifty times as likely to be imprisoned than residents of the Center City-West neighborhood.

Data tables included in the report provide residence information for people in Pennsylvania 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 cities with the highest state prison imprisonment rates are Chester (1,191 per 100,000 residents), Harrisburg (1,144 per 100,000 residents) and Uniontown (972 per 100,000 residents). For comparison, Bethel Park has the lowest imprisonment rate, at 21 people in state prison per 100,000 residents. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh have imprisonment rates of 463 per 100,000 residents and 276 per 100,000 residents, respectively.

“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 Pennsylvania.

“Mass incarceration hurts every community in Pennsylvania, but hurts some communities more than others,” said Benjamin Geffen of the Public Interest Law Center and co-author of the report. “As state and local leaders rethink our approaches to criminal justice, they should use data about who is in state prisons to target investments in jobs, housing, education, and healthcare that will strengthen families and communities.”

The report is part of a series of reports examining the geography of mass incarceration in America.

Pennsylvania 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 Delaware prisons come from

Report shows every community is harmed by mass incarceration

September 15, 2022

Today the Prison Policy Initiative, along with Delaware advocates Kyra Hoffner and Jack Young released a new report, Where people in prison come from: The geography of mass incarceration in Delaware, that provides an in-depth look at where people incarcerated in Delaware state prisons come from. The report also provides six detailed data tables 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 2010 law that requires that people in state prisons be counted as residents of their hometown rather than in cells when state and local governments redistrict every ten years.

The report shows:

• All three counties — and every state legislative district — are missing a portion of their population to incarceration in state prison.
• Wilmington has the dubious distinction of having both the highest number of city residents incarcerated as well as the highest incarceration rate of any city in the state.
• Mass incarceration is not just a problem impacting large cities. Many smaller towns are also hit hard. Laurel, for example, has an incarceration rate of 1,227 per 100,000 residents, while Blades has a rate of 924 per 100,000 residents.

Data tables included in the report provide residence information for people in Delaware 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, zip code, legislative district, and census tract.

The data show the cities with the highest incarceration rates are Wilmington (1,299 per 100,000 residents), Seaford (748 per 100,000 residents) and Dover (680 per 100,000 residents). For comparison, Newark has the lowest incarceration rate of any city, at 131 per 100,000 residents, nearly ten times lower than Wilmington, and nearly three times lower than the state rate of 380 per 100,000 residents.

“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 and co-author of the report. “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 Delaware.

“This report provides the most precise picture ever of which communities are most impacted, and just as importantly, it shows where support and resources should be deployed to repair that harm,” said Kyra Hoffner, co-author of the report.

“Every person locked behind bars in Delaware represents a piece of the fabric of a community that is missing,” said Jack Young, co-author of the report. “This report and data provide critical guidance on where and how resources and support should be allocated.”

The report is part of a series of reports examining the geography of mass incarceration in America.

Delaware 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.

A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money: Class-action settlement reveals Global Tel*Link’s addiction to seizing customer money

Evidence from court case shows why the FCC should act to stop abusive practices in the industry.

by Stephen Raher, September 7, 2022

On August 30, a federal court in Georgia approved a settlement in the years-long class action lawsuit against Global Tel*Link Corporation (“GTL”), one of the two major providers of phone services in prisons and jails. This litigation challenged GTL’s policy of seizing customer money from “prepaid accounts” after a short period of inactivity. Just as important, though, it shows why the FCC needs to take action to end this type of abusive practice throughout the industry.

Under the terms of the settlement, GTL will provide cash payments to some customers, account credits to others, and will institute a uniform policy of not seizing customer funds until accounts have been inactive for a minimum of 180 days. GTL has also agreed to implement procedures to warn customers before their accounts are declared inactive. Prison Policy Initiative filed an amicus brief in the case, pointing out certain ambiguities in the settlement agreement — our concerns were addressed by the addition of clarifying language in the court order approving the settlement.

One of the more interesting facts revealed in the case came at the very end — just days before the final hearing, the court denied GTL’s request to keep secret the amount of money it has taken from “inactive” accounts over the years. Although the court allowed GTL to keep such amounts secret for recent periods (specifically, September 2021 onward), we now know that from April 2011 through August 2019, GTL took over $121 million from customer accounts that it declared inactive — this averages to over $1.2 million a month. This isn’t money that GTL earned in return for providing a service, it’s simply money that GTL took because it could.

We have pointed out this shocking figure to the FCC, along with a request to enact rules that would prohibit companies from taking funds like this. Even though GTL has agreed to some reforms as a result of the class-action settlement, other telecom companies can and do seize customer funds in a similar manner, and no company should be able to enrich itself by taking money simply because a customer hasn’t made a call in recent months.

Information about the settlement

Although the deadline to file a claim for cash payments has passed, customers with active or reactivated accounts are still eligible to receive credits. See the official class website at https://gtlprepaidsettlement.com/FAQ.

The state prison experience: Too much drudgery, not enough opportunity

An underutilized government dataset goes deep into daily life in state prisons — including work assignments, programming, and discipline — revealing lost opportunities for rehabilitation, education, and hope.

by Leah Wang, September 2, 2022

As 1.25 million people in state prisons navigate their sentences, many are eager to find hope for a better life after release. They may seek out ways to work and earn a living behind bars, set themselves up for success upon release, and gain a better skillset for navigating life outside of the criminal legal system. Prisons often claim to provide appropriate educational programming, vocational training, and other opportunities for growth or “rehabilitation.” But as the most recent, nationally representative data from state prisons show, these facilities provide few opportunities for people looking to make the most of their time inside. Instead, prisons — guided by state policies, as well as the broad discretion of correctional staff — tend to focus on enforcing rigid rules and filling incarcerated people’s time with menial work, without which the prison could not function.

Using data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, this briefing reveals how prisons fail to implement programs that we know “work” at setting incarcerated people up for success in the future (such as giving people opportunities to earn money, obtain an education, or gain relevant job skills). ¹ These failures have far-reaching effects: When people in prison have little to no income, they may accumulate child support debt, suffer without essential commissary items, or be unable to access communication with loved ones, which can impact people on both sides of the bars. Less overall opportunity in prison can mean lowered prospects for employment and finding stable footing upon release.

Prison work is often compulsory, does little to build useful skills, and pays almost nothing

Prison jobs, often called “work assignments,” are the most common “programming” offered in state prisons. ² Prisons rely on the labor of incarcerated people for food service, laundry, and other tasks that offset operational expenses. (While less common, some prisons also contract with public and private entities, assigning some people to “prison industries” jobs where they do anything from make eyeglasses to fight wildfires.) In general, work assignments are not thoughtfully designed to provide job skills and development: They are intended to keep the prison running and keep “idleness” at bay.

Employment as we know it outside of the carceral system is typically a consensual relationship between employer and employee, and protected by employment laws; prison work assignments, on the other hand, are often compulsory, and incarcerated workers have few rights and protections compared to non-incarcerated workers.³ Prison labor is sealed off from standard workplace protections and minimum wage laws by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which contains an “exception clause” allowing slavery or involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime.

If an incarcerated person refuses to work, they often face disciplinary action. Those who do work receive paltry wages — far less than $1 per hour, typically – and even those mere pennies are often deducted to pay for fees, restitution, and child support, or must be saved for basic necessities like medical visits, hygiene items, and phone calls.

According to the national Survey:

• 58% of people in state prisons have a work assignment. Most of these jobs help keep the prison functioning, such as janitorial duties (29% of workers); food preparation (20%); working in a prison library, stockroom, barber shop, or similar (12%); groundskeeping (10%); and jobs doing maintenance, repair, or construction (7.4%). Only about 6% work in “prison industries” jobs, producing goods or services for other state agencies or companies.⁴
• Considering the broader context of incarcerated people’s lives before prison, 61% of those who had provided at least half of their household’s income before their arrest reported having a prison work assignment in prison. These individuals are now almost certainly earning significantly less than they did in the outside world. And the remaining 39% of former income-providers who now have no work assignment may be experiencing a dramatic shift from providing for their loved ones to having no income to contribute to their families at all.
• Most (71%) people with a work assignment are required to have one, suggesting that many people are forced to work. While many people in prison want to be productive while behind bars, they lack any control in pursuing relevant, stimulating, and/or safe work assignments.⁵
• People in prison who were not forced, but chose to work, said the following reasons were “very important” in their decision: learning new skills (70%), earning money (54%), relieving boredom (51%), or earning good time for earlier release (45%). (Only the 29% of people who chose to work were asked about their motivations.)
• White people in state prisons were slightly more likely than people of other racial and ethnic groups to have a work assignment (63%, compared to 54%-58% for other groups). Previous studies point to racial bias (and gender bias) in how jobs are assigned to incarcerated people.

The Survey did not ask about wages earned (or even whether respondents earned anything at all), but a recent analysis found that the highest-paid incarcerated people earned over one dollar per hour in “industries” jobs, while the typical state prison job — doing things like laundry, food preparation, or other tasks supporting prison operations — paid only 13 to 52 cents per hour.⁶ These unthinkably low wages have remained stagnant since our 2017 deep dive into prison earnings (and even then, we found that some prisons were paying workers less than they had in 2001). Considering the additional blow dealt by inflation, people in prison have virtually no chance of building up financial savings, no matter how hard they work.

State prisons lack educational opportunities, job training, and programming that would help develop skills

Prison work assignments are not the only area where prison policies are inconsistent with what we know would help incarcerated people. In the words of one group of researchers, prison programs that build skills, confidence, and mental health “reduce recidivism by increasing the opportunity cost of committing crimes.” But the staggering length of waiting lists for education and programming at many facilities nationwide tells us not only that incarcerated people want programming, but that there is not nearly enough.

Overall, about two-thirds (68%) of people in state prison have participated in some type of programming, including education (43%); job training (33%); and classes in anger management (35%), parenting (17%), or money management (17%).

According to the Survey:

• Because most work assignments involve menial tasks that are unlikely to help people find skilled work upon release, it seems likely that job training programs would be popular among incarcerated skill-seekers. But the Survey data show that only one-third (33%) of people in state prisons report ever having participated in job training. This lack of widespread job training opportunities may help explain why 29% of incarcerated workers voluntarily chose to take on their work assignments.
• Most of those (58%) who were ever enrolled in job training successfully completed their program, but 1 in 5 (20%) people were prematurely cut off from their program before finishing.⁷
• White and Hispanic people were the least likely racial or ethnic groups to participate in job training (29% each, compared to 33%-37% for other groups). This disparity could be explained by the fact that white and Hispanic people had the highest rates of pre-prison employment, which could indicate less need for training.

Offering education in prisons has a known return on investment, leading to well-documented reductions in recidivism and providing the credentials that lead to better jobs. People tend to enter prison with lower-than-average education levels, and were often under-supported and over-disciplined while in school.⁸ Yet instead of being able to make up for lost time by enrolling in educational programs, the Survey data reveal that only 43% of people in state prisons have participated in educational programming (even though 62% had not completed high school upon admission). Participation rates in education are similar among men and women and across age groups, though incarcerated women are more likely to have a high school education than incarcerated men.

Our analysis of the Survey results also found that:

• Among the 57% of people in state prisons who had never participated in educational programming, the reasons they cite for not participating are illuminating: 18% — over 125,000 people — had never been offered the chance. Another 11% said that they weren’t qualified or allowed to attend, and 7.3% said they could not get into an education program or were waitlisted — again pointing to the widespread problem of waitlists for programming in prisons. Some of these same failures to inform people of educational opportunities and get them enrolled applied to job training programs, too.
• White people in state prisons were the least likely to participate in an education program compared to all other racial and ethnic groups.⁹ This finding may be related to the relatively higher educational attainment of white people who enter state prison compared to other groups, particularly Black and Hispanic people, and the requirement in some prison systems that people without a high school education must enroll in basic education courses.
• Half (53%) of people without a high school credential reported former or current enrollment in education programs, compared to less than 30% of people with at least a high school diploma – further evidence that high school and college opportunities aren’t equally available in prisons.¹⁰ While high school equivalency (e.g., GED) programs can start to bridge the education gap between incarcerated people and the general public, the lack of higher education opportunities remains a problem, as a high school education alone greatly limits employment prospects.¹¹

Even minor rule violations in prison can have serious consequences

Prisons have strict rules that govern nearly every aspect of life, and incarcerated people face frequent, excessive, and often arbitrary punishment for alleged violations of those rules. Importantly, discipline systems in prison do not have nearly the same level of due process or transparency that courts do: Correctional officers can hand out “tickets” for suspected rule violations at their discretion, setting off a series of administrative hearings and investigations led by prison staff. People behind bars do not have the right to an attorney (related to the violation), to cross-examine witnesses, or to be judged by a jury of their peers, even when they are accused of an action that would be a crime in the free world. And whether the incarcerated person pleads guilty or not, a hearing committee or higher authority can issue sanctions to almost any degree.

In his 1975 illuminating deep-dive, Prisons: Houses of Darkness, law professor Leonard Orland points out the trap set by unjust systems of prison discipline, which still holds true today:

“Punishment imposed by a prison discipline committee constitutes a most unfair kind of ‘triple jeopardy.’ Typically, the same committee that ordered punitive segregation also has the power to take away statutorily or meritoriously earned ‘good time,’ … Moreover, records of such misconduct are seen by the parole boards and may well be a factor in parole denial. Thus, a finding of prison misconduct may result in three separate losses of freedom for the inmate.”

Our analysis of the Survey data shows that people in state prisons can be harshly punished even for minor, non-violent infractions. This is disproportionately true for women, and in some cases for people of color. Specifically:

• More than half (53%) of people in state prisons had been written up for or found guilty of at least one rule violation in the past year.¹² This is the same percentage of people written up for rule violations in 1986 – although state prisons in 2016 held nearly 800,000 more people than they did 30 years prior, so far more individuals are impacted by prison discipline today. Of respondents who were written up at least once in the 12 months prior to the Survey, about 9% reported receiving a “major” violation, a category that includes assault, rioting, attempted escape, and food strikes.

• Women in prison are more likely to report being written up for a rule violation in the past year than men (58% versus 53%). Of those who were written up at least once, women were more likely to have received a “minor” rule violation than men (70% versus 57%). These data align with research showing that women are more likely to be written up and disciplined for breaking prison rules, and receive disproportionate punishment for minor, subjective infractions like “disrespect.”
• Nearly all people (90%) with a major or minor rule violation in the previous year received some form of disciplinary action. Of those who were disciplined, about half (53%) lost certain “privileges,” like access to the commissary, visitation, or phone calls, even though these things should arguably be considered “essentials,” not “privileges,” in prison. And 1 in 8 (12%) lost sentence-reducing “good time” (days credited off one’s sentence for good behavior) that they’d already earned. And, of course, these violations become part of each individual’s disciplinary record, which impacts weighty decisions including parole release. All of these punishments underscore the high stakes of prison discipline.
• One-third (35%) of those who received a disciplinary action for their most recent rule violation were ordered to solitary confinement, an extreme measure that is hardly ever appropriate (and often comes with the losses of other “privileges” mentioned above). This high dependence on solitary confinement is particularly concerning, as the international human rights community considers solitary confinement, as practiced in U.S. prisons, to be torture.¹³
• Men (26%) were more likely than women (17%) to receive solitary confinement as a sanction for a rule violation. This finding tracks with national data on the use of “restricted housing,” which includes solitary confinement. Some state prison systems have recently moved to cut down on using solitary for specific populations (for example, Massachusetts eliminated the “restrictive housing unit” at its only women’s prison in 2020). However, women were more likely than men (18% vs. 12%) to be confined to their own cell as punishment, a practice that advocates consider similarly egregious.
• Racial disparities in sanction types were not readily apparent through the Survey data. For example, between 22% and 28% of each racial or ethnic group was sent to solitary confinement as a sanction, and between 1% and 4% of any given group were transferred to another facility as punishment. Nevertheless, research points to alarming racial disparities in how rule violations in state prisons are recorded and disciplined.¹⁴
• The survey data suggest that prisons lean heavily on solitary confinement for infractions that involve no physical harm, such as “verbal assault.”¹⁵ Even respondents who were written up for things falling into the category “other minor violations” ended up in solitary 17% of the time. Even if everyone who was ordered to solitary confinement for their most recent past-year violation served just one day there (and many certainly had much longer stints than that), this amounts to 135,000 days, or 370 years in solitary confinement.

Prison rules and disciplinary procedures are an under-discussed issue that shapes daily prison life. As the Survey findings make clear, just as with work assignments and programming, there is a disconnect when it comes to rule violations between what prisons do in practice and what would actually help people return to their communities with a fair chance at a good life. Solitary confinement, in particular, is incredibly damaging to mental health, even increasing the risk of premature death after release from prison. But any sanctions that disrupt what little support exists for incarcerated people are bound to fail them in the long run.

Conclusion and recommendations

In the name of “justice,” states misguidedly send large numbers of people with low levels of education and income to prison, and then offer them little in the way of economic, professional, or personal growth opportunities to increase the odds of a better future. The Survey data show that incarcerated people are starved for opportunities to earn a real living and find purpose in state prisons. It’s in everyone’s best interest to offer meaningful opportunities to incarcerated people — for one, it costs far less to educate someone compared to locking them up. Putting obvious fiscal considerations aside, disrupting the cycles of struggle, unlawful or violent behaviors, and incarceration will require more compassionate — and less carceral — interventions.

Policymakers must drill down to these aspects of everyday prison life to improve outcomes. Without better opportunity and preparation, the hope to which so many incarcerated people cling throughout their sentences will wane, their cycles of incarceration will continue, and the crisis of mass incarceration will continue to be one of our nation’s greatest failures. Therefore, we recommend that states:

Bring prison employment into modern, real-world context:

• Legally recognize incarcerated workers as employees, affording them workplace protections, the right to unionize, and minimum wages
• In applicable states, end the requirement to work in prison¹⁶
• Ensure that work assignment and job training opportunities align with skills and technologies that are relevant to today’s job market
• Establish policies and accountability measures to ensure work assignments are not allocated in a discriminatory manner

Shift priorities away from monotonous work and punishment, toward opportunity:

• Ensure that all incarcerated people are aware of programming and educational opportunities available to them
• Shift prison budgets away from costly and counterproductive practices like solitary confinement and toward improvements in job training, high-quality higher education, special education, and English as a second language education, and other programs
• Provide people who participate in educational or other prison programs with pay equal to what they would receive for a work assignment¹⁷
• Allow people to complete a program before transferring to a facility that does not offer the same program (at a minimum, require that every effort is made to allow continued participation)
• Ensure that people being released from prison can continue their education or training, instead of having to drop everything and find work immediately to satisfy parole requirements¹⁸

Pull back the curtain on rule violations and prison discipline:

• Acknowledge gender and racial biases in how prison rules are enforced and sanctioned by correctional staff, and work to end excessive and disparate disciplinary practices
• Prohibit the forfeiture of earned good time as a sanction, as “good time” is a strong motivator for good behavior,¹⁹ and an important tool for safely reducing prison populations
• End the use of solitary confinement and other forms of harmful, long-term segregation

New data reveals where people in California prisons come from

Report shows every community in California is harmed by mass incarceration

August 31, 2022

Today the Essie Justice Group and the Prison Policy Initiative released a new report, Where people in prison come from: The geography of mass incarceration in California, that provides an in-depth look at where people incarcerated in California state prisons come from. The report also provides 20 detailed data tables — including localized data for Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, Fresno and Santa Clara County — 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 2011 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.
• While no county sends as many people to prison as Los Angeles County, many of the state’s smaller counties, including Kings, Shasta, Tehama, and Yuba, have a far larger portion of their residents imprisoned.
• Native reservation and trust land in California has an imprisonment rate of 534 per 100,000 people, nearly double the state average of 310 per 100,000.
• There are dramatic differences in incarceration rates within communities, often along racial and economic lines. For example, in Los Angeles the 14 neighborhoods with the highest imprisonment rates are clustered in South Central Los Angeles, where 57% of residents are Latino, 38% are Black, and 2% are white. Meanwhile, the LA neighborhoods with the lowest imprisonment rates are mostly in the predominately white and wealthier Westside region.
• The large number of adults extracted from a relatively small number of geographical areas seriously impacts the health and stability of the families and communities left behind. It specifically impacts women and gender non-conforming people, where 1 in 4 women and 1 in 2 Black women have an incarcerated loved one.

Data tables included in the report provide residence information for people in California 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 Kings (666 per 100,000 residents), Shasta (663 per 100,000 residents) and Tehama (556 per 100,000 residents). For comparison, Marin County has the lowest prison incarceration rate, at 80 people in state prison per 100,000 residents, more than 8 times lower than Kings 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 California.

“When someone is incarcerated, families and communities are destabilized and women-especially Black women, bear the burdens of mass incarceration through financial devastation and profound health implications. This report provides the most cutting-edge data we have to date to help us better understand how specific regions of the state are experiencing incarceration,” said Felicia Gomez, Senior Policy Associate at Essie Justice Group. “We now have an additional layer of analysis, that connected to the lived experiences of women with incarcerated loved ones, sheds light on which regions in California are sending the most people to prison and how that is impacting communities and their constituents. And just as importantly, it uplifts the urgent need for the state to close more prisons and make full investments into care and community safety.”

The report is part of a series of reports examining the geography of mass incarceration in America.

California 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.

Since you asked: How many people are released from each state’s prisons and jails every year?

The number of people going through reentry each year vastly exceeds the resources available to them in most communities.

by Wendy Sawyer, August 25, 2022

We’ve released an updated version of this briefing that also breaks down releases by sex.

The key role of reentry programs and services in the success of people released from prisons and jails cannot be overstated. People returning to their communities from even relatively short periods of incarceration often have acute needs related to health, employment, housing, education, family reunification, and social supports – not to mention challenges obtaining essential documents like birth certificates, Social Security cards, and driver’s licenses or other identification. The service gaps between these predictable needs and the resources available to people in the critical time period following release contributes directly to both early deaths and the cycle of re-incarceration (“recidivism”) for far too many people.

In 2019, we wrote about the extreme gap between needed and available reentry services for women, who report a higher need for services than men, but who are frequently overlooked in reentry programs targeted at the much larger population of incarcerated men.

Since that publication, journalists, advocates, and service providers have reached out asking about the total number of people released from prisons and jails in their state each year. While these are numbers you might expect would be easy to find, they aren’t published regularly in annual reports on prison and jail populations by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In fact, the annual data collected by the federal government about local jails (the Annual Survey of Jails) cannot generally be broken down by state; only the more infrequently-collected Census of Jails data can be used to make state-level findings.

Annual releases from state and federal prisons as of 2019. This map doesn’t include people who are released from local jails, which experience much higher rates of population turnover (sometimes referred to as “jail churn”) due to shorter average length of stay.

To aid those who need these statistics to make the case for devoting more resources to reentry services, or simply wish to understand the scale of reentry in their state, we compiled the most recent available Bureau of Justice Statistics data about releases from both prisons and jails, by state:

Often, conversations about reentry focus on people released from prisons rather than jails, because people in prison are generally confined for much longer than people in jail and because felony convictions make finding housing and employment particularly difficult. We decided to include jail releases here because while many people who go to jail are released quickly, others languish behind bars for months, often without being convicted or sentenced. Moreover, particularly vulnerable people are often arrested, jailed, and released repeatedly, and these individuals have high levels of need for community-based supports rather than punishment. For more information about the needs of people in jail, see our report Arrest, Release, Repeat, and for more on the unmet needs of people in prisons, see Beyond the Count and Chronic Punishment.

Looking for releases to your local community?

For readers hoping for prison release data more local than the state level, we can offer a few suggestions:

First, as we recently explained in a separate post, we have published a series of reports about the places people in prison call home in the states that have ended prison gerrymandering. In these states, home address data is collected by the prison system, which we have aggregated at various geographic levels including counties, cities, ZIP codes, and even neighborhoods in select cities. Assuming that people released from prison each year are distributed across the state in a way that’s similar to the distribution of people in prison, you can use this data to estimate how many people from each of these places are released each year. You simply need to know the state-level ratio of annual prison releases (from the table above) to the number of people reallocated to their home addresses in our state-level reports. You can then multiply that ratio by the number of people in prison from the geographic area you are interested in to arrive at an estimate of how many people from that area are released each year.

For example: Let’s say you want to estimate how many people from Buffalo, New York are released from New York prisons annually. In New York state, there were 20,903 people released from prison in 2019. And according to our report, 39,027 people were reallocated to their home addresses from state prisons, which is a ratio of 53.5% (20,903 divided by 39,027). You can then multiply that ratio by the number of people in prison from Buffalo (1,703) to estimate that about 912 Buffalo residents are released from New York prisons each year.

For readers from states that have yet to end prison gerrymandering, other proxy measures may work well. Many states publish data on the counties that send people to prison (“county of commitment”). The Vera Institute of Justice uses these data, wherever possible, to break down state prison populations to the county level in its Trends tool (under the label “prison incarceration”). While “county of commitment” data refer to where an incarcerated person was convicted and sentenced – not their home address – it’s a safe bet that many people are from the same county as where they were convicted, as most criminal activity occurs close to home. To estimate releases based on county of commitment numbers, you can follow the same method described above, but substitute the county of commitment number for the data from our reports.

Looking for a more recent estimate of jail releases in your state?

Again, because jails are operated locally and the Bureau of Justice Statistics only surveys all jails every six years or so in the Census of Jails, precise data on the number of people released from all the jails across a given state are not available for every year. However, the fact that most people are in jail for a relatively short period of time means that in most states, the number of admissions is very close to the number of releases each year. Similarly, the number of arrests tracks closely with the number of admissions; the Vera Institute of Justice points out that for every 100 arrests, there are 99 jail admissions. So if you know the number of arrests or jail admissions in your state in a given year, that number is likely quite close to the number of jail releases.

We hope this data and the links help you with your advocacy in your state.

Military base closures: A model for getting past the parochial politics of closing prisons

The BRAC process, which is used to close military bases, has successfully avoided political minefields. Could a similar process be created to close prisons?

by Stephen Raher, August 22, 2022

The Sentencing Project recently released an important report about prison closures and the need to thoroughly plan for repurposing former facilities. The report, Repurposing Correctional Facilities to Strengthen Communities, summarizes trends in prison closures, emphasizes the need to reinvest in communities that have been destabilized by mass incarceration, and provides case studies of closed prisons that have been reinvented–ranging from the widely-praised repurposing of New York’s Mid-Orange Correctional Facility to the entertainment-themed redevelopment of Tennessee’s Brushy Mountain prison (a tourist attraction that scholar Judah Schept has accused of being reliant on “interpersonal violence and depravity to narrate and sell…the ideology of punishment”).

The complex dynamics of repurposing closed prisons is an important problem for activists to confront. But we don’t even get to that stage without deciding to close correctional facilities in the first place. And closures are often blocked by local political leaders who insist that prisons are the indispensable key to host-communities’ economic survival. When prison populations decline and governors or legislatures make plans to close unneeded facilities, host communities reliably assemble in force to proclaim the “extreme difficulty” of finding replacement jobs and question the ability of their town to even exist in the absence of a prison. Elected officials often cave in the face of such local opposition.

But there is a model for closing government facilities notwithstanding strong local opposition. Military bases are spread throughout the country (the average congressional district receives about $80 million in annual spending from the Army alone), making it notoriously difficult to get base closures through Congress. Realizing that the country had too many military bases, in 1988 Congress chose to get past the local politics of base closures by creating the “base realignment and closure” (“BRAC”) process.

The mechanics of BRAC are complicated, but two components are particularly relevant to advocates seeking to close prisons. First, decision-making in the federal BRAC process is insulated from political pressure. The secretary of defense appoints an independent BRAC commission that studies the assets and needs of the military and then issues a report listing bases to be closed. Although the report is subject to review by elected politicians, the framework deliberately prevents piecemeal meddling: The president and Congress can reject the recommendations in their entirety, or they can allow them to go forward; they cannot pick and choose certain bases to remove from the closure list.

The second important aspect of the federal BRAC process is how local communities receive assistance in repurposing closed bases. Normal surplus property regulations are bypassed so that local communities can give input on the best ways to reuse facilities. The federal government also provides financial assistance for communities to plan redevelopment, upgrade utilities, demolish unneeded buildings, construct new buildings, and retrain workers.

Every year, states throughout the country debate closing prisons. Achieving closures–and making sure they are permanent–requires acknowledging the needs of local communities (both those that host closed prisons and those that have been depopulated through mass incarceration) and avoiding the political minefield of provincial pork-barrel politics. Adopting a modified BRAC-like process for closing prisons is an idea whose time has come.