Mass incarceration is on the ballot

A guide to how 19 offices you may be asked to vote on can help end mass incarceration in America.

by Mike Wessler, September 11, 2024

Elected Offices

Local Offices

District Attorneys

Sheriffs

County Commissioners

Mayors and City Commissioners

City Auditors

Local Judges

Coroners

City Clerks

School Board Members

State Offices

Governors

Attorneys General

Secretaries of State

State Legislators

State Auditors

Utility Commissioners

Appellate Court Judges

Supreme Court Justices

Federal Offices

President

Members of Congress

Election Day is right around the corner. While presidential campaigns get most of the attention from the news media, many lesser-known down-ballot races can have a much more dramatic impact on criminal legal system reform in America.

For voters interested in ending mass incarceration, we’ve put together a guide to the most common offices for which they will cast their ballots this November. We also explore how those offices can make decisions to reduce the number of people behind bars, improve conditions in prisons and jails, and help turn the page on America’s failed experiment with mass incarceration.

It’s worth recognizing that there are significant differences in what an office might be called and its exact responsibilities from state to state and city to city, so readers should keep in mind that this might not be a perfect match for their area. Additionally, it would be impossible to list all of the complex and far-reaching ways some offices influence the criminal legal system. This guide focuses on the most common and consequential offices and responsibilities in this realm and is not intended to be all-encompassing. With this guide, we aimed to give people a starting point for their research to better understand the roles and powers of the offices they’ll be asked to vote for.

Readers should use this guide to evaluate their candidates for office, press them to take clear stands on how they’ll use their position to improve the criminal legal system if elected and hold them accountable for those commitments once they take office.

Local Offices

Most of the day-to-day interactions that people have with the criminal legal system involve local governments. Local governments are responsible for a wide swath of related activities, including policing and law enforcement, the prosecution of criminal laws, and conditions and policies at local jails.

District/County Attorneys

Because of their immense power, government prosecutors known as district attorneys (sometimes called county attorneys) loom large in any discussion about the criminal legal system and what can be done to reform it. And it is important to remember that the person who holds this office has immense discretion in how to use this power.

They oversee the vast majority of criminal cases in their jurisdiction. Not only do they determine which types of offenses to prioritize for prosecution, but in individual cases, they also determine whether to bring charges against someone and, if so, for what crime.

Additionally, while they don’t directly set bail conditions — judges generally do that — they usually recommend whether a person should be offered bail and, if so, whether they must pay money to go free before their trial. Their recommendations hold immense weight in these judicial decisions.

They also serve as gatekeepers to diversion programs. These programs allow people charged with crimes to resolve their cases without a criminal conviction and, in many cases, without incurring charges. The district/county attorney decides what those diversion programs look like, whom they are offered to, and what happens when someone completes it.

While this explanation covers the most prominent parts of the district attorney’s job, it is certainly not exhaustive. To learn more, we recommend reading Fair & Just Prosecution’s report, 21 Principles for the 21st Century Prosecutor, which goes into much greater detail.

Sheriffs

Sheriffs play many roles in the criminal legal system that can vary greatly from state to state and county to county. Generally speaking, though, their core responsibility is running the county jails, making them responsible for managing the conditions in which people are detained pretrial.¹ Importantly, in this role, they’re responsible for the health and safety of people who are in their custody, including what health services they have access to while incarcerated. Additionally, they enter into contracts with private companies that provide services, such as phone calls, commissary sales, and tablet computers. They decide what people detained in their jails are charged for these services.

Additionally, many sheriffs also conduct law enforcement activities and criminal investigations. This gives them wide latitude in determining who is arrested and for what offenses.

Finally, some sheriffs also oversee probation programs and officers. In this role, they have a huge impact on the lives of people on probation. They can prioritize the person’s successful completion of the program in a way that keeps them from being arrested or incarcerated again, or they can prioritize punishment by strictly enforcing arbitrary and often expensive conditions that set people up to fail.

County Commissioners

County commissioners² generally have two primary responsibilities when it comes to the criminal legal system.

First, they provide oversight of the county jail, including setting budgets and approving contracts for services. Notably, they are also often responsible for considering proposals for new jail construction. During debates about building a new jail or expanding an existing one, county commissioners have powerful leverage that they can and should use to ensure that prosecutors and law enforcement are doing everything they can to reduce the number of people stuck in jails unnecessarily.

Second, they allocate funding and, in some jurisdictions, provide oversight of the county sheriff’s department. This can influence the law enforcement presence in the community and the activities the department is tasked with prioritizing.

Mayors and City Commissioners

These offices are responsible for supervising the local police department. This includes determining its funding, providing some oversight of its activities, and selecting its chief. Through these choices, they determine the size, scope, and priorities of the police departments in their communities.

Additionally, they set funding levels for other community resources that can prevent law enforcement interactions in the first place. For example, they could direct funding to expand mental health services, drug treatment options, or pre-police diversion programs in their area.

City/County Auditors and Controllers

City and County Auditors do far more than just monitor the spending of agencies (although they can, in fact, do that). They also look at the overall performance of key departments. For example, they can look at how jails are administering their welfare funds, how police departments are responding to the needs of the communities, jail conditions, the administration of the county’s bail practices, how public housing and health care providers are delivering services, and much more. Through their work, auditors and controllers can act on behalf of residents of their community to provide much-needed transparency and ensure their government is properly and effectively serving them.

Local Judges (including Justices of the Peace)

Local judges play multiple roles in the criminal legal system. While they are intended to be unbiased arbiters between the prosecution and defense in criminal cases, their decisions can have a huge impact on whether a person is convicted and whether they serve time behind bars — both before and after a conviction. They preside over a person’s initial court appearance after their arrest, at which time they’ll determine whether they can be released from jail, whether they have to pay cash bail to be released, and if there are any other conditions of their release. They also oversee criminal proceedings in the courtroom when a person goes to trial. In this role, they participate in decisions around who is selected as jurors, what evidence can be admitted, how the trial is run, and determining their sentence (if convicted). Importantly, they also set conditions a person must abide by when they are on probation.

Coroners

When someone dies unexpectedly, coroners often conduct medical examinations to determine the person’s manner and cause of death. Their findings and reports are often pivotal in criminal investigations and hold immense weight in criminal trials. Coroners can help expose the truth in criminal cases. Conversely, though, their mistakes can also send people to prison for crimes they did not commit. Importantly, corners are also often responsible for investigating the deaths of incarcerated people.

City/County Clerks (sometimes known as Supervisor of Elections)

This office, which has many different names across the country, has a key interaction with the criminal legal system: jail voting. Most people in jails are still eligible to vote but are prevented from doing so by a complex set of barriers. This office can help clear those barriers. They can work with local jails to make it easier for people detained there to register to vote and cast their ballots. A growing number of places in the country have even established polling locations in jails to make it easier for incarcerated people to have their voices heard.

School Board Members

The intersection of education and incarceration is complex. In short, we know that people with lower educational attainment are more likely to be incarcerated. So, in essence, every choice school board members make can help reduce incarceration in the community in the long run.

There are additional — more direct — choices that school board members make related to the criminal legal system. The first is whether or not police have a presence in schools as school resource officers. Second, school boards also set disciplinary policies, many of which are directly linked to the “school-to-prison pipeline,” such as when a student is suspended or expelled and when law enforcement is called for disciplinary activities in the schools. Both of these choices can result in children being tangled in the criminal legal system at a young age. Finally, in some places, they also are responsible for ensuring students in the juvenile justice system have equitable access to quality education.

State Offices

State government looms large in the criminal legal system. Not only are state prisons the largest incarcerators in the country, locking up over 1 million people every day, but states also write and enforce the laws that most frequently result in people being locked up in the first place.

Governors

Governors lead their state’s government, so naturally, their power and responsibilities are far-reaching. However, there are several specific areas that have a particularly dramatic impact on the size, scope, and conditions of the criminal legal system in their state.

One of the most important things they do is appoint the head of their state’s Department of Corrections, which runs state prisons.³ This agency is responsible for the health and safety of people incarcerated, how those facilities operate on a day-to-day basis, and how much incarcerated people (and their families) pay for things like phone calls, commissary items, and more. It also shapes policies around the use of good time credits, parole, and compassionate release.

An underappreciated role of governors is appointing people to state boards and commissions. The people appointed to these bodies can have a huge influence on how state government runs, and their decisions often go unnoticed by the public and the media. Notably, in many states, governors appoint people to their state’s parole board, a body that determines whether people who have served time behind bars are released or not. Additionally, in states that have prison ombuds, the governor often appoints the person who serves in that position.

Similarly, governors have the power to issue pardons and commutations for people convicted of state crimes. These can result in a person being released from prison early or undoing some of the worst collateral consequences of their conviction. Unfortunately, though, governors have woefully underused this important power.

Finally, governors sometimes appoint state judges to the bench. We discuss the role of judges in other parts of this guide, but in general, they are responsible for presiding over criminal cases, including determining the sentence for people found guilty and, in some instances, determining whether laws passed by the state are unconstitutional.

Attorneys General

Attorneys General are often called the top law enforcement officer in the state, and for good reason. While the specific duties and responsibilities vary significantly from state to state, generally speaking, this office plays an oversight or coordinator role for county/district attorneys in their state, often helping to set standards for criminal prosecutions. In addition, they can investigate and prosecute some serious criminal cases on their own. If a person is convicted of a crime and appeals that conviction, this office generally argues against those appeals.

Importantly, this office also represents the state when it faces civil lawsuits. For example, if a family sued the state government over poor prison conditions, the attorney general would likely represent the state in that case.

An often overlooked responsibility of many attorneys general is enforcing their state’s public records law. Prisons, jails, and court systems routinely unfairly deny requests for public records that should legally be accessible. In many states, advocates and journalists who have had their requests denied can often ask the attorney general of their state to intervene and force the facilities to produce the records.⁴

Secretaries of State

Secretaries of State generally oversee elections in their state. In this role, they can take action to improve ballot access for people who are currently in jail (and, in a few states, for people in prison, too). A motivated secretary of state can prioritize voter registration in these facilities and proactively address problems people who are incarcerated may face when attempting to cast their ballot. Additionally, they often provide guidance to local election officials, which gives them the chance to further improve ballot access.

State Legislators

State legislators have one of the most important and often overlooked roles in the criminal legal system. It is not an exaggeration to say that the only constraints on their abilities are state and federal constitutions, money, and their imagination. Their primary responsibility is writing and passing laws. They determine what is a state crime, the punishment for those offenses, the conditions a person will face after they are released, and much more. State lawmakers have so much power, in fact, that we put out an annual report highlighting dozens of actionable steps they can take to reform the criminal legal system without making it bigger.

In addition to passing laws, state legislators are also responsible for developing a state government budget that allocates money to state prisons and many law enforcement agencies. Through this action, they can influence the size and number of prisons in their state, the conditions in those prisons, and the role of law enforcement in their communities.

Notably, state lawmakers also can serve on legislative oversight committees that review the activities of government agencies, including state prisons.

State Auditors and Comptrollers

While the exact responsibilities and titles differ significantly from state to state, state auditors and comptrollers are generally tasked with assessing how well state agencies are doing their jobs and spending money. This goes beyond simple accounting. They can look at any number of activities of their Department of Corrections or state law enforcement officials. For example, a 2020 audit by the Massachusetts State Auditor found the state’s Department of Corrections was not processing sick-call requests from incarcerated people as quickly as required and was not fulfilling its obligations to incarcerated people upon their release. Used correctly, these can be powerful offices for exposing the mistreatment of people in the criminal legal system and the mismanagement of public dollars.

Utility Commissioners

Utility Commissions are tasked with regulating the state’s utility companies, such as electric providers, phone companies, and similar businesses. While it may seem like this has little to do with prisons and jails, in some states, these officials have played a critical role in reducing phone rates behind bars. For example, changes made by the Iowa Utilities Board to jail phone rates saved the loved ones of incarcerated people roughly $1 million every year. While the Federal Communications Commission recently approved rules that will significantly reduce voice and video calling rates in prisons and jails, the work of Utilities Commissions is not done. They can still take action to address the rapidly expanding presence of tablets and other telecom services behind bars to ensure that incarcerated people are not taken advantage of.

Appellate Court Judges

After a person is convicted of a crime, they have a right to appeal their conviction. That’s where appellate court judges come in. They oversee these appeals to determine whether the trial was held in a manner that was fair and respected the constitutional rights of the person convicted of a crime. They have the power to affirm or overturn a person’s criminal conviction or sentence.

Supreme Court Justices

State supreme courts are generally considered the most powerful court in their state. If a person convicted of a crime is unsuccessful at appealing their case in front of the appellate court judge, they can ask the state supreme court to hear the case as well.

Additionally, these courts are tasked with assessing the constitutionality of laws and policies related to the criminal legal system. This can include a wide variety of issues, such as policing practices, prison and jail conditions, and whether state laws violate a person’s constitutional rights.

Federal Offices

The federal government’s role in mass incarceration is vast and complex. Even though the federal prison system holds only about one-quarter as many people as state prisons collectively do, the federal government is still responsible for 98 federal prisons and 142 immigration detention facilities. Also, through the Department of Justice, it oversees federal law enforcement and criminal prosecutions.⁵

President

Like governors, the ways the president can impact the criminal legal system are vast.

One of the most consequential decisions they make is who they appoint to be Attorney General of the United States. This person will oversee the Federal Department of Justice, which prosecutes all cases involving allegations of federal crimes. Similarly, the president appoints U.S. Attorneys who oversee those prosecutions. The Attorney General and U.S. Attorneys have considerable latitude on which cases to pursue, which crimes are prosecuted, and the desired punishment if a conviction is secured. Additionally, the Attorney General oversees the Bureau of Prisons (BOP), which operates all federal prisons. The BOP is responsible for a wide range of prison conditions, including the health and safety visitation policies and communication options for people incarcerated at its facilities.

Presidents are also responsible for signing (or vetoing) bills passed by Congress. And even before a bill makes it to their desk, they work with lawmakers to shape that legislation. These laws can have far-reaching effects, as we discuss below when talking about the responsibilities of members of Congress.

One of the president’s most long-lasting impacts comes through his or her appointments of federal judges, including U.S. Supreme Court Justices. In addition to hearing federal criminal cases, federal judges often also interpret laws to determine whether they violate the U.S. Constitution.

The president also appoints members to boards and commissions focused on a wide range of issues. For example, the president appoints commissioners to the Federal Communications Commission, which recently slashed calling rates in prisons and jails. The president also appoints members to the Federal Trade Commission, which oversees many consumer issues, including junk fees in prisons and jails. They also appoint members to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which has a hand in determining the severity of sentences for people convicted of federal crimes.

Finally, presidents have the power to issue pardons and commutations for people convicted of federal crimes. Unfortunately, though, they rarely use this power. Through these acts, the president can either reduce the sentence of someone convicted of a crime or undo some of the worst consequences of that conviction.

Members of Congress

Like state legislators, the principal responsibility of members of Congress is passing laws. Through these laws, they determine what actions are considered federal crimes and the potential sentences for people convicted of those crimes. They can also pass legislation to address issues related to prisons and jails at the federal, state, and local levels of government. For example, members of Congress have brought forward a bill to end prison gerrymandering nationwide.

The other principal responsibility of members of Congress is developing and passing a budget that determines how much money is allocated to federal agencies, including the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons. These budgets can have wide-ranging implications for the number of people incarcerated, the number and condition of prisons, and the availability of community-based services and health care.

Notably, members of the U.S. Senate are also responsible for considering and confirming many appointments made by the president — including the appointment of federal judges and the U.S. Attorney General. This allows them to affirm or deny whether a person has the experience, temperament, and priorities to serve in that position.

Making your voice heard

No single elected official built America’s broken system of mass incarceration. And no one officeholder can end it singlehandedly. Accomplishing that will require a wide focus on elected offices up and down the ballot.

This guide is not all-encompassing. America’s elections are diverse and complex, so it would be impossible to cover every office that influences the criminal legal system and every responsibility of those offices. Instead, as you prepare to head to the polls, we hope this guide helps you better understand how the offices you’ll be asked to vote for can use their power to reduce the number of people behind bars and improve conditions for those who remain incarcerated. After the election, we hope you’ll use it to hold those elected officials accountable, too.

With Election Day approaching, visit Vote.org to register to vote (or check your registration status) and make your plan to make your voice heard at the ballot box.

(Author’s note: We’d like to thank the team at Bolts Magazine for their insights as we put together their guide. Bolts is a nonprofit newsroom that covers issues related to elections and the criminal legal system.)

10 ways that mass incarceration is an engine of economic injustice

The fight for a fair economy and the movement against prisons are one and the same.

by Eric Seligman and Brian Nam-Sonenstein, August 27, 2024

Table of Contents

Mass incarceration traps low-income communities in poverty

#1: Sentencing poor people to deeper poverty

#2: Impoverishing the families and communities of incarcerated people

#3: Deepening poverty in rural prison towns

Mass incarceration weakens all workers

#4: Raising the stakes of unemployment for all workers

#5: Weakening formerly incarcerated workers — harming all workers

#6: Making it harder for all workers to unionize

Mass incarceration undermines movements for economic justice

#7: Suppressing political engagement and representation

#8: Weakening unions, removing a key player in movements for economic justice

#9: Inflaming social tensions that undermine worker solidarity

#10: Hiding economic injustice, making it harder to organize against

Money is power in the United States, and mass incarceration plays a major role in determining who can wield power and who can’t. As we’ve noted repeatedly over the years, it is no coincidence that the poorest and most vulnerable communities are also the most policed. The criminal legal system erects significant barriers to employment and the ballot box, economically and politically weakening entire communities. Importantly, this arrangement impacts all workers: employers use this massive class of disadvantaged people to threaten all workers with replacement and increasingly risky unemployment if they dare to demand better wages and conditions. Mass incarceration also weaves a narrative that pits people with similar economic interests against one another, reducing systemic inequality to matters of individual choice. Fortunately, understanding mass incarceration as the wealthy’s preferred economic policy clarifies that ending it is necessary for all movements for justice and equality — all working people benefit from solidarity with criminalized people.

In this briefing, we compile ten examples of how mass incarceration blocks progress toward economic justice. We argue that our massive system of criminalization is not an isolated issue, nor is it someone else’s problem; it is an engine of inequality that traps people in poverty, weakens worker power, and undermines political organizing toward a more prosperous future for the vast majority of people.

Mass incarceration traps low-income communities in poverty

First, it’s important to understand how incarceration makes and maintains poverty. Criminalizing the poorest people, saddling them with debt, and destroying their financial futures has grave consequences for their families and wider communities. Additionally, prisons are economically depressing for the poor rural towns that host them, leaving them in financial ruin for years to come. It turns out that struggling urban and rural communities have a shared interest in ending our country’s reliance on prisons to address poverty and unemployment.

#1: Incarceration sentences poor people to deeper poverty

As the saying goes, it’s expensive to be poor, and in the U.S. the criminal legal system makes this emphatically so. At every stage of the criminal legal process — from pretrial detention, to incarceration, to reentry — already-poor people are faced with ever-harsher conditions of poverty.

Poverty traps people in jail. About 83% of people in local jails are legally innocent and awaiting trial, and many of them are too poor to make bail.¹ At the same time, jail traps people in poverty: it prevents people from working and immediately increases the chances they’ll be fired, leading to long-term job instability and lost government benefits. People in jail must also pay high prices for phone calls, medical fees or “copays,” and essential goods purchased in the commissary.² Even those who are released pretrial can still take a big financial hit when they’re forced to make nonrefundable payments to bail bond companies and pay expensive user fees for pretrial electronic monitoring.

In prison, periods of employment³ are replaced with low-wage prison labor⁴ — wages that are quickly consumed by expensive communications, medical care, and commissary goods, not to mention fines for alleged misconduct in many states. Release and reentry provide little reprieve, as people on post-release supervision (who are disproportionately poor⁵ to begin with) are forced to pay monthly fees for things like regular urinalysis tests, electronic monitoring devices, mandatory programs, and more for years on end.⁶

#2: Incarceration impoverishes the families and communities of incarcerated people

Families of incarcerated people lose household income and assume astronomical new expenses related to supporting a loved one on the inside. It bears repeating that these families are often already struggling with poverty,⁷ and prison makes their survival significantly harder. According to a survey by the Ella Baker Center, roughly 65% of families with a loved one in prison were unable to meet their basic needs because court-related fines and fees sent them into debt over $13,000 on average. In particular, 58% of families living in poverty were unable to afford the costs associated with a conviction. Meanwhile, an estimated 1 in 3 families went into debt because of communication and visitation costs alone. Women were most often responsible for covering these costs: another survey conducted by the Essie Justice Group found that 35% of women experienced homelessness, eviction, or struggled to make rent or mortgage payments as a result of bail, court fees, and lost economic opportunities. Incarceration cost one-third of women their household’s primary source of income, and 43% were forced to work more hours, get a different job, or turn down an educational opportunity as a result.

These harms spill over into the larger community. Lost wages and barriers to employment among the formerly incarcerated reduce their purchasing power, which in turn deflates demand for local goods and services. As a result, local businesses can’t afford to hire as many people, exacerbating unemployment for those returning there from prison and the broader community. The high concentration of policing and incarceration in poor communities creates a feedback loop of economic consequences, creating and worsening poverty at the very same time.

#3: Prisons don’t fix rural poverty — they deepen it

Towns suffering from unemployment and deindustrialization, especially rural communities, are often sold the idea that prisons can help turn things around.⁸ But this story could not be further from the truth: prisons actually deepen poverty in the communities where they are built — and, they deepen poverty the most in the towns that are the most impoverished to begin with. Rather than create local jobs, most openings are filled by senior corrections workers⁹ from other areas. In fact, local workers are often rejected from these jobs because of symptoms of local poverty: bad credit histories, low levels of education, criminal records, drug use, age, and even a lack of prior experience puts locals at a disadvantage compared to those from other areas. There are decades of examples of this dynamic at work:

• After California’s state prison in Corcoran was built in 1988, fewer than 10% of the jobs went to local residents.¹⁰
• Residents of Malone, New York were promised 750 jobs when a state prison opened there in 1999, but those jobs went mostly to people from outside of the town because of prison system seniority rules.¹¹
• When a federal prison opened in McCreary County, Kentucky in 2003, only an estimated 10% of the new jobs were filled by local residents, amounting to about 30 jobs total.¹²
• Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s 2007 study of California’s prison boom reported that under 20% of jobs from new state prisons went to local residents on average.

Additionally, using prisons to chase community investment is often a race to the bottom. In fact, new prisons can discourage investment in several important ways:

• Many businesses avoid new prison towns because they tend to lack local amenities and fear the incoming criminalized population.
• Communities spend tons of money to convince, for example, the federal government to site a prison in their locality. They offer steep discounts on land and resources with the hope of making the money back in the future. Instead, rents and land values eventually plummet when the promised economic boom never arrives, devastating home values.¹³
• Prisons attract large chain stores that strategically site themselves nearby, driving out the smaller local businesses that provide similar goods and services. While the profits for smaller local businesses reliably circulate within the community, the profits for chain stores are largely distributed throughout their operations elsewhere.¹⁴
• Prisons are a blight on the environment. Their construction destroys local habitats, they’re often built on dangerously polluted land, and, once built, they generate significant waste that is expensive to remediate.¹⁵

Mass incarceration weakens all workers

One of the ways that mass incarceration traps people in poverty is by raising the stakes of unemployment for all workers, creating immense obstacles to organizing for better terms of employment. Rather than alleviate poverty through jobs, housing, education, and healthcare, the U.S. uses criminalization to force people to comply with a deeply unequal economy.

#4: Mass incarceration raises the stakes of unemployment for all workers

Mass incarceration emerged as the U.S. economy grew more unequal and work became more precarious: In 1973, the wealthiest 10% of Americans captured one-third of all income, but nearly 40 years later they had captured one-half of it. In that time, the ultra-rich top 1% went from holding 9% of all income to nearly a quarter of it. Meanwhile, at least 17% of workers toiled under unstable work schedules in 2015.¹⁶ The growth of the criminal legal system, combined with rising inequality and the demise of the social safety net, has made unemployment riskier and weakened workers’ bargaining position. If losing your job means you’ll receive meaningful financial support before your next job, you’ll be more likely to risk retaliation from an angry employer to demand higher wages and better conditions. If losing your job may lead to an indefinite period of austerity, stress, and surveillance that could end in arrest and incarceration, you’ll be less likely to risk making such demands. In a recent study of labor markets in high-incarceration communities, Adam Reich and Seth J. Prins find that the more incarceration there is in a community, the less likely people are to risk their jobs demanding better terms of work, regardless of prior experiences with incarceration. In other words, in neighborhoods where incarceration is more common, workers — formerly incarcerated or not — are more inclined to play it safe at work than risk unemployment and incarceration.

The U.S. incarceration rate has closely tracked the rise in the share of national income held by the wealthiest 1% of Americans. For most of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, the top 1% held about 10% of the total national income while the U.S. imprisoned about 100 people per 100,000. By the 2000s, the share held by the top 1% had doubled to around 20% while the incarceration rate grew to five times the historical norm.

#5: Suppressing the wages of formerly incarcerated people harms all low-wage workers

As mass incarceration restricts job opportunities for formerly incarcerated people, it creates a feedback loop that suppresses wages for everyone. Here’s how it works: limited job options threaten formerly incarcerated workers with deeper poverty, criminalization, and re-incarceration, and makes them especially dependent on those few employers who are willing to hire them. As a result, they are compelled to accept nearly whatever wages or conditions are offered to them. Employers can then use this group of precarious workers to threaten others with replacement if they dare to demand higher wages and better conditions. Among the more than 50,000 people released from federal prisons in 2010, a staggering 33% found no employment at all over four years post-release and no more than 40% were employed at any given time. Successfully landing a job also had limited benefits: formerly incarcerated workers averaged 3.4 jobs between 2010 and 2014 — in other words, they secured jobs that didn’t offer security or upward mobility. These jobs tended to be the lowest-paying positions. An analysis of IRS data by the Brookings Institution found most employed people recently released from prison receive an income well below the poverty line. Everyone suffers when employers can readily threaten to fire a worker and hire from the highly vulnerable formerly incarcerated pool, forcing everyone to accept less money and worse treatment.

Incarceration erodes a worker’s ability to quit — an important measure of worker power. Additionally, formerly incarcerated workers have lost their say in which jobs they accept: while “before prison” workers can exhibit a preference for more satisfying jobs, “after prison” workers have to accept high- and low-satisfaction jobs at similar rates.

#6: Mass incarceration makes it harder for all workers to unionize

Higher unionization rates lead to higher wages throughout the economy because, in places where businesses have unionized, other employers must pay more to compete for local workers. Unions are also an equalizing force, reducing racial and gender economic disparity and increasing political participation. Mass incarceration undermines these benefits by preventing workers from leveraging their collective power through unions or other worker associations that can more safely and effectively make demands of employers. Reich and Prins’s 2020 study offers the first large-scale documentation of this effect: they found individuals with a history of incarceration were 85% less likely to join the OUR Walmart workers association. They also discovered people who had experienced any contact with the criminal legal system (including felony convictions, probation or parole, or incarceration) were 76% less likely to join the organization. According to their analysis, as prison admissions rose, the odds of signing an OUR Walmart membership card fell.. Union approval elections were also less likely to succeed in communities with higher incarceration rates regardless of whether the workers involved in that particular election had been previously incarcerated. The chilling effect of mass incarceration on labor organizing pervades throughout the entire low-wage labor market, affecting all workers. Beyond the increased risk associated with losing one’s job, there are likely other reasons for this dynamic, such as incarceration’s suppressing effect on the community networks and institutions where labor organizing often takes place.

Mass incarceration weakens political movements for economic justice

Finally, mass incarceration’s coercive power, rooted in its ability to exclude and impoverish, seriously undermines political movements for the rights of the most marginalized, who have the most at stake in economic reform. By reframing systemic inequalities as individual failures and criminality, the narratives built around prisons stoke the flames of racism and pit people with similar economic interests against one another. In this environment, our weakened political movements cannot win or maintain the social programs that would help nearly all of us, and that the vast majority of people want.

#7: Mass incarceration is anti-democratic, suppressing political engagement and representation

Disenfranchisement laws prevent people who have the most intimate understanding of poverty in the U.S. — and the most at stake in economic reform — from participating in elections. According to the Sentencing Project, as of 2020, an estimated 5.17 million people — 1 out of every 44 adults in the entire eligible voting population — lost their right to vote due to a felony conviction. Prison gerrymandering also disempowers the communities from which people are incarcerated: by counting incarcerated people where they’re imprisoned instead of where they’re from, the Census Bureau dramatically distorts political representation at the state and local level, and paints an inaccurate picture of community populations for research and planning purposes.

Incarcerated people and their communities are also shunned from the political process in ways beyond legal disenfranchisement. The many stresses of returning from prison lead many individuals — and entire high-incarceration communities — to significantly retreat from formal politics and from the more informal processes of shaping the institutions that structure their lives. According to a 2010 study by scholars Vesla Weaver and Amy Lerman, contact with the criminal legal system is strongly and consistently associated with declining trust in government and a reduction in one’s likelihood of voting, even when the sample is restricted to those who have not been legally disenfranchised. Other research confirms this effect encourages not just individual disengagement from politics but the withdrawal of entire communities from politics and more informal forms of neighborhood involvement.

#8: Mass incarceration weakens labor unions, removing a key player in broader movements for economic justice

Organized labor has traditionally been a key player in movements for just economic policies. Beyond providing a gateway for members to build confidence in the possibility of organizing around shared interests to change policy, unions have often provided the actual institutional structure that organizes the public for economic justice. According to a 2021 study from the Economic Policy Institute, the 17 states with the highest union densities have, on average:

• State minimum wages that are 19% higher than the national average — 40% higher than low-union-density states,
• Median annual incomes $6,000 higher than the national average,
• A higher share of unemployed workers receiving unemployment insurance,
• An uninsured population 4.5 percentage points lower than that of low-union-density states,
• A higher likelihood of passing paid sick leave laws and paid family and medical leave laws than states with lower union densities, and
• Significantly fewer restrictive voting laws.

Police and corrections officers provide stark examples of how powerful organized workers can be, though these unions’ relationship with the criminal legal system tends to lead to positions that do not serve the interest of all workers. In some states, law enforcement organizations play a very significant role in electoral politics, often as main contributors to major campaigns. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, for example, has contributed more than $9.3 million to political campaigns in the last 20 years — $3.8 million of which was spent across 32 state legislative races since the year 2000 alone. Over the past year, the California guards union negotiated a $1 billion raise over three years and got a new, additional state-funded retirement perk. In addition to pushing legislation directly responsible for expanding California’s prison system, the organization bankrolled particular victims rights groups that have helped stoke fears of criminalized people. Imagine if those sectors of the workforce that articulate more progressive policies for economic justice were as organized and politically active as the California prison workers union. By making it harder for most workers to unionize — while also empowering those segments of labor with a vested interest in the criminal legal system — mass incarceration removes a key player from political movements for economic justice.¹⁷

#9: Mass incarceration inflames social tensions that undermine worker solidarity

Throughout U.S. history, racism has prevented the development of a fully united movement for workers rights. Mass incarceration has continued this tradition by reinforcing divisions that obscure a shared interest in policy reforms. Prisons are home to racially disproportionate outcomes and a heated debate about their causes¹⁸ that plays out in media, exacerbating racism in society. Labor market research that finds that employers more frequently assume criminality in Black job applicants, whether they have a criminal record or not, exemplifies how mass incarceration influences society’s ideas and relationships around race in the workplace. Relatedly, the monumental scale of punishment in the U.S. leads to a hardening of ideas about workers who are “law-abiding” and those who are not, creating deep cultural rifts that leave less room for organizing around common grievances. While many workers and incarcerated people often share very similar needs for economic reform — like more affordable housing, education, or healthcare — the strength of their divisions along the lines of “criminality” tend to overpower the possibility of solidarity around shared needs.

#10: Mass incarceration hides economic injustice, making it harder to organize against

While mass incarceration creates some very visible economic injustices, others remain hidden, and when the public can’t readily see injustice or accurately pinpoint its source, it is harder to organize people against it. For example, mass incarceration artificially lowers official unemployment rates as incarcerated people go uncounted. Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett show that, in the 1990s, mass incarceration lowered the unemployment rate for Black men by 7 full percentage points. The ’90s are generally celebrated as a booming time for the U.S. economy with increasing employment opportunities for people of color. However, if incarcerated people were included in these statistics, the jobless rate for Black men would have stayed at an appalling 40% between the official unemployment peak in the early 1980s and the “inclusive” mid-1990s. Furthermore, if these figures and economic policy targets were recalculated to include the prison population, it would be even clearer just how little our society spends on social programs to address dire economic problems.

Beyond statistical misrepresentation, mass incarceration also gives rise to narratives that displace blame for criminalized poverty entirely onto the individual. Despite the vast amount of research on the role of economic conditions in causing crime, criminal legal proceedings present many symptoms of poverty, unemployment, and homelessness not as economic problems to be alleviated through systemic policy changes, but as personal failings that must be forcefully punished. This “individualization” of structural problems is also very clear in reentry. One can only counsel so many exceptionally persistent formerly incarcerated job applicants — who are indeed more “active” in the labor market than their general population peers¹⁹ — on how to beat out other workers before it becomes clear that the lack of economic opportunities that would allow them (and all workers) to meaningfully support themselves is really to blame. Bruce Western’s Homeward and Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore’s “Carceral Chicago” are full of painful stories of individuals stuck in these situations, making heroic individual efforts amid a scarcity of opportunities. In this situation, a certain percentage of people are guaranteed to end up unemployed, and demanding fiercer competition among them will not change this fact. It will, however, continue the pattern of filling prisons by blaming individuals for structural economic problems.

Conclusion

As these ten points show, mass incarceration is a major obstacle to movements for economic justice. The vast majority of people in the United States have a stake in dismantling this engine of inequality, which not only impoverishes people but traps the poorest communities in poverty. Through a combination of financial sanctions and legal disenfranchisement, criminalized people, their families, their communities, and eventually all low-wage workers become economically and politically disadvantaged. Mass incarceration presents a looming threat that deters all workers from risking unemployment by demanding better wages and working conditions, undermining both individual bargaining power and union organizing. Broader movements for economic justice suffer from the loss of unions as important incubators for political organizing, and people become discouraged from engaging in political participation altogether. Rather than address structural conditions by investing in what most people need — which the nation has the resources to do — the United States has chosen to blame and punish the individuals who are most harmed by them. As a result, mass incarceration stokes racism and pits people with similar economic interests against one another. In the end, these facts make clear that movements to end inequality and mass criminalization are in fact one and the same, and solidarity between all workers — criminalized or not — is necessary to progress toward a more economically just future.

Two years after the end of Roe v. Wade, most women on probation and parole have to ask permission to travel for abortion care

Since the 2022 Dobbs decision, 21 states have restricted abortions earlier than the Roe v. Wade standard. Now, more of the 800,000 women on probation and parole must seek abortion care out-of-state — but for many, whether they can get there depends on an officer’s decision.

by Wendy Sawyer, June 18, 2024

June 24 marks two years since the Supreme Court stripped Americans of their constitutional right to abortion. The court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization permitted state governments to limit and even ban abortion care — and they did. As a result, the share of patients who cross state lines for abortion care has almost doubled, from about 1 in 10 to almost 1 in 5. Traveling out-of-state for health care, including abortions, is a hardship for anyone, but it is especially challenging for people on probation or parole.

According to The New York Times, since the Dobbs decision, 21 states have implemented abortion rules more restrictive than the standard under Roe v. Wade.¹ Fourteen states now ban abortion altogether, and most other states ban abortion after a certain point in pregnancy. And while some of these less-restrictive bans preserve abortion as an option for most people who need one, these bans are nonetheless as obstructive for people who need abortion care after their state’s time limit.² In all, 41 states have some kind of abortion ban in place post-Dobbs, whether “total bans” or bans based on gestational duration.³ In every one of these states, standard conditions⁴ of probation and/or parole require permission to travel out of state, county, or another specified area.⁵

To understand how this post-Dobbs landscape impacts women under the U.S.’ massive system of community supervision, we examined standard supervision conditions in each state, along with the number of women who must comply with them. We find that the one-two punch of abortion and supervision restrictions impacts an estimated 4 out of 5 women⁶ (82%) on probation or parole nationwide.⁷ That means that for the vast majority of people under community supervision, the ability to seek abortion care out-of-state is left not to the pregnant person, but to the discretion of a correctional authority, typically their probation or parole officer.

Specifically, we find that, excluding federal probation and post-release supervision,⁸ 82% of women on probation and 85% of women on parole live in states that (1) either completely ban abortion or restrict it based on gestational age and (2) list travel restrictions as a standard condition of supervision.

Every state and D.C. restrict the movement of people on probation or parole
For our analysis, we first looked at rules related to travel in the standard conditions of probation and parole in each state and D.C. (These are summarized in the table below.) We find that probation agencies in all but two states (Ala. and Iowa) generally require permission to leave the state, county, or other designated area. Four of these states empower the court or probation officer to set the boundaries for travel restrictions on an individual basis.⁹ Rules restricting interstate travel are just as common in the context of parole and post-release supervision: 40 states have a standard condition requiring permission to leave the state. Among the states that do not, five (Ark., Iowa, Mont., N.M., and Pa.) require permission to leave an even smaller area — the county or district.¹⁰ West Virginia and D.C. require permission to travel, but individualize the specific geographic boundaries in the supervision contract.

Excluding federal supervised populations, the vast majority of women on probation (98% or 672,000) and parole (96% or 60,000) live in states where their standard supervision conditions require permission to leave the state, if not an even smaller geographic area. Every single state and D.C. require permission to travel for either their probation or parole population — and almost all require permission for both.

It’s important to note that “standard conditions” are just part of the picture of probation and parole conditions, because courts can — and very frequently do — impose any number of additional “special conditions.”¹¹ So even if travel restrictions are not included in the standard conditions that apply to everyone on probation or parole, they may still be imposed at the discretion of the court or community supervision agency.

Limited abortion care options are made worse by these standard conditions

We next looked at each state’s abortion bans and restrictions alongside their standard conditions of probation and parole. This analysis gets to how quickly state laws foreclose the possibility of in-state abortion care for women under either form of community supervision, forcing them to request permission to seek care in another state instead.¹² We find that the much tighter restrictions imposed by states since the Dobbs decision put over 400,000 more women in this precarious position than there were under the protections of Roe v. Wade. Alarmingly, we find that only 1 in 6 women on probation or parole can access abortion care at any stage of their pregnancy without needing permission to cross state lines.

Delving deeper, our analysis shows that, excluding federally supervised populations:

• Over half (53%) of women on probation and parole live in the 21 states that the Times identified as banning abortion care at an earlier point than the standard set by Roe v. Wade (i.e., the highly variable point of “fetal viability”). Less than 3% of these women are able to travel across state lines without permission.
• Nearly one-third (31%) of all women on probation and parole live in states that now have a total abortion ban. Of these, just 4% have no standard condition restricting travel.
• Another 17% of women on community supervision live in states that ban abortions at six weeks — a point at which more than 1 in 4 women are not yet aware of their pregnancy.
• Only 16% live in places without abortion bans and can access abortion care at any gestational point without crossing state lines.

Importantly, even when parole or probation authorities approve interstate travel, the process of getting a “travel permit” takes time and logistical coordination — and sometimes even fees.¹³¹⁴ This necessarily delays abortion care, increasing the risk of complications and often further limiting access.¹⁵ For example, a woman on probation in South Carolina who only becomes aware of her pregnancy when she’s eight weeks along will have to travel out-of-state for an abortion. But if it takes two weeks for her to get permission to travel, a non-surgical abortion is likely no longer an option, as the necessary medications are only approved for use until 10 weeks’ gestation.

A travel restriction is just one of many barriers to healthcare for people on probation and parole

Interstate travel restrictions are just one of the barriers women — or for that matter, everyone on probation and parole — face when it comes to accessing health care. As we’ve already touched upon, some standard conditions restrict travel across much smaller areas, such as counties or court districts. Similarly, people on electronic monitoring — an increasingly common condition of community supervision that amounts to a form of “e-carceration” — are regularly blocked from leaving their home, workplace, or other approved locations. As we have explained before, people on electronic monitoring often report being denied permission to see a doctor or go to the pharmacy to have prescriptions filled.

Even in the few places that don’t impose restrictions on movement, financial costs often put healthcare out of reach for people on probation and parole. As we’ve found in previous research, people on community supervision tend to have lower incomes, with about 60% reporting annual incomes below $20,000. About 25% don’t have health insurance to cover the cost of even basic care — despite reporting worse overall health and greater levels of need.¹⁶ Probation and parole conditions often come with additional expenses as well, such as monthly fees and the costs of drug testing or electronic monitoring devices, which leave even less money for healthcare.

Finally, for women on probation and parole who need abortion care, there is a special risk of further criminalization, either for violating the conditions of their supervision or for the abortion itself. A recent law review article details the various laws used historically and currently to criminalize abortion seekers and providers, paying special attention to laws targeting people who choose “self-managed abortions” when they are unable to access care from the formal healthcare system. A report by researchers at If/When/How describes 61 cases, across 26 states, in which people were investigated or arrested for allegedly ending their own pregnancy or helping someone else end theirs. All were from 2000-2020 — in other words, pre-Dobbs. Efforts to criminalize abortion have only gained momentum since.

Conclusions

Ultimately, Dobbs not only made abortion care much less accessible for everyone who may become pregnant; it created new risks of criminalization as well. For people under supervision, those risks are intensified by the travel restrictions found in standard conditions across the country. As the Community Justice Exchange and Repro Legal Defense Fund explain in their organizing guide, “In states where clinical abortion is banned or inaccessible … [self-managed abortion] will likely be the abortion option most accessible to people under carceral surveillance, putting them at a risk for criminalization that people who can travel freely do not face.”

For this reason (among others), state legislators, courts, and community supervision agencies should minimize the number and restrictiveness of standard conditions imposed on everyone on probation and parole — and greatly reduce the use of these massive supervision programs in general. Courts should limit who they place on supervision, individualize supervision conditions, and apply those conditions only for as long as necessary to achieve results. This approach is far more likely to set people up for success than relying on restrictive, one-size-fits-all rules that only act as tripwires to further criminalization and punishment.

Certainly, whether it’s appropriate to restrict someone’s movement is among the most situation-dependent decisions supervision authorities can make, whether for work, family, religious, educational, or — as we’ve discussed here — health reasons. Restricting where people can go inevitably blocks many from accessing the resources they need, which in turn creates health and safety risks for both individuals and communities. These very real and life-threatening consequences must be taken into account and not discounted simply because of a criminal legal status.

Author’s note: Amelia Wittig and Emily Widra provided the foundational research for our analysis of standard probation conditions by collecting and categorizing the relevant forms, web pages, and statutes that stated whether travel restrictions apply to everyone on probation. These sources are on file with the author. As part of a forthcoming report on probation conditions more broadly, we plan to upload the publicly-accessible documents and those we were given permission to share, and to provide a summary table with links in our Data Toolbox.

Donald Trump can still be president, but he could be barred from being a bartender, car salesman — or real estate developer

The former president’s conviction spotlights how state policies make it hard for people with felony convictions to find good jobs.

by Brian Nam-Sonenstein, June 5, 2024

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Last week, former President Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in New York — becoming the first former (and perhaps future) president to be convicted of a felony. While the conviction will not prevent him from pursuing the presidency, he nonetheless joins over 19 million people in America with felony convictions. Unlike the vast majority of people with this status, Trump’s immense wealth and power will likely insulate him from the struggles most will face in securing much less prestigious jobs. That’s because many states permit if not outright facilitate bias against hiring people with records — especially roles that require professional licenses.

Criminal records lock people out of the job market, making everyone less safe

Most people who have criminal records are not billionaire reality TV stars or real estate moguls with wealth and connections to fall back on. For them, getting a job is a matter of survival, and having a record greatly diminishes their chances of success. That’s because a variety of policies across the country effectively disqualify and deter people with records from obtaining employment.

This dynamic traps people in a vicious cycle of poverty and policing that makes everyone less safe in the end. Nearly four out of every 10 people in state prison — most of whom had past convictions — were jobless in the month leading up to their arrest. Black people (46%) and women (53%) in state prisons were especially unlikely to have been employed during that time. Meanwhile, more than 600,000 people return to their communities from prison each year and struggle to secure employment, housing, healthcare, and care for children in large part due to restrictions imposed on those with criminal records. Even though people in this situation are more likely to be actively seeking jobs than the general public, they are far more likely to be rejected by employers and report unemployment at a rate five times higher than the general public. These differences are rooted in discriminatory policy choices, not individual aspirations or capabilities.

Even when people in these circumstances do find work, they are often relegated to the most insecure and low-paying positions. Licensed occupations can provide a path to better job security, but that option is foreclosed by counterproductive policies such as these.

State laws ban people with felony convictions from holding many jobs

State laws and policies give employers ample opportunities to reject potential workers simply on the basis of their having been convicted of a crime. Though explicit employment bans that prohibit hiring from these populations have been modified in some states in recent years thanks to tireless advocacy, decision-makers in most places still enjoy wide discretion to exclude people from certain kinds of work on these grounds.

This is especially true for occupations that require professional licensing, such as bartenders, exterminators, healthcare workers, and car salesmen. People who want to work in real estate — either as agents or developers — are often required to submit to criminal background checks as part of the licensing process, too. Though these bans most frequently target people who are convicted of felonies in particular, certain misdemeanors can also preemptively disqualify people as well.

Whether explicit or discretionary, occupational licensing restrictions for people with felonies on their records are widespread. Just a few examples include:

• Pest control in North Carolina: No one can be issued an ID or work as an estimator, serviceman, salesman, solicitor, or an agent for any licensee if they have been convicted of a felony within three years of their application.
• Car sales in Mississippi: People who want to sell cars must have “good moral character, honesty,” and “high ethical standards” — qualities that are “presumptively” not met if they were, among other things, convicted of a felony or certain misdemeanors.
• Bartending in Florida: Licensed bars cannot employ anyone as a manager, person in charge, or bartender who has been convicted of a felony anywhere in the U.S. in the past 5 years.
• Any health professional in Virginia: Previously licensed healthcare workers face mandatory license suspensions if convicted of a felony. This includes early-career positions like certified nursing assistants, veterinary technicians, and peer recovery specialists. Nurses, in particular, could be prevented from receiving licenses or certifications for any felony or misdemeanor involving “moral turpitude.”
• Firefighters in Florida: Firefighters must not have been convicted of certain misdemeanors, a felony, or any crime punishable by at least one year of imprisonment.

Even indirect employment bans have devastating effects

Even when jurisdictions do not explicitly ban people with felony convictions from obtaining occupational licenses, they typically give licensing agencies so much discretion that they can deter potential job-seekers with records from applying. If you have a record but want to work as a plumber’s apprentice in Texas, you have to fill out an additional extensive “Supplemental Criminal History Information” form. In New York, meanwhile, people with criminal records are not explicitly banned from working in the real estate profession, but they are not entitled to receive real estate licenses without the express permission from the Secretary of State, either. Hurdles such as these are enough to keep most people from applying in the first place.

In other places, discretionary bans are designed to target people who have felony convictions that are “directly related” to the work they would be doing. In Texas, for example, Trump’s convictions for falsifying business records could easily be construed as grounds to deny him a license to handle insurance, taxes, or (as he loves to do) hiring and firing people as an employee for a professional employer organization.

Conclusion

It’s important to reiterate that most people with criminal records have to navigate these challenges with far fewer resources and connections, and far less power, than Donald Trump. Though he officially has a felony record, he will not encounter the majority of these barriers to making money, let alone surviving. In the coming months, we will likely see clear examples of how rich and powerful people like Trump are insulated from the consequences of a criminal record that millions of the most vulnerable people in society — typically the primary targets of the criminal legal system — are forced to endure each day. This will ultimately not be a lesson in equality in justice, but a reminder of the freedom from punishment that people in Trump’s position enjoy even in the rare instances that they are convicted of their crimes.

That being said, the lesson we take from Trump’s conviction should not be that the system needs to get tougher. In fact, the opposite is true: the fact that such employment policies are counterproductive to basic safety interests and are so unequally applied are strong reasons to lower barriers to work for the average person with a criminal record — not erect new ones. At the very least, anyone who believes that a felony conviction shouldn’t disqualify someone from the most powerful office on the planet must also agree that it makes no sense to prohibit others with felony convictions from serving in more ordinary roles as plumbers, pest control workers, and bartenders. Fortunately, there are plenty of measures states can take to make life easier for people with criminal records:

1. Enact occupational licensing reform: States should reform their licensing practices to eliminate the automatic rejection of people with felony convictions.
2. Ban blanketed employer discrimination: Criminal records are not good proxies for employability. Additionally, because of racially disproportionate incarceration rates, organizations who discriminate against people with criminal records may also be contributing to racial discrimination and are therefore subject to litigation under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
3. Implement automatic record expungement procedures: Having an automatic mechanism for criminal record expungement that takes into account the offense type and length of time since sentencing would, in the near term, help formerly incarcerated people succeed and would, in the long term, promote public safety.
4. Issue a temporary basic income upon release: Providing short-term financial stability for formerly incarcerated people would operate as an investment, helping to ease reintegration and provide public safety and recidivism reduction benefits that would result in long-term cost savings.
5. Make bond insurance and tax benefits for employers widely available: Some governmental bodies offer insurance and tax incentives for employers who hire people with criminal records, protecting against real or perceived risks of loss. Increasing the availability of such programs would provide hesitant employers with added financial security.

For more information about the kinds of policies that prevent people with criminal records from obtaining occupational licenses, the various collateral consequences of those policies, and state-by-state comparisons, the following organizations offer excellent resources:

• CSG Justice Center: Fair Chance Licensing Project: States Expand Access to In-Demand Jobs
• The National Reentry Resource Center: National Inventory of Collateral Consequences of Criminal Conviction
• The Rights Restoration Project: Advancing Second Chances: Clean Slate and Other Record Reforms in 2023

New data and visualizations spotlight states’ reliance on excessive jailing

We've updated the data tables and graphics from our 2017 report to show just how little has changed in our nation's overuse of jails: too many people are locked up in jails, most detained pretrial and many of them are not even under local jurisdiction.

by Emily Widra, April 15, 2024

Table of Contents

Warehousing effect

Renting jail space

COVID’s Impact

Recommendations

State-specific graphics

Methodology

Data appendices

Footnotes

One out of every three people behind bars is being held in a local jail, yet jails get almost none of the attention that prisons do. In 2017, we published an in-depth analysis of local jail populations in each state: Era of Mass Expansion: Why State Officials Should Fight Jail Growth. We paid particular attention to the various drivers of jail incarceration — including pretrial practices and holding people in local jails for state and federal authorities — and we explained how jails impact our entire criminal legal system and millions of lives every year. In the years since that publication, many states have passed reforms aimed at reducing jail populations, but we still see the same trends playing out: too many people are confined in local jails, and the reasons for their confinement do not justify the overwhelming costs of our nation’s reliance on excessive jailing.

People cycle through local jails more than 7 million¹ times each year and they are generally held there for brief, but life-altering, periods of time.² Most are released in a few hours or days after their arrest, but others are held for months or years,³ often because they are too poor to make bail.⁴ Fewer than one-third of the 663,100 people in jails on a given day have been convicted⁵ and are likely serving short sentences of less than a year, most often for misdemeanors. Jail policy is therefore in large part about how people who are legally innocent are treated, and how policymakers think our criminal legal system should respond to low-level offenses.

Figure 1. The frequent practice of renting jail cells to other agencies makes it difficult to draw conclusions from the little data that is available. This update to our 2017 report offers an updated analysis of national data to offer a state-by-state view of how jails are being used and we continue to find that pretrial populations continue to drive jail growth across the country. The data behind this graph is in Appendix Table 1.

More than 460,000 people are currently detained pretrial — in other words, they are legally innocent and awaiting trial. Many of these same people are jailed pretrial simply because they can’t afford money bail, while others remain in detention without a conviction because a state or federal government agency has placed a “hold” on their release.

Pretrial detention disproportionately impacts already-marginalized groups of people:

• Low income: The median felony bail amount is $10,000, but 32% of people booked into jail in the past 12 months reported an annual income below $10,000.
• Black people: 43% of people detained pretrial are Black. Black people are jailed at more than three times the rate of white people.
• Health problems: 40% of people in jail reported a current chronic health condition. 18% of people booked into jail at least once in the past 12 months are not covered by any health insurance.
• Mental illness: 45% of people booked into jail in the past 12 months met criteria for any mental illness, compared to only 30% of people who had not been jailed.
• Experiencing homelessness: While national data don’t exist on the number of people in jail who were experiencing homelessness at the time of their arrest, data from Atlanta show that 1 in 8 city jail bookings in 2022 were of people who were experiencing homelessness.
• Lesbian, gay, or bisexual: 15% of people booked into jail in the past 12 months identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, compared to 10% of people not booked in the past year.

This confinement creates problems for individuals on a short-term basis and also has long-term effects. Research in different jurisdictions has found that, compared to similarly-situated peers who are not detained, people detained prior to trial are more likely to plead guilty, be convicted, be sentenced to jail, have longer sentences if incarcerated, and be arrested again. And these harms accrue quickly: being detained pretrial for any amount of time impacts employment, finances, housing, and the well-being of dependent children. In fact, studies have found that pretrial detention is associated with a decreased likelihood of court appearance and an increased likelihood of additional charges for new offenses. There is no question that wholesale pretrial detention does far more harm than good for an increasing number of people and communities.

State and federal agencies pay local jails a per diem (per day) fee for each person held on their behalf. For example, in 2024, the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections (prison system) pays local jails in Louisiana $26.39 per person per day, and more than 14,000 people in the Department’s custody were in local jails in 2022. The fees paid by different agencies to confine people in local jails range and depend on the contract between agencies: In 2023, the per diem rate negotiated between Daviess County, Kentucky and the U.S. Marshals Service increased from $55 to $70 per person per day. And these per diem fees can rack up quickly: in fiscal year 2021, the U.S. Marshals Service paid North Carolina counties more than $31 million for jail holds, while the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections spent more than $123 million on their “local housing of adult offenders” program.

In 28 states and the District of Columbia, more than 10% of the jail population is being held on behalf of a state or federal authority. This both skews the data and gives local jail officials a powerful financial incentive to endorse policies that contribute to unnecessary jail expansion. Local sheriffs — who operate jails that are rarely filled to anywhere near their total capacity with people held for local authorities — can pad their budgets by contracting out extra bed space to federal and state governments. To be sure, sharing some jail capacity can be a matter of efficiency: for example, if one county’s jail is occasionally full, borrowing space from a neighboring county may be better than building a larger jail. And, in some states — like Missouri — state law requires that local jails agree to hold people for state or federal agencies. But the systematic renting of jail cells to other jurisdictions — while also building ever-larger facilities in order to cash in on that market⁶— changes the policy priorities of jail officials, leaving them with little incentive to welcome or implement reforms.

Fight jail expansionsWhat to do when your county proposes a bigger jail.

In our 2017 report, we found this phenomenon was most visible in Louisiana, where the state largely outsourced the construction and operation of state prisons to individual parish (county) sheriffs.⁷ The most recent data suggests that as of 2022, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Mississippi stand out as the worst offenders. In all three states, at least one-third of the state prison population is actually held in local jails (53% in Louisiana, 47% in Kentucky, and 33% in Mississippi).⁸

Another major consumer of local jail cells is the federal government, starting with the U.S. Marshals Service, which rents about 26,200 jail spaces each year — mostly to hold federal pretrial detainees in locations where there is no federal detention center. In the District of Columbia, South Dakota, New Hampshire, and New Mexico, more than 15% of the statewide jail population was actually held for the U.S. Marshals Service in 2019. Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement rents about 15,700 jail spaces each year for people facing deportation.⁹ In 2019, New Jersey stood out with 16% of the statewide jail population held for immigration authorities, followed by Mississippi (10%).

We should note there is significant geographic variation in just how much of a jail’s population is held for other authorities: more than a quarter of people in rural jails were held for state, federal, or American Indian and Alaska Native tribal governments in 2019, compared to only 11% of people in urban jails.¹⁰ The distribution also varies by state, as each has different levels of “excess” jail capacity, and federal officials have specific needs in different parts of the country.

The practice of holding people in local jails for other authorities carries significant personal, social, and fiscal costs, often exposing detained people to the harms of incarceration for longer periods of time than they would be otherwise. Jails are not designed to hold people for any significant period of time; they lack sufficient programming, services, and medical care to house people for months or years.¹¹ This practice also contributes to jail overcrowding, which fuels jail construction and expansion in turn. As scholars Jack Norton, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, and Judah Schept succinctly put it: “When they build it, they fill it, and counties across the country have been building bigger jails and planning for a future of more criminalization, detention, and incarceration.”

Updated state-specific graphics

In 2017, we argued that if lawmakers want criminal legal system reform, they must pay attention to jails. Years later, this remains true. To help state officials and state-level advocates craft reform strategies appropriate for their unique situations, this report offers updated data and state-specific graphs on conviction status, as well as changes in incarceration rates and populations in both prisons and jails.

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

We’ve drilled down into 2019 data to show prison and jail releases by sex in each state and made our best estimates of how many women and men were released from prisons and jails nationwide in 2022.

by Leah Wang, February 28, 2024

We often think about incarceration as something only experienced behind bars, but millions of people leave correctional facilities every year in serious need of services and reentry resources. Journalists, advocates, and other users of our website reach out frequently to ask if we know the total number of people released from prisons and jails in their state each year. Many are trying to fight for more resources for people returning home and want to know how these numbers break down by sex. 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 (BJS).

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 at all; only the more infrequently-collected Census of Jails data can be used to make state-level findings. As for prisons, 2019 is also the latest year for which state-level release data by sex ¹ have been published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. (The total number of people released by each prison system is published annually by the BJS, most recently reporting 2022 data.)

To make this information more accessible, we’ve drilled down into the most recent data available to show how many men and women are released from prisons and jails each year.²

Why we need data disaggregated by sex or gender identity

For years, the mass incarceration of women has been overlooked, even though women’s incarceration has grown at twice the pace of men’s incarceration in recent decades. Women are disproportionately locked up in local jails, where they’re less likely to be able to afford money bail if they’re not convicted, or are more likely to be serving a shorter sentence for a property or drug offense. While there, women in jail experience bleak conditions like expensive phone calls, a lack of programming and education opportunities, and poor quality healthcare.

Being locked up in a state prison also presents a unique set of challenges for women, including the higher chance of being hundreds of miles away from loved ones. No matter how or where a woman is incarcerated, women are generally worse off than men leading up to their incarceration. And entire families are harmed when a woman is put in prison or jail: More than half of incarcerated women are mothers, and women are more likely than men to be primary caregivers to children. Ultimately, keeping women out of correctional facilities and supporting them post-release should be a top priority for lawmakers.

Unfortunately, data regarding women in the criminal legal system are neither updated regularly nor always compatible across years, obscuring our collective view of what’s happening to women in the criminal legal system and how specific reforms impact them. When it comes to gender identity in prisons and jails, the data are even worse, as government surveys typically include trans men under “females” and trans women under “males,” and do not ask further about self-reported gender identity.³ Without better data collection and reporting, the unique needs of women, as well as transgender and nonbinary people, will go on being disregarded in policy and practice.

Any work that chips away at mass incarceration for people of all genders should include fighting back against carveouts of “non-violent” offenses, addressing family separation, drastically improving reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare, and ramping up gender-responsive reentry services for these individuals.

What’s changed since these data were collected in 2019?

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a dramatic drop in correctional populations in 2020 and 2021 – although this was due to fewer admissions, not more releases – so there have been fewer people eligible for release in the last couple of years. Even though prison and jail populations have unfortunately largely rebounded since then, there were still 29% fewer releases from prisons and jails in 2022 compared to 2019.⁴ Because of this dramatic difference from 2019, we also calculated rough estimates of releases by sex in 2022 on the national level for those interested in what more recent release numbers look like:

Estimated releases from prisons and jails, by sex, in 2022

To estimate what 2022 releases from prisons might look like by sex, we started with the number of state and federal prison releases, excluding deaths, reported in 2022 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics: 443,534.⁵ We then used the 2019 data to find the percentage of all prison releases that were from female prisons, which was about 12%; this percentage was based on all releases including deaths, because deaths in prison aren’t reported by sex. Applying this percentage to total prison releases in 2022, we estimate that about 55,179 people were released from female state and federal prisons in 2022, of which about 3,951 were from federal prisons.⁶

To estimate the number of releases from local jails in 2022 by sex, we first had to estimate the number of total releases, which the Bureau of Justice Statistics did not publish. We started with the number of jail admissions reported for that year: 7.3 million, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.⁷ Most people are jailed for a relatively short time, typically released from jail the same year they are admitted, so we would expect the number of admissions to be very close to the number of releases.⁸ In 2019, there were just 1.15% fewer people released from jails nationwide than were admitted that year. We applied this percentage to the 7.3 million jail admissions in 2022, arriving at an estimated 7,215,958 releases from local jails in 2022. To estimate how many of those releases were women, we calculated the percentage of all jail releases in 2019 that were women (23%) and applied that percentage to our estimate for total jail releases in 2022. Because there is no national source of data for jail deaths in 2022, we could not exclude deaths from these estimates of jail releases.

Opportunities for further data analysis

We also get lots of questions about the number of people released to local communities (counties, cities, et cetera). While we don’t have a solution that works for every state, we do suggest two different ways to generate estimates in our previous briefing about releases.

Data collection efforts regarding incarcerated women are slowly improving in some areas: For example, the Bureau of Justice Statistics is considering adding questions about pregnancy and maternal health in its national surveys of correctional facilities. In the meantime, we hope this dataset is useful in your advocacy work. The 2019 release data can be accessed from our Data Toolbox; for more information about mass incarceration in your state, see our State Profiles pages.

Prison disciplinary fines only further impoverish incarcerated people and families

We analyzed prison policies for all 50 states and the federal prison system, and found that 16 prison systems actually impose fines — in addition to other punishments — when someone violates a prison rule. We explain why disciplinary fines and fees are bad policy, putting excessive hardship on incarcerated people and their loved ones.

by Leah Wang, February 7, 2024

In yet another example of how the criminal legal system extracts wealth from the poorest families, at least one-third of prison systems nationwide charge fines as a punishment for a rule violation. Prison administrators claim that imposing disciplinary fines, along with other punishments, helps to maintain order and reduce violence in correctional facilities. They also argue that the fines simulate outside-of-prison processes for dealing with misconduct, such as parking tickets.

Though rule violations¹ and their corresponding sanctions are a common feature of incarceration, disciplinary fines and fees aren’t the way to create safe environments where people can prepare for their release. On the contrary, when prisons impose these charges and subsequently help themselves to the funds in people’s prison accounts, incarcerated people are often left with little to no money for purchasing essential items and services that the prison doesn’t provide.² As a result, their mental and physical health suffers, creating a more volatile environment inside. Loved ones also pay the price of these fines — often literally, as a primary source of financial support.

Like medical “co-pays” and exceedingly low wages in prison, disciplinary fines and fees are little more than a means to exploit incarcerated people. Whether they’re tiered fines or flat “administrative” fees, they are an undue burden; prison is already one big financial sanction for those who are already on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. By focusing on punitive measures that deprive people further, prisons miss the mark on what actually makes prisons safer — providing opportunity rather than taking it away. We hope advocates and policymakers will understand how disciplinary fees, which exist alongside other excessive punishments, undermine the rehabilitative goals of corrections, the safety of people inside, and the odds of success during reentry.

Disciplinary fines and fees are used in about one-third of all prison systems

To determine just how common disciplinary fines and fees are, we combed through the publicly available policies on prison disciplinary procedures in each state and the federal prison system. We also looked at policies related to prison-controlled bank accounts (often called “inmate trust accounts”) and related fees, as well as practices relating to collecting debts. We found that at least 16 prison systems charge incarcerated people disciplinary fines or fees:

Prison disciplinary fines and fees

Every jurisdiction that charges disciplinary fines or fees does so a bit differently, but taken together, a few findings stand out:

• Disciplinary fines and fees are common. In 16 prison systems, we found policies referencing fines and/or fees related to confirmed disciplinary violations (where someone is found guilty or pleads guilty). In many cases, the severity level³ of the rule violation determines the amount of the fine, but in other cases there is a “flat” charge for any violation. In either case, charging fines means that some of the most innocuous behaviors — like making “loud or disturbing noises” in Kansas prisons — have a price tag.
• Most prison systems impose disciplinary fines between $5 and $25, but some charge hundreds or thousands of dollars. Incarcerated people in five jurisdictions (Alabama, Arizona, Maine, Oregon, Utah, and the federal prison system) can face triple-digit fines for a single disciplinary charge: For example, Arizona’s fines start at a shocking $500 for the first instance of what they consider the most serious violations⁴ and go as high as $2,000. Utah state prisons impose up to $600 for a more serious “A Code” offense, and up to $300 for a “B code” offense — which can be for things like “horseplay,” or any conduct deemed “disorderly.”
• Some prison systems insidiously present these charges as “administrative” fees. We found five prison systems that charge “administrative” or “processing” fees for disciplinary violations. We include them here because they’re just as punitive and unaffordable as fines. In Georgia, for example, each guilty finding for a disciplinary violation comes with a $4 fee, unless the violation is for having a cell phone or similar communication device, a harshly-punished violation in several states;⁵ that specific act will set someone back a $100 “administrative processing fee.” People incarcerated in North Carolina prisons, who are charged a $10 administrative fee per disciplinary infraction, collectively lost $313,000 in fees to the state’s general fund in Fiscal Year 2022 alone.⁶

For incarcerated people, even “small” fines and fees can be huge setbacks

Outside of prison, a $5 or $10 fine might seem pretty inconsequential, or even surprisingly low. (Parking tickets, for example, are generally much more costly.) But to a typical person behind bars, a loss like this represents a serious change in financial circumstances; the value of money is simply different in prison. Prisons charge people for necessities like food and hygiene products, communication with loved ones, health care, and in some cases, “room and board.”⁷ And prison wages hardly cover these expenses, averaging less than one dollar per hour in most jurisdictions:

• Someone in Kansas, for example, would have to work for over two months in the lowest-paying prison job to pay off a $20 disciplinary fine, the maximum charged there.⁸
• In Virginia, where any rule violation comes with a flat $15 fine, it could take 33 to 55 hours (or one to two weeks) of work to cover that cost. Of course, this math only applies to the roughly 50% of the prison population with jobs; those earning no wages have to rely on financial support from loved ones. ⁹

It’s also important to note that prison disciplinary and labor systems already disadvantage some more than others: Black and Indigenous people, women, and those with disabilities¹⁰ tend to face prison discipline disproportionately. And research shows racial, gender and disability disparities in how prisons assign jobs. Considering disciplinary fines in this context, it makes little economic or administrative sense to continue picking these pockets.

Almost all prison systems also order restitution, but some states’ policies are excessive and inappropriate

We also found that nearly all prison systems have a policy about facility-owed restitution, or the reimbursement of costs incurred for damaged property or medical expenses that result from a rule violation. We often think of restitution as court-ordered reimbursement to civilian crime victims — and many incarcerated people face this type of debt, too — but in a prison setting, restitution serves as little more than a running tab for the state.

Many prison restitution policies require that the amount being sought reflects the actual cost of an item or service, like the requirement to present an “itemized list of expenses and/or items damaged and costs to repair or replace” in Georgia state prisons. Such efforts to justify restitution amounts might sound reasonable to an outsider, but these “reimbursements” are to state agencies for largely budgeted costs.¹¹ For example, some prison systems pursue restitution for things like staff overtime, vehicle mileage, and workers’ compensation costs.^{12 13} And in a shameless move only the carceral system could devise, four states (Iowa, Georgia, Nevada, and New Mexico) seek reimbursement for medical charges related to self-harm and/or suicide. The financial cost of events that happen in prisons, which are inherently violent and mentally damaging places, shouldn’t be billed to incarcerated people and their families.

Prison systems often help themselves to the money they charge incarcerated people

In order to collect monetary sanctions, prisons will garnish (deduct) a portion — in some cases, up to 100% — of money credited to an incarcerated person’s account, whether it’s their hard-earned wages, money transfers from loved ones, or economic stimulus payments.¹⁴

A common deduction rate we found in our survey of state policies was 50%: Seven states (Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, California, and Rhode Island) deduct up to half of incoming deposits and apply it to a debt. That means, for example, that someone with a disciplinary fine debt in Pennsylvania who earns 50 cents per hour (near the maximum prison wage there) would only receive 25 cents per hour. Some of these states further complicate matters by just taking everything: Rhode Island prisons will begin collection on a debt by taking as much of the amount owed as possible, leaving an account balance of $10, and then begin garnishing 50% of subsequent deposits to cover the rest. This means that money sent in by a loved one may never actually reach its intended recipient, but instead go straight into the prison’s pocket.

SHADOW BUDGETSIn some prisons, fine revenue pays for incarceration

A few other states’ policies (Oregon, Texas, and Wisconsin) suggest that 100% of funds are garnished (sometimes referred to as a “freeze” on an account) to cover a debt, without leaving any amount to cover basic necessities. And while nearly all prison systems claim to provide assistance to people who are extremely poor, or “indigent,” we found that prison indigence policies are too narrowly defined and limited to be very helpful.

Prison debt collection policies can also apply post-incarceration: Some prisons hold debts like disciplinary fines or facility-owed restitution on file in case of a future return to custody. And a few cases we found, corrections departments turn into collection agents — or at least threaten to do so: In Iowa prisons, for example, if someone who owes has signed an agreement, staff may pursue debts in small claims court or by seeking to garnish their state tax refunds. In Wisconsin, transfer or release “shall not terminate the inmate’s obligation to pay ordered restitution.” It’s hard to know whether prison systems actually enforce these collection policies, but the possibility looms large over people who work hard to be truly free of prison once they’re released.

Disciplinary fines and fees are just one part of an illegitimate ‘kangaroo court’ system in prisons

Disciplinary fines and fees are only a microcosm of a much larger problem with how prisons treat behaviors and “discipline.” The comprehensiveness of prison policies on rules, sanctions, collecting debts, and disciplinary hearings might suggest that prisons offer incarcerated people transparency and due process when they’re accused of a rule violation, but evidence suggests the opposite.

In fact, incarcerated people are not entitled to many aspects of due process when it comes to disciplinary hearings, like calling witnesses and obtaining counsel. Further, disciplinary hearings in prisons only require “some evidence” (in other words, any small amount of evidence) of misconduct, a much lower standard of proof than courts require in outside legal decision-making.¹⁵ This arbitrary and shadowy adjudication process only leads to hurt and mistrust; take this scenario, based on a case observed in a 2015 study of prison discipline:

A male prisoner tosses a plastic cup half-full of liquid toward a prison officer, nearly hitting her…. [T]he result, almost inevitably, will be cellular confinement (segregation) and a loss of privileges of some sort… During this time, the prisoner’s anger at the officer will potentially increase, exacerbated by the painful conditions of solitary lockdown. When the prisoner returns, he or she will make life difficult for the officer and the officer may in turn make life difficult for the prisoner. The cycle continues.

The legitimacy and credibility of prison disciplinary hearings — or lack thereof — matter because the stakes can be high. Being found guilty of a more serious violation, in particular, can change the course of someone’s incarceration drastically, through solitary confinement, the loss of earned good time, restricted access to necessary commissary items, and the potential impact on parole decisions. Prison systems should consider how this “kangaroo court” system of disciplinary hearings unfairly and harshly punishes people for behaviors that, as mounting evidence suggests, are often brought about by the prison environment itself. When harm does occur inside, restorative justice practices present an alternative way to problem-solve, and could lead to a more trusting, safer climate.

Disciplinary fines and fees in prisons are not “accountability”

While they may imitate the broader “justice” system in some ways, disciplinary fines and fees arguably do nothing to promote a sense of accountability or safety inside of prisons. The current approach to handling prison misconduct, in which fines play just a supporting role, is infantilizing and creates bleak conditions like solitary confinement and deprivation, which in turn lead to violence and mental health problems. To make prisons safer for everyone, administrators should overhaul disciplinary processes and provide more access to and opportunities for family contact, education, healthcare, treatment, and repairing harm.

By pulling back the curtain on murky aspects of everyday prison life like discipline, we hope prison administrators and policymakers will see that incarcerated people are starved for opportunities to achieve economic, professional, and personal growth, and that disciplinary sanctions undermine these goals.