A recent study from a researcher at University of Pennsylvania finds that higher jail rates are associated with higher death rates, especially for Black people and women.

by Emily Widra and Wendy Sawyer, January 30, 2025

The health, social, and economic harms of incarceration extend far beyond the people behind bars to their children, families, and entire communities, as a large body of research has shown. New research from Anneliese Luck at the University of Pennsylvania adds to this evidence, finding strong links between higher county jail incarceration rates and higher county mortality (death) rates. While researchers have already established the clear connections between jail incarceration, community health, and deaths, Luck’s analysis in The Distribution of Carceral Harm: County-level jail incarceration and mortality by race, sex, and age reveals how these connections vary across age, sex, and race. Generally, Luck finds that higher jail rates are associated with higher death rates for Black people and for women than for white people and men — with the notable exception of older Black men, for whom the “mortality penalty” of higher jail rates is most dramatic.

A health cross behind jail bars Truth of jail servicesJails aren’t good at providing health & social services.

Luck’s analysis of racial differences is a particularly important contribution, given that the burden of incarceration falls disproportionately on Black communities. While Black people make up less than 14% of the U.S. population, they account for 42% of people who are incarcerated; unsurprisingly, Black people are also overrepresented among people with an incarcerated family member. Ultimately, Luck’s breakdown of the relationship between higher jail rates and elevated death rates by demographic characteristics gives us a clearer picture of the carceral system’s disproportionate impacts on the health and well-being of some of the most vulnerable populations.

two line graphs showing that as jail incarceration rates increase, so do county death rates for white men, white women, Black men, and Black women.

Methodology

It may be useful to define some of the terms used in Luck’s study and in this briefing discussing her findings. The main variables of interest are:

  • County-level jail incarceration rates (more simply, “jail rates”): This is the number of people held in a local jail relative to the number of people in the jail’s jurisdiction, which is usually a county (jails are usually run by counties or municipalities). Incarceration rates are typically expressed “per 100,000 residents,” but they can also be calculated for specific groups within the larger population — for instance, Luck uses the number of Black people in a county jail relative to the number of Black people in the county to express the county-level Black jail rate. A higher jail rate indicates that the county incarcerated a larger portion of its population.
  • County-level mortality rates (or “death rates”): This is the number of people in the county who die within a certain time period (in this case, five years), relative to the total number of people in the county. This rate is also expressed “per 100,000 residents” or per 100,000 people who share a certain characteristic, such as race, sex, or age group. A higher mortality rate indicates that a greater portion of its residents died over a certain period of time.
  • Race, age group, and sex: The data used in Luck’s study include two racial categories (non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic white), five age groups (19 and younger, 20-34, 35-49, 50-64, and 65+), and two sexes (male and female).

As an additional note on the language used in this briefing, we (like Luck) also use the term “mortality penalty” as a kind of shorthand to describe the increase in death rates associated with increases in jail incarceration rates. While the word “penalty” often implies a causal relationship, it’s important to note that the findings we discuss describe correlations between county jail rates and county death rates, not direct causes and effects.

For data sources, Luck used the race-specific1 jail incarceration rates from the Vera Institute of Justice’s Incarceration Trends database2 for over 1,000 counties across the country.3 She calculated the county-level death rates by combining restricted vital statistics death data from the National Center for Health Statistics with publicly available population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau by age, sex, race, ethnicity, county, and year; this gave her age-specific death rates by county and year for four groups: Black men, Black women, white men, and white women. She then pooled (merged) the county death rates for 2010-2014 and 2015-2019, which she analyzed in comparison to the 2009 and 2014 jail incarceration rates, respectively.4

In this study, the average jail incarceration rate for Black people across all counties in the sample (1,060 per 100,000 Black residents) is more than four times that of white people (260 per 100,000 white residents) in 2014.5 This is a reflection of the well-documented racial disparities in U.S. incarceration. There is also a much wider range of county jail incarceration rates for Black people than for white people: one standard deviation6 in the race-specific jail rate is 1,500 per 100,000 Black people, but just 400 per 100,000 white people.7 Because of these differences, the findings of this study are expressed differently for Black and white populations.

Luck analyzed the data using two models that each included different variables; both showed strong, statistically significant links between county-level, race-specific jail rates and death rates across both sexes and races, and across almost all age groups. The first model simply looked at the relationship between the county-level, race-specific jail rates and the county-level death rates of the various demographic groups. In the second model, Luck controlled for a number of county-level characteristics like poverty rate, violent crime rate, percent with a college education, urbanicity, and race, age, and sex distributions. This more sophisticated model accounts for factors besides jail rates that could explain the differences in death rates, to try to isolate the relationship between jail rates and death rates as much as possible. In this briefing, we focus on the results of this second model.

Limitations of the study: Some contextual notes on the findings

Like every study, this study has some limitations. Luck relies on existing data gathered for different purposes, so there were some constraints on how she could use the data to assess the relationship between jail incarceration, deaths, and demographics. She explains various data limitations in her publications, but we thought these two were worth noting here:

  1. The sample was limited to counties with large enough Black and white populations to allow for valid comparisons between racial groups. So while the sample represents the majority of the nation’s Black and white residents, it reflects a somewhat more racially diverse and less rural subset of counties than we would see if every single county was included. In order to include as many less-populous and rural counties as possible (375 in the final sample), Luck pooled the mortality data into two five-year periods (instead of looking at just a few deaths in a county in one year, she used the larger number of deaths over a five-year period).
  2. Previous research indicates that the association between jail incarceration rates and community death rates weakens over time: the link is strongest when you compare jail rates to mortality rates a year later, and weaker when you compare them to mortality rates five or ten years later. Because Luck uses mortality data pooled across a five-year period, her analysis likely underestimates the associations she finds in this study.

To be clear, these limitations do not diminish this study’s contribution to a robust body of evidence of the harms of incarceration on entire communities; they simply provide additional context.

Read the entire methodology

 

Key findings from this study

The results of this study support our understanding that policing and criminalization disproportionately impact the same communities that are most vulnerable to any number of negative outcomes, including high unemployment rates, decreased life expectancy, worse health and worse access to healthcare, and exposure to environmental dangers, inevitably contributing to the observed differences in community death rates.8

Race-specific measures reveal more about the link between incarceration and death rates

By incorporating race-specific measures into the analysis, Luck’s new study is able to show how different demographic groups in the same communities fare under aggressive jailing. Importantly, it also demonstrates that using “race-neutral” measures, as most previous studies do, actually underestimates the scale of the “mortality penalty” — that is, the increase in death rates associated with increases in jail rates. To show this, Luck ran her analysis again using total population rates (i.e., not differentiated by race), and found increases in total jail rates were associated with death rate increases of 0.3 to 1% across the various demographic groups she studied. While this is a statistically significant difference, using race-specific measures yielded a much greater difference in death rates (1.4% to 1.9%). As a result, the new study’s use of race-specific data provides a more nuanced look at the people facing the most serious harms associated with jail incarceration.

Higher jail rates are associated with greater increases in death rates for women than men

The new study finds that both Black and white women’s death rates in almost every age group increase more dramatically with higher jail rates than men’s do. An increase of one standard deviation in the white jail rate (400 per 100,000) corresponds to an increase in the death rate by 1.4% for white men and 1.9% for white women of all ages. An increase of one standard deviation in the Black jail rate (1,500 per 100,000) corresponds to an increase in the death rate by 1.8% for Black men and 1.7% for Black women of all ages — but this is driven by a single age group of Black men (65+) for whom the increase in mortality is more than twice that of Black women (65+), as we explain below. For all other age groups, the “mortality penalty” is higher for Black women than Black men. Because men are incarcerated at rates far higher than women,9 the impact of the carceral system on women’s lives is often overlooked, but this research underscores the need to study how mass incarceration endangers women’s lives inside and outside of jails and prisons, too.

two bar charts that show women's mortality rates increase with higher jail rates more than men's for both Black and white women, except for Black people aged 65 and older.

As other research has shown, jail incarceration disproportionately impacts women’s well-being and health in a number of ways. The rising jail rates of women mean that more and more women are directly impacted by the carceral system, and those women are more likely to have medical conditions and face higher jail death rates than men. Indirectly, women are profoundly impacted by the detention and incarceration of family members: 1 in 4 women have had a family member incarcerated. Higher incarceration rates are associated with a host of negative health consequences for non-incarcerated women: increased frequency of adverse reproductive health outcomes, diminished access to healthcare, and elevated rates of new HIV infections. There are also serious financial repercussions for women with incarcerated loved ones which can ultimately have downstream effects on health and mortality.

The one exception: The “mortality penalty” is greatest for Black men 65 and older

The larger increases in women’s death rates that we see with higher jail rates are consistent across all age groups and both races — except among Black people 65 or older. Across counties with higher Black jail rates, the death rates of Black women under 65 were 1% to 3.4% higher (depending on the age group) than in the counties with lower Black jail rates; these are greater differences than observed among Black men under 65 in the same counties. However, for people 65 years or older, this trend was reversed: higher Black jail rates were associated with a 2.1% increase in death rates for Black men over 65, but a smaller 1% increase in death rates for Black women over 65.10 The author explains the implications of this finding:

“The disproportionate toll absorbed by older Black populations—particularly men, and largely driven by coupling of the increasing penalties of jail incarceration with already high levels of mortality—calls attention to the ways racial inequalities in incarceration may exacerbate other forms of socioeconomic, political, social, and health disadvantage that have been historically shouldered by Black individuals in the United States.”

Because Luck’s research is among the first to examine the relationship between jail incarceration and mortality by race, sex, and age, these findings offer new and damning evidence for what we already know: the burdens associated with incarceration are disproportionately carried by those who are already most vulnerable to other socioeconomic disadvantages.

Conclusion

This study contributes to the growing body of evidence that mass incarceration has fatal consequences that extend far beyond jail cells and prison walls. Luck’s use of race-specific jail rates to assess the ways in which jail incarceration affects white men and women differently from Black men and women calls attention to the racially disparate community consequences of incarceration.

Women and older Black men are particularly vulnerable to the “mortality penalty” associated with higher jail incarceration rates, suggesting that jails contribute to the “uneven geography of health and mortality” across the United States. In addition, this research underscores the role jails and short jail stays play in public health. While much research on the association between population-level health outcomes and incarceration has been focused on policing and prisons, these new findings emphasize the need for research to incorporate local jails into our understanding of how the carceral system hurts the health of individuals, families, and communities.

 

Footnotes

  1. “Race-specific” rates are rates calculated for a specific racial group. The race-specific jail incarceration rate is the number of people in jail in a specific racial group relative to the total jurisdiction-wide population of that racial group.  ↩

  2. In its Incarceration Trends dataset, Vera presents jail incarceration rates for counties per every 100,000 residents aged 15-64. Because these jail incarceration rates exclude youth under 15 years and older adults, we can assume they represent at least a slight undercount of the total number of people incarcerated in jail. In 2022, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that there were 1,900 people under 18 years old in local jails, but we do not know how many of those youth were under 15 years old. Vera’s Incarceration Trends dataset has been used frequently in studies of mortality and incarceration, including Kajeepeta et al. (2021), Weidner & Schultz (2019), and Nosrati et al. (2021).  ↩

  3. Luck included counties with populations of at least 5,000 people in each race-sex category (Black-male, Black-female, white-male, white-female) in her analysis. Ultimately, the study included 1,103 counties, representing more than 95% of the total U.S. Black population and approximately 76% of the total U.S. white population. Luck explains that while this sample is not entirely nationally representative — for example, the sample reflects a slightly more racially diverse and slightly less rural subset of counties — there are only “marginal” differences between this sample and all counties in the U.S. in terms of mortality, jail incarceration, and the county covariates (county-level poverty rate, violent crime rate, college education, percent of population that is Black, percent of population that is male, percent of population that is aged 20-30, and urbanicity).  ↩

  4. Luck explains that she did this to ensure the temporal ordering of the relationship between jail incarceration rates and the subsequent five-year pooled death rates. Her use of the two time periods (2010-2014 and 2015-2019) offered more stability to her mortality estimates and allowed the inclusion of more counties. For more information on this process, please see the author’s explanation in her Data and Methods section.  ↩

  5. These rates are slightly different from the race-specific jail incarceration rates calculated by the Vera Institute of Justice, which were 944 per 100,000 for Black people and 266 per 100,000 for white people in quarter two of 2014. These rates differ because Luck indirectly estimated the mean (average) incarceration rates based on a weighted average of race-specific jail rates across counties, weighted by the total population.  ↩

  6. The standard deviation is a measure of how much variation there is in a certain measure (like county-level jail rates) within a sample population (like the counties included in a study). Where there is wider variation in the individual data points, the standard deviation is greater, and where there is less variation, the standard deviation is smaller. Standard deviations can be useful to distinguish between observed measures (like county jail rates) that are more typical (closer to the average for the population) versus those that are especially low or high compared to the others in the dataset. That is how Luck uses standard deviations in this study: when she uses “an increase of one standard deviation” to describe a difference in jail rates, you might think of that as “in counties with jail rates well above average for the population” or “in counties with higher jail rates than most.”  ↩

  7. Luck expresses the standard deviations as changes in percentage points, which we reframed as change in incarceration rate: for example, an increase of 0.4 percentage points from an incarceration rate of 1,000 per 100,000 would be 1,400 per 100,000 people, and an increase of 1.5 percentage points from an incarceration rate of 1,000 per 100,000 would be 2,500 per 100,000 people.  ↩

  8. Because of the nature of the data and research included in this study, we cannot necessarily draw causal conclusions about the direct impact incarceration rates have on mortality rates.  ↩

  9. In 2022, men had a national jail incarceration rate of 345 per 100,000 male residents, while women had a jail rate of 55 per 100,000 female residents, according to Table 4 of the Bureau of Justice Statistics report Jail Inmates in 2022 — Statistical Tables.  ↩

  10. This finding adds to what we know from existing research showing that Black men disproportionately experience the serious health implications of incarceration, frequently appearing later in life.  ↩

January 28, 2025

The systems meant to maintain order and safety in prisons are ripe for abuse by corrections staff, are frequently used to dole out extreme punishments, and play a key role in keeping people in prison longer, a new report shows. The Prison Policy Initiative’s report Bad Behavior: How prison disciplinary policies manufacture misconduct, released this morning, offers an overview of all 50 state prison systems’ disciplinary policies, and explains how the use of these policies as a tool for mass punishment works against prisons’ stated goal of rehabilitation.

Bad Behavior is the broadest review of disciplinary policies to date, and draws on original research as well as testimony from 47 currently incarcerated people, providing an essential look at how prisons are run in the age of mass incarceration. The report’s findings help explain why over 50% of people in state prisons in a typical year are punished at least once for misconduct:

  • It is nearly impossible to avoid disciplinary infractions behind bars: Prison rules cover a vast range of possible conduct, including vague conduct such as “disrespect” and redundant rules about rulebreaking, and the vast majority of disciplinary cases are for minor violations rather than interpersonal harm.
  • Incarcerated people have no meaningful way to defend themselves when accused of infractions: Accused people are typically not allowed to seek representation, and face significant obstacles to finding and presenting evidence (including witnesses) at disciplinary hearings, meaning that many people are severely punished based solely on the testimony of a corrections officer.
  • Discipline policies are exacerbating America’s mass incarceration crisis: People found guilty of disciplinary violations are frequently put in solitary confinement or have good-time credits revoked, both of which can effectively lengthen their prison sentences.
A chart showing over half of people in state prisons are written up for disciplinary violationa annually, and most are minor violations with harsh punishments.

The report notes that misconduct records impact incarcerated people’s chances of earning early release in other ways as well, such as by preventing them from participating in educational or job training programs, and working against them in hearings before parole boards.

“Whether it’s being stripped of one’s ability to visit with family, getting expelled from programs, or being put in solitary, punishments for rulebreaking always come with a cost to rehabilitation and reentry,” said report author Brian Nam-Sonenstein. “State lawmakers should be paying close attention to how many minor infractions are punished in prisons, and the impact this has on people’s circumstances when they’re released.”

The report issues recommendations to departments of corrections for how to immediately make their disciplinary systems fairer and more constructive, including:

  • Reduce the number of misconduct rules, focusing first on rules that are redundant and that create opportunities for discrimination and abuse.
  • Limit the influence of misconduct records on early release decisions, recognizing that most infractions are minor and that rules are often enforced arbitrarily.
  • End solitary confinement and bans on family contact, and institute non-punitive responses to violations such as drug use behind bars — especially in facilities where treatment is practically nonexistent.
  • Improve fairness and accountability in disciplinary processes, starting with basic measures such as allowing people representation at hearings and the ability to gather and present evidence and witnesses.

“The disciplinary system behind bars is largely a mirror of the criminal legal system on the outside, with one crucial difference — departments of corrections can modify their systems at any time,” Nam-Sonenstein said. “Immediate action can — and should — be taken to stop people in prisons being thrown in solitary or having their release jeopardized because of a system that is so reactive to minor misbehavior, and often manufactures it out of whole cloth.”

The full report is available at https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/discipline.html. Additionally, the Prison Policy Initiative published a guide for reporters investigating disciplinary systems in their state’s prisons, available at https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2025/01/28/discipline-pressguide/.

We offer questions for jumpstarting your reporting, suggestions for finding data, advice for communicating with incarcerated sources, and more.

by Wanda Bertram, January 28, 2025

This week, we released Bad Behavior: How prison disciplinary policies manufacture misconduct, the first 50-state analysis of prison disciplinary systems published in decades. Here, we discuss how journalists can dig deeper into disciplinary policies — a topic that touches many other aspects of life behind bars.

As the report explains, prison misconduct rules cover a vast range of behavior, making these systems ripe for abuse by corrections staff. The four dozen incarcerated people we corresponded with in developing our report described frequent charges for vague offenses like “not standing for count”; harsher punishments for accused people when they attempted to defend themselves against charges; and hearing officers finding people guilty on scant evidence rather than going against the word of another officer.

Our report is a high-level overview of how disciplinary systems work. But for journalists, there is a lot more room to explore how these systems are enforced in practice and how incarcerated people are impacted by the sanctions that follow a guilty plea.

Reporting on disciplinary policies

If you’re interested in investigating the prison disciplinary system in your state, our collection of state disciplinary policy documents should help you get started. Our 2024 briefing on disciplinary fines — covering 16 states where we know those fines are being imposed — might also be useful. We also have more national statistics in our 2022 briefing on discipline.

A good place to start is finding out how many misconduct cases were processed in your state’s prison system in the last 1-2 years. (That will require a public records request, as we explain more below.) The following questions about disciplinary action could also jumpstart your reporting:

  • If your state DOC classifies different violations by severity, in how many recent cases was the most serious charge a minor or moderate one? (You may want to drill down on specific charges, and our report includes a table of common infractions.)
  • How many disciplinary cases processed in recent years resulted in someone being sent to solitary confinement? How many resulted in lost visitation or communication “privileges”?
  • How many days of good time were lost in recent years due to disciplinary action? (We suggest also asking what types of offenses are leading to people having time credits revoked.)
  • How do women, and racial minorities, experience disciplinary action differently? (For instance, our report shows that women are slightly more likely to be written up than men and much more likely to receive “minor” violations.)

In addition to the sanctions imposed when someone is found guilty, misconduct records also carry collateral consequences. You might want to ask these questions to get a better sense of the impact of disciplinary action:

  • Do misconduct records disqualify people in your state’s prisons from participating in any educational, job training, or behavioral programs?
  • What kinds of disciplinary offenses impact parole decisions in your state? Does the parole board ever consider minor violations enough to deny someone early release?
  • Does your state allow prisons to extend someone’s sentence past their original release date due to disciplinary infractions? (For example, in Wisconsin, being found guilty of infractions or being in solitary confinement can both lead to someone’s release being postponed.)

Talking to incarcerated people about disciplinary systems

Incarcerated people are essential sources for reporting on disciplinary policies, and are often eager to share their experiences and views. Be aware, though, that your sources are taking a risk in talking to you. (Ironically, unsanctioned communication with the media may be grounds for disciplinary charges.)

Anytime you’re working with incarcerated sources, setting clear expectations is key. Make sure to communicate the scope of your project and the terms of your conversations with your sources, as well as the risk of retaliation. Be clear about when you are planning to use their quotes and personal information in your story and make plans to protect their identities if necessary. For more guidance, read the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s guide to interviewing incarcerated people.

In talking to incarcerated sources about prison discipline, we suggest asking questions like:

  • Do you feel that the discipline system in your prison is effective at maintaining order and keeping people safe?
  • Are there any conduct rules (or categories of rules) that seem to be enforced more than others?
  • Are people accused of disciplinary infractions in your prison able to meaningfully defend themselves, such as by interviewing witnesses at hearings and presenting evidence?
  • How often are incarcerated people successful in defending themselves from disciplinary charges?
  • How would you change the system, if you could?

We urge journalists to only share biographical information about incarcerated people that pertains to the story. An incarcerated individual’s crime of conviction, for example, might be relevant insofar as it explains how long they have been behind bars. But being judicious about including biographical details will help you build trust with your sources.

Finding data on prison disciplinary systems

The bad news for journalists is that we don’t know how much data departments of corrections maintain about disciplinary action. The good news is that every disciplinary case — whether or not it goes to a hearing — begins with a write-up, and you can file public records requests for these reports and analyze them yourself if necessary.

screenshot of a typical discipline report, from the Arizona Department of Corrections

A sample disciplinary form.

In some states, the state government is supposed to conduct regular audits or analyses of prison disciplinary systems. The DOC’s official discipline policy should specify whether that is the case. If so, we recommend requesting any reports or audits of the disciplinary system from the last several years.

When requesting copies of actual disciplinary reports, you can ask the DOC to provide only reports from a certain time frame, where a certain charge was filed, where a certain type of penalty was imposed, and so on. If your investigation is looking at trends in prison discipline (rather than the treatment of a specific person), we suggest specifying in your records request that you are not seeking personally-identifiable information, and that the DOC can redact any details that could identify someone. This precaution can preempt records request denials based on privacy concerns.

For general advice on filing public records requests with criminal legal system agencies, check out our records request guide.

Using our report as a resource in other investigations

Disciplinary systems are relevant to many other aspects of the prison experience that journalists may find themselves reporting on. Our report may come in handy if you’re covering:

  • Solitary confinement. As our report notes, 35% of people who reported receiving disciplinary action in a sample year said they were put in solitary confinement as punishment. The section of our report about disciplinary processes dives into how people can end up saddled with punishments like this, with little or no opportunity to defend themselves against the charges.
  • Parole, “good time,” and other early release mechanisms. In nearly all states that use discretionary parole, release rates are declining. As news outlets like AL.com and Cleveland.com have reported, misconduct records play a significant role in release decisions. We also encourage reporters to dig deeper into how disciplinary action affects how much “good time” incarcerated people are able to accrue.
  • Protests and strikes in prison. Disciplinary codes punish several forms of dissent against prison conditions and rules, and in some states, dissenting behaviors like refusing to go to one’s prison job are treated as serious offenses. Our table of common disciplinary offenses helps explain how prison authorities can turn nonviolent protests into punishable infractions.
  • Prison programming. Reporters investigating the availability of educational, job training, or behavioral programs in prisons may want to find out whether misconduct records can exclude someone from participation. While we can’t say for sure, it’s possible that overactive disciplinary systems are effectively barring many people from rehabilitative programs — programs that can be a key part of securing early release.

Discipline systems are administrative processes in prisons that mimic criminal courts, and punishments for infractions are — in the words of corrections officials themselves — “the jail of the prison.” In other words, these systems are a black box within a larger, more well-known black box. Without investigative journalism, it is likely that these systems will remain largely obscure.

If you’re considering writing about prison discipline — or have any questions about our report or this guide — we encourage you to reach out to us through our contact page.

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