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We highlight some of the year's best reporting on incarceration, and offer tips for journalists interested in pursuing similar stories in their states.
As multiple crises — of poor conditions, escalating deaths, environmental dangers, and an aging population — converge in U.S. prisons and jails, investigative journalism is more important than ever to shine a light inside the “black box” of mass incarceration. For journalists interested in investigating issues behind bars in the coming year, we curated 10 stories published this year that are ripe for emulation by other newsrooms.
Each of these stories concerns an issue endemic to U.S. prisons and/or jails. For each, we’ve included a few questions journalists can ask to start exploring the issue in their state or county.
Reporters Ivana Hrynkiw and John Archibald took a deep dive into the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, which — like most parole systems in the U.S. recently — is granting release to fewer and fewer people every year. Their story series exposes a system that keeps even the elderly locked up for decades, and demonizes people whose convictions were as minor as shoplifting or growing marijuana. And for those with more serious convictions, like the domestic abuse survivor who shot her abuser over 30 years ago, “Denied” shows how the Board has refused to take important context into consideration.
Another excellent parole story came from Bolts and Mother Jones, who collaborated to reveal the nearly-nonexistent chances for approval that people in Virginia prisons face. (This could be helpful for reporters in states that — like Virginia — have formally “abolished” parole but still retain it for people sentenced before the law was changed.)
Questions to jumpstart your reporting on parole grant rates:
How many people eligible for parole in your state have been granted release in recent years? (For most states, for years 2019-2022, that data is on our website.)
What are the most common reasons people are denied parole? (You will likely have to submit a public records request for this information. Some states keep this data, while others do not.)
How many elderly people in your state’s prison system were considered for parole in recent years? How many were approved/denied?
As part of a series on the Allegheny County Jail’s expanding medication program for drug addictions, Venuri Siriwardane investigated how the jail delivers medications: by waking up patients in the middle of the night and giving them crushed-up tablets, which is far from the standard treatment recommended by clinicians. Siriwardane’s series explores how MOUD treatment in jail comes with “all kinds of restrictions, weird requirements, or problems with program administration that lead to people not actually getting the treatment that they need,” in the words of a prisoners’ rights lawyer.
Questions to jumpstart your reporting on treatment for substance use disorder behind bars:
Does your local jail track substance use disorders in the population (for instance, by screening individuals at intake)? If it does keep this information: How many people in the jail in an average month have a substance use disorder?1
For individuals who were on SUD medication treatment prior to their incarceration, can they continue that treatment while in jail?
For individuals not on medication treatment prior to incarceration, will the jail initiate that treatment?
Incarcerated journalist Sara Kielly reported on how the Bedford Hills prison in New York has found creative — and cruel — ways around the state’s 2023 HALT Act meant to limit solitary confinement. Bedford Hills — the state’s maximum security prison for women — has refused to allow incarcerated people their legally-required representation at disciplinary hearings, even provoking outrage and protests from staff. Meanwhile, prisons across the state continue to hold thousands of people in long-term isolation in so-called “alternative” units.
Questions to jumpstart your reporting on solitary confinement:
How many people in your state’s prisons are in solitary confinement (often called “administrative segregation” or “secure housing”)? How many are in other forms of restrictive housing (the prison system’s policy manual may list what those are)?
For people charged with disciplinary violations that could get them put in solitary, what does due process look like? Are people entitled to representation at hearings, and do they get it? Are they allowed to appeal?
A team of reporters at The Appeal analyzed prison commissary price lists in 46 states, finding inconsistent pricing, discrepancies in prices for specific goods inside versus outside prisons, and “markups as high as 600 percent.” Fortunately for reporters interested in diving deeper into commissary data in their states, The Appeal has made it easy to get started, compiling all of the data they used for their project in a public database of commissary prices.
Questions to jumpstart your reporting on prison and jail commissaries:
How many hours would an incarcerated person in your state’s prisons have to work to afford basic items at the commissary, like a toothbrush or a package of ramen? (See the ACLU’s report Captive Labor, page 57, for a table of wages for prison labor by state.)
How much money did the prison system earn for the last few years in commission payments from its commissary provider? (Tip: These payments typically go into the “inmate welfare fund,” the subject of the next story in this list.)
The Sonoma County Jail is sitting on $1.35 million in its “Inmate Welfare Trust Fund,” a reservoir of cash from incarcerated people and their families’ commissary purchases. Reporter Marisa Endicott investigated how the money has been used in recent years, finding that the jail has consistently spent less than half of the available money in the fund — and that some local decisionmakers are interested in removing the jail’s markups on commissary goods altogether in order to allow incarcerated people to save money.
Another notable investigation into prison and jail welfare funds came from the Washington State Standard, with reporter Grace Deng finding — similarly — that the Washington DOC is letting $12 million in its welfare fund sit idle.
Questions to jumpstart your reporting on inmate welfare funds:
What is the welfare fund called in your local jail system, and how is the money allowed to be used?
What is the balance of the welfare fund? (You will likely have to submit a public records request for this information.)
Who oversees the welfare fund and how is the money spent? Do incarcerated people and their loved ones have a voice?
Idaho is one of a number of states allowing sheriffs to “opt in” to jail inspections, and also lacks consequences for jails that don’t report deaths to the state government. As a result, many deaths go unreported, with the state officials that handle death data forced to “search for media coverage of deaths that were not reported” to get an accurate count. Reporter Whitney Bryen’s findings skillfully illustrate the absence of data and accountability around deaths in local facilities.
Questions to jumpstart your reporting on deaths behind bars:
How many deaths occurred in your local jail last year?
What kinds of records does the jail keep around deaths in custody? (Posing this question to the public information officer at the jail will help you decide what records to request.)
For more tips on investigating in-custody deaths, see our June briefing about health privacy laws and submitting effective public records requests.
We also recommend building relationships with family members of people who have died in jail. All too often, jails fail to produce accurate counts, and family members can help fill in the gaps.
On its face, New York State has a robust jail oversight system, with a state agency tasked with inspecting local jails and even empowered to shut jails down. But the agency reveals very little of its findings about jails to the public. Chris Gelardi and Eliza Fawcett at New York Focus used public records requests to bring jail oversight records into public view — records that reveal widespread problems in locally-run facilities and ineffective (or nonexistent) state attempts to fix those problems.
Questions to jumpstart your reporting on jail oversight:
What agency oversees local jails in your state? Who staffs that agency, and how often do they actually meet? (This table we prepared of state agencies that set local jail standards may be helpful.)
Can jail oversight officials in your state require jails to submit to inspections or is it an “opt-in” system? If officials find problems in a jail, can they require jails to fix those problems?
Reporter Rachel Crumpler investigated the North Carolina Department of Public Safety’s response to Hurricane Helene: While incarcerated people made it through the storm safely, several hundred were relocated to already-crowded prisons in non-impacted parts of the state. Ignoring demands from advocates that prisons release some incarcerated people to alleviate overcrowding, the department continues to house people in prisons that are already short-staffed, revealing the dire shortcomings of standard emergency response plans.
Questions to jumpstart your reporting on how environmental disasters impact prisons and jails:
What climate-related risks do prisons and jails in your state face? (The Intercept‘s Climate and Punishment mapping tool has data that may help with this question.)
Do the facilities most at risk have written guidelines for handling a weather emergency? If so, what do the guidelines say about when incarcerated people should be evacuated?
Tip: For prisons in several states, the Toxic Prisons Mapping Project has published stories from incarcerated people about their experiences with environmental hazards.
From inside Washington state prisons, writer Christopher Blackwell, collaborating with reporter Khawla Nakua, exposed “another kind of long Covid: how the aftermath of pandemic cuts have lingered” behind prison walls. In Washington, the 7,000 volunteer instructors inside the state’s prisons pre-Covid have dropped to 1,500, leaving incarcerated people without critical programming — including programs helpful or necessary for earning early release. Even staff shortages, which were exacerbated by the pandemic, cannot fully account for the nationwide shrinking of in-prison programming.
Questions to jumpstart your reporting on prison programming:
How many volunteer instructors, counselors, and service providers were in your state’s prison system in 2019? In 2021? Today?
What percent of incarcerated people were participating in educational programs in your state’s prisons in 2019/2021/today?
As lockdowns and lockdown-type conditions become more frequent and prolonged throughout U.S. prisons, Alex Brizee at the Idaho Statesman investigated how protests by men at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution — where rehabilitative programming and recreational time have been largely suspended for years — are both winning concessions from prison officials and leading to punitive crackdowns. Responding to the Statesman‘s inquiries, DOC officials talked out of both sides of their mouths, saying staff shortages were to blame for conditions while also claiming incarcerated people could earn back these “privileges” through better behavior.
Questions to jumpstart your reporting on lockdowns:
Were prisons in your state under prolonged lockdowns at any point in 2024? How many times? (We recommend cultivating incarcerated sources and asking them this question in case the prison system is not forthcoming.)
How do lockdowns impact incarcerated people’s access to family visits? To commissary? To recreational time?
This piece only scratches the surface of the excellent journalism we saw in 2024 — other stories dealt with the criminalization of mental illness, kids prosecuted in adult court, prison phone contracts being violated by telecom companies, and much more. As state prisons and local jails continue to warehouse the vast majority of people incarcerated in this country, local investigative journalism remains a core piece of the movement for reform.
For more story ideas, subscribe to our newsletter, where we deliver briefs on important issues behind bars on a mostly-weekly basis. And if you’d like to talk about a story concept with us, get in touch.
Footnotes
It’s worth noting that your jail may deny this request, invoking HIPAA. For general tips on overcoming HIPAA-related obstacles, see our June briefing. ↩
Jails and prisons across the country have record-high vacancies, creating bad working conditions for corrections staff and nightmarish living conditions for incarcerated people. Why haven’t pay raises, benefits, and new facilities turned recruitment around, and what does that tell us about the state of mass incarceration?
Prisons and local jails struggled with staffing well before the COVID-19 pandemic spurred a national labor shortage, and they haven’t bounced back since. Recruitment and retention are still a high priority for corrections agencies,1 with nearly half reporting between 20 and 30% of their workers leaving each year. Many departments have tried increasing compensation, lowering employment requirements, hiring more part-time workers, and building new facilities to attract recruits but it hasn’t worked. Why not? Because “understaffing” is an untreatable symptom of mass incarceration — not a recruitment problem.
When there are fewer workers than necessary to operate facilities as planned, correctional authorities cut back on the things staff are needed to manage, and conditions get worse: people are stuck in ‘lockdown’ conditions, they’re transferred around, housing units are consolidated, access to services and programming is limited, and fights break out. As conditions deteriorate, fewer people want to work in these facilities. Decarceration should seem like the obvious way to break the cycle, but it’s readily dismissed by corrections leaders2 whose livelihoods depend on mass incarceration. In this light, understaffing is a bad way to understand what’s plaguing jails and prisons but a good way to demand more investment; it’s why recruitment is the only solution corrections can offer and a dead end at the very same time.
It has become clichéd for corrections departments and news media to blame understaffing for nearly every problem in jails and prisons; everything would be so much better (the thinking goes) if departments simply had enough workers. This framing conveniently overlooks mass incarceration as a policy choice, restricting the universe of available policy solutions to greater investments in locking people up. Many of the issues for which “understaffing” is blamed are fundamental to mass incarceration, and are best addressed through decarceration — not a jobs program for corrections officers or further investments in surveillance and imprisonment. Decarceration takes incarcerated people (and workers) out of harm’s way while freeing up resources for more constructive uses in the community, which are far more effective at deterring crime and ensuring safety than criminalization.
In this briefing, we look at what’s happening to the corrections workforce, how staff shortages harm incarcerated people and workers, and how corrections agencies have tried (and failed) to address staffing problems without addressing mass incarceration. In the end, we urge jurisdictions to prioritize release and reduced admissions over futile attempts to make mass incarceration “work.”
According to our analysis of the Census Bureau’s Annual Survey of Public Employment and Payroll, the number of state prison and local jail workers fell substantially with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and has yet to rebound.
Staffing is down despite annual wage growth
Prisons and local jails have shed thousands of full-time workers in recent years. Despite rising wages, this decline in the workforce — which began to accelerate in 2020 — is expected to continue into the next decade and has been markedly worse in state prisons than in local jails.
Employment. State prisons lost 12% of their full-time workforce between 2013 and 2023, with nearly all (93%) of this decline coinciding with the pandemic, according to our analysis of the Census Bureau’s Annual Survey of Public Employment & Payroll.3 Local jails lost 2% of their full-time workers over the past decade, with a 7% decline in the workforce since 2020.4 Meanwhile, part-time employment5 in jails and prisons has grown since the first year of the pandemic.6 The total correctional workforce7 has shrunk by 11% in state prisons and 7% in local jails since 2020, and agencies are expected to see, on average, a 6% decline in employment between 2023 and 2033.8
Corrections wages have risen and largely kept pace with inflation over the past 10 years; even during high inflation following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the purchasing power of corrections workers’ salaries remained relatively consistent.
Wages. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics,9 the median annual wage for correctional officers and jailers in 2023 was $53,300.10 The median corrections salary grew by 35% in the decade between 2013 and 2023, and 12.5% since 2020 alone. Wages have remained relatively consistent with inflation for the last 10 years, but these figures notably exclude premium wages,11 which are significant and have skyrocketed in recent years. There are no public data on premium pay, but news reports indicate that workers racked up hundreds of millions of dollars of these additional wages in many prison systems.12 While overtime puts more money in workers’ pockets, demanding work schedules burn people out and deter them from seeking or keeping corrections jobs.
Working as a delivery truck driver is roughly 15 times as deadly as working in a jail or prison, and yet corrections workers’ median annual salary is around $13,300 higher.
Jail and prison officials consistently blame low wages as an obstacle to recruitment, but it’s worth noting that the median annual corrections wage ($53,300) is higher than professions requiring more training and education, like EMTs ($53,180) and counselors and social workers ($44,040). Additionally, corrections work isn’t among the top 10 most dangerous jobs in America, but their median annual salary is still higher than those for jobs that are, such as loggers ($48,910 per year), roofers ($50,030), delivery truck drivers ($39,950 per year), and construction workers ($44,310 per year).
Recruitment strategies can’t address fundamental problems in jails and prisons
While our work focuses mostly on how the system harms incarcerated people and their communities, we’ve written before about how corrections work harms workers. A recent job posting for a Georgia corrections officer provides an instructive example, noting that applicants must be prepared to work nights, weekends, and holidays; be exposed to violence and disease; strip search people; and kill them “if necessary:”
Select requirements listed in an additional “Note” in all Georgia Department of Corrections job vacancy listings for Correctional Officers (accessed December 7, 2024).
In addition to working in the same overcrowded and dangerous environments facing incarcerated people, corrections workers are exposed to physical health risks such as injury or an increased risk of infectious diseases including COVID-19, tuberculosis, and hepatitis B. They have high rates of death and suicide from routinely experiencing trauma: one 2013 study of nearly 3,600 corrections professionals from all over the country estimated that 34% of correctional staff in security roles have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) while 31% have depression — rates that are much higher than the 6 out of every 100 people (or 6% of the U.S. population) who will have PTSD at some point in their lives.
With that in mind, it’s no wonder why several recruitment strategies have failed to make these jobs more attractive:
Pay increases haven’t worked: As we’ve noted, the median annual salary for corrections officers has increased year over year. Agencies have tried to use higher salaries, signing bonuses, generous benefit packages, and other compensation to recruit workers but this generally hasn’t made a difference. Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail, which has a lot of problems including that it hasn’t had enough staff for many years, deployed hiring bonuses and the highest salaries of any sheriff’s department in the state but still struggles to fill positions.14 Meanwhile, the Colorado Department of Corrections has tried offering up to $7,000 in bonuses and received around $192 million to increase compensation, recruitment/retention incentives, staff overtime, and contracted personnel, but still faces a major labor shortage.
Easing employment requirements hasn’t worked: Corrections officials have also tried to relax various employment requirements to boost recruitment. In most cases, this involves changing the minimum or maximum age requirement to work as a corrections officer. In Mississippi, teenagers are expected to manage people incarcerated in state prisons with as little as an 8th-grade education, and the state still ranks among the worst of the worst for understaffing. The federal Bureau of Prisons, meanwhile, faces staff shortages despite temporarily raising its maximum age for corrections officers to 40 years old.
Staff wellness programs haven’t worked: Employee wellness programs are a popular approach to making corrections workplaces more attractive. The American Correctional Association surveyed 45 state prison systems and 25 local jails and found that 96% of those corrections agencies offered some form of employee wellness programming. However, over half of the 61 corrections agencies that reported barriers to wellness programs said that “lack of adequate staffing” was a barrier to implementation.
Other desperate measures:Florida and West Virginia have called in the National Guard to maintain a brutal state of emergency rather than release people in response to staff shortages. West Virginia recently ceased its emergency as staffing levels have improved compared to two years ago, but overcrowding and staff vacancies persist nonetheless. Meanwhile, Nevada has contemplated turning to drones and monitoring shackles, and the federal government is considering taking over Alabama prisons amid hundreds of deaths, years of understaffing, and a plan to build a new $1 billion prison.15
Conclusion
Understaffing is a real problem in jails and prisons, and is directly tied to the living conditions of incarcerated people. It is an inevitable consequence of the U.S.’s limitless dependence on criminalization and mass incarceration — not a failure to provide higher wages, new prisons, and yoga classes. We know this because narrowly focusing on the needs of the corrections workforce has not made a dent in staffing, nor has it improved conditions for incarcerated people.
Decarceration is the most straightforward, workable solution to the problems for which “understaffing” is blamed. This means increased use of parole and other forms of release, ending cash bail, reducing arrests and police contact, and other interventions aimed at removing people from the system and preventing more people from going in are all targeted policy solutions to understaffing. When policymakers abandon the idea that these problems can be addressed as narrow recruitment and human resources issues, and instead move away from mass criminalization and incarceration, we will finally see real movement on these issues and real relief for workers and incarcerated people alike.
Footnotes
Recruitment and retention are high priorities according to recent surveys from the Correctional Leaders Association. Half of the survey respondents — including administrators for all 50 state prison systems, four territories, four large jail systems, and military corrections — report officer turnover rates in the 20-30% range annually, with 38% of staff leaving within a year and 48% leaving within one-to-five years. ↩
One report from the American Correctional Association on staffing notes that “the physical work environment includes noise level, not being able to bring one’s cell phone into work, or limited access to natural lighting. Environmental factors have been linked to increased sick leave, stress, and employee substance use. Unfortunately, many of these realities cannot be changed or they require significant expense to improve.” ↩
To calculate these figures, we used national-level full-time and part-time Corrections employment data for 2013 to 2023. The survey collects state and local government employee data from all agencies of the 50 state governments and approximately 91,750 local governments. According to the methodology, these data cover the pay period including March 12 of each survey year. ↩
Some state prison and local jail systems saw particularly large drops in their full-time staff rosters. For example:
Notably, this temporary strategy to cope with understaffing likely has a limited shelf life. Part-time workers do not receive the same benefits and compensation packages offered to full-time employees, and part-time workers likely won’t fill enough of the gaps in the schedule to meaningfully reduce the reliance on mandatory overtime. ↩
The number of part-time workers in state prisons grew by 45% between 2021 and 2023, adding 3,391 part-time workers while losing 33,431 full-time workers (-8%). In local jails, part-time employment grew by 5% in that time, recruiting 587 part-time employees as full-time employees declined by 9,645 (-4%). In all, part-time workers offset full-time workers by only 10% in state prisons and 6% in local jails. ↩
Here, “total correctional workforce” refers to combined full- and part-time employees in state prisons and local jails. ↩
To calculate these figures, we used median annual wage data for Correctional Officers and Jailers for each year from 2013 to 2023. According to the methodology for this series, the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey reports wages as straight-time, gross pay, exclusive of premium pay. Base rate; cost-of-living allowances; guaranteed pay; hazardous-duty pay; incentive pay, including commissions and production bonuses; and tips are included, while overtime pay, severance pay, shift differentials, nonproduction bonuses, employer cost for supplementary benefits, and tuition reimbursements are excluded. ↩
The lowest 10% of corrections workers made around $38,340 per year while the highest 10% made around $87,670 per year. Importantly, these wage data exclude premium pay, such as overtime and shift differential pay. ↩
The U.S. Department of Labor defines premium pay as “Extra compensation paid at a ‘premium rate’ for certain hours worked by an employee because such hours are hours worked in excess of eight in a day, or in excess of 40 hours in the week, or in excess of the employee’s normal working hours or regular working hours, as the case may be.” This pay is offered at a premium rate, which the DOL notes “may not be less than one and one-half times the rate established in good faith for work performed in nonovertime hours on other days.” This includes overtime, which is mandatory in many prison systems as fewer workers have to work longer hours, as well as shift differential pay, earned when people work outside of their normal hours. ↩
For example:
Despite heavy investments in recruitment in New Hampshire in recent years, the department of corrections ran up a $3.4 million deficit trying to operate state prisons with roughly half its workforce. Corrections leaders have asked lawmakers to pull funding from other departments to fill this gap.
The Illinois Department of Correction’s staff collectively worked nearly 2 million hours of overtime during the 2022 fiscal year, costing the department $95.5 million. IDOC has tried to argue that rebuilding a women’s prison will help drive recruitment, reducing its reliance on overtime.
A report from the John Howard Association sheds light on the situation in Illinois. For example, it reported results from a survey of 8,616 people incarcerated in that state’s prisons found that 67% said they “spend too long locked up in their cells,” and around 26% disagreed with the statement that they have the “opportunity to go to yard at least twice a week.” They also found administrative-based lockdowns (usually tied to a lack of staffing) accounted for a majority of lockdowns over the last six years — specifically, 86.5% of all lockdowns in FY 2024. Between 2019 and 2024, lockdown days increased nearly 549%, from 242 lockdown days to 1,570 lockdown days – and even this may be an “incomplete picture” because, the authors write, “individual housing areas may be locked down and not captured in public reporting, which appear to only reflect facility-wide restrictions at most prisons.” (For context, the report explains, “Lockdowns typically mean that all incarcerated people in a facility are subject to the extreme restrictions consistent with solitary confinement or restrictive housing. During these periods, incarcerated people are confined to their cells or sleeping areas for 22 to 24 hours per day with limited access to activities such as education, programming, visitation, recreation, religious services, and communal meals.”) ↩
Ironically, the neighboring Clarke County sheriff has warned his jail will look like Fulton County if officers don’t receive a 10.5% pay increase even though such increases have made no meaningful difference in conditions in Fulton County. ↩
Conditions in Alabama prisons have become so dire that some incarcerated people are calling for the federal government to step in. ↩
In a new report, we highlight reforms that are ripe for victory in the new year and provide tips for advocates to oppose lawmakers pushing for failed "tough-on-crime" lawmaking.
December 4, 2024
Today, we released our annual list of actionable and specific criminal legal system reforms state legislators can pursue as they return for the new legislative session. This sweeping resource offers examples of reform victories that policymakers can emulate to make the criminal legal system fairer without making it bigger.
Each reform provides critical context about the problem it seeks to solve, points to high-quality research on the topic, and highlights solutions and legislation that have already been implemented in other states.
The list is not intended to be a comprehensive platform. Instead, we’ve curated it to offer policymakers and advocates straightforward solutions that would have a significant impact without further investments in the carceral system. We particularly focused on reforms that would reduce the number of people needlessly confined in prisons and jails. Additionally, we selected reforms that have gained momentum in recent years, passing in multiple states.
2024 carried several big setbacks for those pushing for an end to mass incarceration. In response, this year’s report includes a new section, offering tips for advocates to oppose their legislators backsliding into “tough-on-crime” lawmaking.
We sent this list to roughly 700 lawmakers, in all 50 states, from all political parties, who have shown a commitment to reducing the number of people behind bars in their state and making the criminal legal system more just and equitable. As they craft legislation for the upcoming legislative sessions, this list will provide them with actionable solutions to some of the most pressing challenges their states’ criminal legal system faces.
Advocates in Virginia are leveraging their own lived experience and the voices of thousands of other systems-impacted people and their families to make sweeping changes to the state’s prisons. Here’s how they’re doing it.
People who go through the criminal legal system often feel as if their humanity is being ignored. These feelings are more than justified. Dehumanization is not simply a side effect of incarceration: it is intentional and has been a part of prisons in the United States since the first brick was laid. Prisons in early America were so focused on keeping prisoners isolated and anonymous that they “required inmates to wear hoods whenever overseers moved them around the penitentiary.” While some things have changed, stripping prisoners’ identities remains a main component of incarceration in America.
According to activists like Johnny Perez, “The thing that they take the most, also, is actually your identity.” As the authors of The Roles of Dehumanization and Moral Outrage in Retributive Justice point out, “viewing others as lacking core human capacities and likening them to animals or objects may make them seem less sensitive to pain, more dangerous and uncontrollable, and thus more needful of severe and coercive forms of punishment.” Reducing incarcerated people to numbers or to the alleged acts that brought them to prison makes it easier to deny them civil rights and allows systems to justify harsher punishment, longer sentences, as well as the inhumane, often abusive conditions that prisons impose by design. Dehumanization allows policymakers to ignore the human impact of their decisions on people in prisons and their families. It also creates the false image that people in prison are incapable of rehabilitation.
When lawmakers don’t see people in prisons as fully human, it makes it much harder to change inhumane prison conditions and policies. That’s why an organization of systems-impacted advocates in Virginia, The Humanization Project, uses a framework of “humanization”to drive policy change. Humanization works to unflatten the identities of those impacted by incarceration in public narrative and political discussions, shifting focus away from people’s worst moments and toward the many statuses and roles that make them who they are. Through humanization, people are not just numbers or statistics; they are fully formed human beings with families who love them. They are children and parents, husbands and wives, grandmothers and grandfathers. This change in perspective can have a powerful impact on lawmakers.
The Humanization Project provides a powerful framework for advocacy
The Humanization Project has been working with the impacted community to reform Virginia’s justice system since 2017. Co-founded by Executive Director Taj Mahon-Haft and his partner Gin Carter while Mahon-Haft was still incarcerated, the organization began by noting that the “human consequence” of policy decisions was often left out of reform discussions. Informed by Mahon-Haft’s experience as a trained sociologist, The Humanization Project used a humanization framework, centered in empathy and common ground, to develop several strategies to change this dynamic, including:
Using multimedia platforms to curate narratives and impacted person-produced research that provide human faces and voices for issues, and connecting those narratives with policymakers, advocates, and the public;
Using community engagement and direct outreach to educate and inform impacted people and their families on how the legislative process works, what a bill will do, and the processes and procedures of system change;
Leveraging their intersectionality as impacted advocates to facilitate human-centered discussions across a diverse array of partners in order to build capacity and coalition through commonality and compassion.
Entirely dependent upon the support and engagement of the justice-impacted community, this model helped The Humanization Project shift narratives, defuse fear-mongering attacks, and expand support for one of the biggest reforms in Virginia’s history, HB5148, which established a system for Earned Sentence Credits.
Anatomy of a victory: Earned sentence credit in Virginia
According to the Virginia Department of Corrections, when COVID-19 hit, the state’s prison population had been hovering at around 30,000 people since at least 2014.1 Advocates, organizers, and policymakers used litigation and proposed legislative changes to reduce prison populations. In the context of this struggle, lawmakers proposed HB 5148 to expand the use of earned sentence credits. In Virginia, as in other states, some people in prisons earn “good time” credits: for each day they spend incarcerated without disciplinary issues, they earn a certain amount of time off their overall sentence. Earned Sentence Credits, unlike good time credits, are based on merit and require participation in rehabilitative or educational programming, work, or service. Among other benefits, expanding the use of earned sentence credits can help reduceprison populations, make prisons safer, and reduce the chance of people returning to prison. Offering and incentivizing rehabilitative programming also better aligns with what crime survivors want. In Virginia, however, offense-based carveouts meant that thousands of people couldn’t earn sentence credits for participating in programming. HB 5148, the Earned Sentence Credit bill, more than tripled the amount of time most people could earn for participating in programming and applied retroactively, meaning people were awarded credit for programming they had participated in in the past. All in all, it offered an earlier release date for thousands of people in Virginia’s prisons.
Interested in whether your state has earned sentence credits?
33 states allow good time credits.
Many states have long-held mandatory minimum and truth-in-sentencing laws that severely limit the amount of time people can earn, with states like Arkansas, South Dakota, and Louisiana recently implementing new restrictions. Where allowed, earned sentence credit policies are often riddled with offense-based carveouts that severely limit their effectiveness as a means of decarceration. According to a 2020 National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) study of time credit statutes by state, 32 states allow good time,33 states allow earned time, 35 states have programming requirements for earned time or good time, and 20 states have restrictions on time earned or good time based on classification or offense.
Using a humanization model, and with the priceless engagement of community members and grassroots and civil rights organizations like the ACLU of Virginia, The Humanization Project produced videos and messages from people in prison to urge policymakers to pass HB 5148. When Gov. Youngkin forced a budgetary amendment that carved out people with certain offenses and reduced the number of people eligible for the rise in earned sentence credit by around 40%, The Humanization Project again lifted the voices of those most directly affected to fight against the change. The bill passed in October 2020, and was fully realized in May 2024 when the state’s new budget was signed into effect without the governor’s exceptions, expanding eligibility to another 7,000 incarcerated people.
Including the 10,826 who had received immediate changes to their release dates when the bill took effect in July of 2022, nearly 18,000 people2 have had their release dates modified overall. Around 79% (or 7,329 out of 9,324) of people released from Virginia’s prisons in FY 2023 alone benefitted from earned sentence credits, with thousands more projected to be released through earned sentence credits in FY 2024. Overall, per the Virginia Department of Corrections’ monthly population reports, the state lowered its state-responsible population by around 12% between June 2022 (25,889) and September 2024 (22,802), contributing to the closure of four prisons. The implementation of earned sentence credit is also projected to save Virginia $28 million over the next two years. The Humanization Project notes this victory does not belong to them, but to the broader justice-impacted community in Virginia: as Taj Mahon-Haft points out, “We are proud to have been part of helping organize and engage people, but the progress only happened because impacted folks across the state shared their voices and humanity in ways that changed hearts and minds. Anyone who really gets to know the members of our community can’t help but want a more humane system.”
Source: Virginia Department of Corrections Monthly Population Reports June 2022 through September, 2024.
Humanizing future advocacy can strengthen reform
While many factors contributed to Virginia’s massive drop in prison population since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the passing of Earned Sentence Credit has played a huge role, as has the use of humanization as a framework for change. The Humanization Project is now applying this same advocacy model to other issues they’ve identified, such as their “Reentry Begins: Day 1 Inside” initiative, which focuses on creating earlier access to programming for people in prison. Currently, people may have to wait months or even years before accessing programming. With the passage of HB5148, earlier access to programming would mean incarcerated people could begin to accrue earned time and ultimately become eligible for release earlier as well, further amplifying the success of the changes to earned sentence credit. The campaign is also turning the lens of humanization towards protecting visitation quality and access for those in Virginia’s prisons and their loved ones, an effort that the Prison Policy Initiative’s advocacy department has supported through research.3 Focusing on humanization as a method of advocacy has proven effective in many contexts, and advocates across the country can use it in their own reform work.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the dehumanizing force of incarceration serves as a roadblock to reform by disconnecting policymakers from the human experiences of those in prison. Humanization is a framework that uses intersectionality, compassion, and common experience to implement meaningful, sweeping change by countering narratives that too often overlook the people in the policy. As the Humanization Project’s co-founder Gin Carter puts it, “This particular argument has been won with humanity conquering the day. We discuss the human impacts more while stereotypes, dog whistling and fear-mongering win out less often.”
Learn More
Learn more about good time and other ways to shorten excessive prison sentencesin our report, Eight Keys to Mercy, and learn how mass decarceration does not make us less safe in Large scale releases and public safety, and learn more about combating carveouts that undermine effective justice reforms in our toolkit and webinar on charge-based exclusions.
Footnotes
We used data from the Virginia Department of Corrections monthly population reports here as it provides the most recent data. However, the Bureau of Justice Statistics consistently reports significantly higher populations, including in 2014 (37,544), 2022 (27,162), than the Virginia Department of Corrections. The reason for this is unclear. ↩
Last month, the federal government approved an important new rule that makes people on probation or parole, out on bail, or living in a halfway house eligible to receive Medicare benefits. Medicare is the federal health insurance program for people who are age sixty-five or older or who have certain disabling medical conditions. Under this new rule, more than 340,000 people over the age of 65 who are on probation or parole, along with countless others who are under other forms of community supervision, will now qualify for Medicare.
Medicare does not provide care for people who are “in custody.” However, prior to this rule change, Medicare’s definition of “in custody” was much broader than the average person would assume. Rather than applying only to people behind bars, it also applied to anyone who was on bail, probation, parole, in a halfway house, or otherwise under the supervision of correctional authorities but not necessarily behind bars — excluding them from accessing health insurance benefits from the program.
The federal government based its previous Medicare policy on the flawed notion that people on community supervision received medical care from a correctional authority, which we heard time and time again is not the case. Prisons and jails often don’t provide adequate care to people behind bars, and they certainly don’t provide it to people living in the community.
This change is important because older people and people with disabilities are tangled in the criminal legal system at disproportionately high rates. Additionally, people on community supervision have dramatically higher rates of serious medical conditions, including Hepatitis B or C, kidney disease, and other disabilities — they’re also more likely to be uninsured.
This is a significant victory won by the work of advocates from all across the nation that will significantly improve healthcare access for hundreds of thousands of people.
