Untangling why prison & jail populations dropped early in the pandemic

Reductions in prison and jail populations were due to COVID-related slowdowns in the gears of the criminal legal system. Without intentional action, these reductions will be erased.

by Wendy Sawyer, March 24, 2022

Sections

Crime and arrests

Jail bookings & pretrial detention

Court slowdowns

Prison admissions

Keeping admssions low

Last week, we released the latest edition of our Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie report, in which we showed about 1.9 million people locked up by various U.S. systems of confinement, according to the most recent data available. Out of context, that number would be cause for celebration among those of us fighting to end mass incarceration: it’s almost 400,000 fewer people than were locked up before the pandemic. Unfortunately, this reduction in the incarcerated population is unlikely to last very long without more lasting policy change. In fact, fear-mongering about upticks in certain specific crimes may make this work even harder and lead to policy changes that make mass incarceration even more intractable.

It’s important, therefore, to understand what changes — intentional or not — led to the prison and jail population drops in 2020 and 2021. This briefing offers the context needed to temper expectations about sustaining those population drops and to maintain focus on the policy changes needed to permanently reduce the use of confinement. Without those needed changes, we can expect prison and jail populations to return to pre-pandemic “normal” (extreme by any other measure) as the criminal legal system returns to “business as usual.”

The reduction in prison admissions, which explains most of the drop in incarceration in the early pandemic, was the effect of temporary changes in arrest and jail practices, court slowdowns, and the refusal of some prisons to accept transfers from jails. However, the data do not allow us to distinguish how much of the drop in admissions was due to a given type of change, such as transfer refusals versus slowdowns.

The changes that have had the most impact on incarceration since the start of the pandemic include:

• 24% fewer arrests in 2020 compared to 2019, largely due to changes in everyday behaviors under widespread “stay at home orders,” as well as short-term guidance issued by some police departments to limit unnecessary contact and jail bookings;
• 21% fewer criminal cases filed in state courts in 2020 compared to 2019 — the result of fewer arrests and changes in some prosecutorial practices;
• 36% fewer criminal cases resolved in state courts from 2019 to 2020, attributable to court closures, operational changes, and delays in case processing;
• A 17 percentage point net drop in criminal case clearance rates in state courts, indicating a growing backlog of pending cases;
• 40% fewer admissions to state and federal prisons in 2020 compared to 2019, largely the result of court slowdowns but also partly due to the refusal of some prisons to accept transfers from local jails to prevent the spread of the virus.

Critically, the one thing that we and other advocates demanded from the very start of the pandemic – intentional, large-scale releases to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in the tight quarters of prisons and jails – did not happen. In the first year of the pandemic, prisons actually released 10% fewer people than they did the year before, and among the twelve states that regularly publish more recent data, that trend held throughout 2021 as well. Only three states (New Jersey, California, and North Carolina) released a significant number of incarcerated people from prisons. Parole boards also approved fewer releases in the first year of the pandemic than the year before.

Changes in crime and arrests

Two major factors contributed to the 24% drop in arrests in 2020: widespread changes in behavior and more limited changes in police practices. The shift away from in-person activities towards remote work, learning, commerce, and social contact represented a major change in our usual behaviors. This explains some changes in crime trends: for example, with more people home during work hours and on weekends, there were fewer low-risk targets for home break-ins. And in 2020, there were 18% fewer home burglaries reported than in 2019, and consequently 13% fewer arrests for burglary. With fewer people out, there were also fewer opportunities for thefts that require close contact: reports of pickpocketing dropped 37% and purse-snatching 25%, and arrests for these types of crimes (larceny/theft) dropped 23%. The 24% drop in arrests for driving under the influence (DUI) also makes sense in this context: there were fewer people on the roads, and for a long time, few bars or restaurants open for people to consume alcohol.

Policing changed too, to a lesser degree. Police officers got sick, reducing their capacity to arrest, and some officials directed police to avoid unnecessary contact with the public and to issue more citations in lieu of arrest. This likely explains the dramatic reductions in arrests for “nuisance” crimes like vagrancy and drunkenness.

Some of these changes were extremely short-lived: Philadelphia police suspended “non-violent” arrests in mid-March 2020, but just two weeks later, the police force announced it would resume arrests for property crimes, effectively reversing the earlier policy. Police in Maui, Hawai’i set up a call center early in the pandemic to handle calls that didn’t require in-person responses; it was shut down within just three months, when the Police Chief declared “things are settling down.”

Given that almost all of these changes were in direct response to the pandemic, as opposed to long-term policy changes, we should anticipate a return to pre-pandemic arrest rates as work, school, business, and social life return to “normal.”

Jail bookings and pretrial detention decisions

Jail admissions generally mirror arrest trends, so fewer arrests mean fewer people booked into jail. The drop in arrests in 2020 therefore accounts for most of the 16% drop in jail admissions over the course of the year. But there were also some notable, temporary, pandemic-response policies that contributed to the reduced jail populations we saw in 2020, namely:

• The promises of many prosecutors to decline to prosecute certain low-level offenses or to dismiss pending charges against people arrested for such offenses,
• The suspension of arrests for non-criminal (or “technical”) violations of probation and parole,
• Temporary changes in probation and parole conditions that made it easier for people under community supervision to comply, such as videoconferencing instead of face-to-face check-ins and the waiving of monthly fees, and
• The temporary suspension of arrests on outstanding “bench warrants” for things like missed court dates.

Some courts and prosecutors also made impactful, though temporary, changes to pretrial processes. On any given day, at least two-thirds of the nation’s jails are filled with people who have not been convicted and are legally innocent, many because they cannot afford money bail. But early in the pandemic, we saw changes like the “$0 bail” emergency rule ordered for California’s courts, which eliminated unaffordable bail as a barrier to pretrial release for people accused of misdemeanors and lower-level felonies. In another example, the State’s Attorney in Vermont’s largest county directed her office to stop requesting bail for defendants facing low-level charges.

Together, these changes reduced the use of jails for things other than serious public safety concerns. Most of these temporary policies have long since expired, so, except for those places that have enacted policies to permanently reduce incarceration for these non-dangerous and/or non-criminal violations, we should expect to see more people jailed for these reasons again as the pandemic wanes.

Court slowdowns

Most courts had to dramatically change their operations during the pandemic in ways that led to long delays in case processing. According to the National Center for State Courts, the most common court responses to the pandemic included restricting or ending jury trials, suspending in-person proceedings, restricting entry to courthouses, extended filing deadlines, and encouraging video conferences in place of hearings.

In 2020, 21% fewer criminal cases were filed in state courts than in 2019, which in turn meant fewer people were convicted and sentenced to jail or prison. The most recent data available indicates that the number of criminal case filings were still much lower than pre-pandemic levels as of June 2021. Some of this drop in new cases is explained by changing crime and arrest trends, but prosecutorial decisions also played a key role. For example, the Maricopa County (Arizona) Attorney’s Office began delaying the filing of – but not dismissing – “thousands of charges” in an effort to keep down the number of people in courtrooms and jails (and potentially to avoid problems complying with speedy trial laws). And Seattle’s District Attorney decided early on to briefly stop filing charges except for “priority in-custody violent crimes.”

But the changes in court operations have made an even bigger dent in case dispositions than case filings: in 2020, state courts closed 36% fewer criminal cases than in 2019. Unable to keep pace with incoming cases, the clearance rate for criminal cases across over 30 state court systems dropped from 105% in 2019 (when courts were able to close more cases annually than were added to the docket) to 88% in 2020. Some of this slowdown, too, was the result of attorneys requesting postponements; some was simply due to court closures.

Pandemic caseload data from the Court Statistics Project show that criminal court slowdowns were at their worst between July 2020 and January 2021, but even with fewer new cases coming in, “pending” cases have piled up and will take time to clear. As they do, and as arrests and prosecution return to pre-pandemic norms, we can expect the rate of people convicted and sentenced to incarceration to climb back up.

Prison admissions

The cumulative effect of fewer arrests, temporary changes in probation and parole practices, and pandemic-related delays in trials and sentencing was a dramatic 40% reduction in the number of people who entered prisons in 2020. The number of new court commitments (that is, people admitted to prison to serve a new sentence) dropped almost 43% from 2019 to 2020. And, for the same reasons jail admissions fell for non-criminal violations of probation and parole, the number of people admitted to prisons for these violations fell 35%. The massive decrease in admissions was driven by steep drops in large states like California (down 66%), Florida (down 53%), and New York (down 60%).

Some of the change in admissions to prison, however, was simply because people were left in jails longer before being transferred to prisons. In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19 between facilities (a very valid concern), some state prison systems, such as Illinois’, refused to admit people held in local jails who were sentenced to prison. While this may have helped slow the spread into prisons, staff were still bringing the virus into facilities from their home communities. Meanwhile, these delays left thousands of people stuck in local jails, which have fewer programs and far more population turnover than prisons – a miserable situation at any time, but particularly during a pandemic.

Again, because the changes that resulted in fewer admissions in 2020 were temporary responses to the pandemic, we should expect prison populations to rebound to pre-pandemic levels as courts catch up with their backlog of pending cases and probation and parole agencies return to more stringent conditions and harsher punishments for non-criminal violations.

Prison and jail admissions are at historic lows. We can keep it that way.

The changes to the criminal legal system during the pandemic were, for the most part, temporary responses to the immediate public health emergency, not deliberate policy choices to reduce incarcerated populations over the long term. There is little reason to think that incarceration rates will remain at their pandemic-era lows without more intentional changes, particularly since jail and prison populations have already started to rebound. Furthermore, the piecemeal actions that federal, state, and local authorities did take were not nearly enough to protect people in prisons and jails, nor the communities that surround them. To date, almost 600,000 incarcerated people have been infected and more than 3,000 have died behind bars because of COVID-19. And of course, the pandemic isn’t over; still, authorities continue to ignore public health guidance that specifically calls for decarceration.

The fact that many early-pandemic policy changes were so short-lived is particularly frustrating since we know they helped rapidly reduce populations without compromising public safety. Data from the National Crime Victimization Survey show that the number of violent crimes (excluding homicide, which the survey does not cover) fell from about 2 million in 2019 to 1.6 million in 2020; accordingly, the rate of violent victimization fell by 22%. The household property crime victimization rate fell by about 7%. And, as discussed above, arrests and crimes reported by police fell, too.

Government authorities’ willful disregard of the evidence that further, sustained policy changes are both urgently needed and safe is part of a larger problem, of course. The perception (not a reality) that criminal justice reforms have led to upticks in crime over the past few years has fueled pushback against smart policy changes. That perception is powerful, and history shows that reactionary policies can follow: In the 1980s and 1990s, the last time prison and jail populations were as low as they were in 2020, the knee-jerk reaction to (much bigger) increases in crime was to lock more people up, and for longer. Particularly in the context of the ongoing pandemic, we can’t afford to let that happen again.

New data on formerly incarcerated people’s employment reveal labor market injustices

Newly released data doubles down on what we’ve reported before: Formerly incarcerated people face huge obstacles to finding stable employment, leading to detrimental society-wide effects. Considering the current labor market, there may be plenty of jobs available, but they don’t guarantee stability or economic mobility for this vulnerable population.

by Leah Wang and Wanda Bertram, February 8, 2022

How many formerly incarcerated people are jobless at the moment? A good guess would be 60%, to generalize from a new report released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). The report shows that of 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 at any given time, no more than 40% of the cohort was employed. People who did find jobs struggled, too: Formerly incarcerated people in the sample had an average of 3.4 jobs throughout the four-year study period, suggesting that they were landing jobs that didn’t offer security or upward mobility.

As the data show, not only is reentry difficult in the first months of release from prison, but the struggle to find a job actually grew over time for the study cohort of people leaving federal prison in 2010. We show these increasing jobless rates next to one of the most dire economic moments of recent years — when the US unemployment rate reached its highest point of around 15% in mid-2020.¹

We warn readers that we can’t call the 60% jobless rate an “unemployment rate” — joblessness is different from unemployment, which refers to people actively looking for work. We calculated the first and only national unemployment rate for formerly incarcerated people in our 2018 report Out of Prison and Out of Work, and we can’t update that analysis, because we based it on data that the government only collected once.² Nevertheless, the new BJS data suggest that employment rates among people who have been to prison aren’t improving.

Formerly incarcerated individuals tend to experience joblessness and poverty that started long before they were ever locked up. When they’re released from prison, the pressure is on to get a job: People on parole (or “supervised release”) often must maintain employment or face reincarceration,³ while struggling to access social services, and trying to make ends meet in a job market more hostile to them than ever before. This combination of pressures amounts to a perpetual punishment. And it’s not just formerly incarcerated individuals who are punished: Policies that weaken their ability to turn down jobs with low wages may depress wages for other workers in their industries, as we’ll explain in this briefing.

Harsh parole conditions, a lack of social welfare programs, and a tough job market are forcing formerly incarcerated people — already a low-income, majority-minority demographic — into the least desirable jobs. But not everybody is losing: Businesses have found a way to capitalize on the desperation of applicants with conviction histories and exploit the fact that these these individuals have less bargaining power to demand changes in conditions of employment, such as better wages benefits and protections. This results in lower overall wages and more harmful working conditions in certain industries.

Post-release, months of searching and moving between jobs is common

The overall employment rate over four years after the study population was released hovered between 34.9% and 37.9% — in other words, about two-thirds of the population were jobless at any given time.

For those who did find employment after release, their earnings were lower than the general population: In the first few months, formerly incarcerated people were earning just 53% of the median US worker’s wage. And after four years of seeking and obtaining irregular employment, the study population was making less than 84 cents for every dollar of the US median wage (which, in 2014, was about $28,851 annually).

Earnings were lowest for Black and Native American people released from federal prison;⁵ in fact, racial and ethnic disparities in earnings seemed to grow over time. These findings probably reflect an unfortunate “racialized re-entry” process for people leaving prison, where the stigma of incarceration itself and differences in social networks for job-seekers vary across racial and ethnic groups. Researchers of this concept noted that white people getting out of prison actually appeared more disadvantaged and less employable “on paper” due to higher rates of substance use and longer sentences, but still ended up with better employment and income than Black and Hispanic people leaving prison.

Employment may be one of the most important benchmarks of reentry, yet it took formerly incarcerated people an average of over six months to find their first job after release. As such, many did not maintain employment over the entire four-year study period, and the average person in the study had 3.4 jobs over that time. If that sounds erratic, it is: The average person is employed for 78% of the weeks between ages 18 and 54, while people in the study’s cohort were employed just 58% of the time post-release. When people are moving from job to job, families and the economy suffer, and people risk violating their post-release supervision and being returned to incarceration.

Lastly, though it’s not clear exactly why, people who served less than a year in federal prison actually had a harder time finding and maintaining employment post-release, and spent more time without a job than the other groups.⁶ Given this devastating impact on their long-term employment prospects, it’s evident that people who are given short sentences — and who pose no safety risk — should not be incarcerated to begin with.⁷

The struggle to find a good job

The fact that most people released from prison have spotty, sporadic employment may mean that the jobs they’re getting are difficult jobs to keep, even for an extremely motivated worker. These could be temporary jobs, jobs where workers aren’t protected from wrongful termination, or dangerous or low-wage jobs that are unsustainable.

According to the BJS report, the major industries employing formerly incarcerated people include waste management services, construction, and food service. A 2021 study released by the U.S. Census Bureau affirms this finding. The study analyzed thousands of people with felony convictions, tracking their employment and income in the years around the Great Recession (2006-2018), and found that rebounds in construction and various service industries after the recession were associated with a bump in employment and income levels for these individuals. However, the people in that study saw their employment levels plateau after a few years, even in areas where construction and manufacturing thrived.

It’s true that industries like manufacturing and construction tend to boost employment and reduce recidivism for those leaving prison. But while these jobs did, at one time, allow people to build wealth and support a family, they don’t as much anymore, meaning that they are likely not alleviating poverty among formerly incarcerated people. The fact that formerly incarcerated people are not obtaining steady, reliable work is likely related to the industries in which they’re most commonly employed.

When the workforce is under mass supervision, key industries lose employee bargaining power

Looking more closely at the “low-skill” jobs that formerly incarcerated people tend to get can help us understand how mass incarceration and supervision may be hurting whole sectors of workers. In construction and manufacturing, union membership has declined significantly over the last twenty years.⁸ During the same period — between 2000 and 2019 — the number of people on parole grew by more than 150,000, and the number of people with felony convictions swelled from 13.2 million to an estimated 24 million.

While it’s impossible to draw a causal relationship between these two trends — given the numerous factors at play — there is serious potential for exploitation of formerly incarcerated people. For example, The New York Times has reported that New Yorkers with conviction histories are shuttled into non-union construction jobs with low to no benefits. Formerly incarcerated employees placed at such companies have described being “taken aback” at the low wages, and many have had to work other jobs to supplement their pay from their day jobs in construction.

A rising number of people with felony convictions — which is the result of, among other things, overly punitive sentencing — may be depressing wages and hurting working conditions for all workers in certain industries. Formerly incarcerated workers are not to blame, especially as many have likely been working in these industries for the better part of their adult lives. Prison does nothing to improve their qualifications as workers; meanwhile, the struggle of reentry makes them more desperate for job offers, as the new data make abundantly clear.

Formerly incarcerated people need greater opportunity from today’s labor market

The new BJS data confirm that formerly incarcerated people still suffer from sky-high jobless rates (despite evidence that virtually all want to work), and that those who do find work are getting unstable jobs. Formerly incarcerated people are typically poor before they go to prison, and joblessness during reentry can push them into even deeper poverty and have a permanent impact on their wealth accumulation.

These devastating statistics have implications for workers without criminal records as well. When industries can use vulnerable workers to replace or supplement workers who demand decent wages and benefits, the price of labor declines. When burdensome supervision requirements, unnecessary occupational licensing restrictions, and a lack of social welfare programs combine to make formerly incarcerated people desperate for work, all workers suffer.

Indeed, during the labor shortages we’ve seen in 2021 and 2022, employers are turning to currently or formerly incarcerated people as a convenient solution. (And sadly, a rising awareness of formerly incarcerated people’s unjust barriers to employment has allowed some of these employers to frame their actions as enlightened.) These shifts may manifest in depressed wages, benefits, and worker protections sector-wide.

People leaving prison need expanded access to job opportunities so that successful reentry can begin immediately and provide stability, not uncertainty. Policy solutions like occupational licensing reform and automatic record expungement, as well as “banning the box” on all initial employment applications, are respectable first steps. Even better would be including those with conviction histories as a protected class⁹ in employment non-discrimination statutes. In-prison training programs for jobs in construction and similar industries may also boost employment and wages in some areas, according to some research, but it’s not a universal solution, nor does it solve underlying problems of low educational attainment and economic immobility.

It’s critical that lawmakers support workers with and without criminal records who are working together to end the exploitative practices that hurt them all. Without leveling the playing field for formerly incarcerated people, not only will their jobless rates remain high, but self-serving employers will continue to benefit from a disposable labor pool, with detrimental impacts on everyone.

New data: The changes in prisons, jails, probation, and parole in the first year of the pandemic

Newly released data from 2020 show the impact of early-pandemic correctional policy choices and what kind of change is possible under pressure. But the data also show how inadequate, uneven, and unsustained policy changes have been: most have already been reversed.

by Wendy Sawyer, January 11, 2022

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has released a lot of new data over the past few weeks that help us finally see — both nationally and state-by-state — how policy choices made in the first year of the pandemic impacted correctional populations. Unsurprisingly, the numbers document the tragedy of thousands of lives lost behind bars, and evidence of some of the policy decisions that contributed to the death toll. Drilling down, we also see a (very) few reasons to be hopeful and, for those of us paying close attention, a few notable improvements in what the BJS is able to collect and how they report it. Above all, we see how quickly things can change — for better or for worse — when under pressure, and discuss some of the issues and policy choices these data tell us to watch out for.

Key findings from the BJS reports Prisoners in 2020, Jail Inmates in 2020, and Probation and Parole in the United States, 2020:

• Prison, jail, and probation populations dropped dramatically from 2019-2020,¹ but these drops were due to mainly to emergency responses to COVID-19, and correctional populations have already started rebounding toward pre-pandemic levels.
  
• Nationwide, states and the federal government actually released fewer people from prison in 2020 than in 2019.² The decrease in the incarcerated population was not related to releases, but rather the 40% drop in prison admissions and 16% drop in jail admissions.
• Deaths increased 46% in prisons from 2019 to 2020, 32% among people on parole, and 6% among people on probation. Jail deaths in 2020 have not yet been reported.
• Even under the pressure of the pandemic, local jails held a larger share of unconvicted people than ever, and continued to hold far too many people for low-level offenses and technical violations.
• State and federal policy responses to the threat of COVID-19 to incarcerated people varied widely, with a few states appearing to basically ignore the pandemic altogether.

It’s not all bad news: A few “silver linings” for women, youth, and others

While most of the significant changes in correctional populations are unlikely to be sustained after — or even during — the pandemic (more on that in the next section), there are a few positive changes that represent possible tipping points or reversals of seemingly intractable problems. With persistent pressure on policymakers, these changes have the potential to stick:

• Women’s prison and jail populations, and incarceration rates, dropped by a larger percentage than men’s populations did.³ This trend held in all but one state prison system (Alaska), reversing the “gender divide” we’ve observed in the past decade of decarceration efforts.
• Indigenous people experienced the greatest drop, proportionally, in jail populations and jail incarceration rates — nearly 35%. Before 2020, American Indians and Alaska Natives had been a population experiencing disproportionate jail growth, almost doubling between 2000-2019.⁴
• Probation populations were down by over a quarter of a million people in 2020, with far more people going off probation than going on it. With over 3 million people under its thumb, probation is still the leading form of correctional control, and this drop contributed most to the 11% reduction in the overall “footprint” of correctional control.⁵
• The number of youth held in adult prisons dropped by almost half (46%), and three more states joined the ranks of those no longer holding anyone under 18 in adult prisons, bringing the total to 21.⁶ Six other states that held large shares (5% or more) of the roughly 650 youth in prison in 2019 also reduced the number of youth held by at least a third in 2020.⁷

Overall, the “positive trends” in 2020 are nothing to get excited about

In 2020, we did see the kinds of reductions in the number of people under correctional control that we’ll need to see year after year to actually end mass incarceration. And these BJS reports express some of that optimism, with comments like “In 2020, the imprisonment rate was… the lowest since 1992” and “The 15% decrease in persons in state and federal prisons… was the largest single year decrease recorded since… 1926.”

Such dramatic drops in the nation’s use of incarceration would truly be cause for celebration if they weren’t temporary and if they weren’t still “too little, too late” for the thousands of people who got sick or died in a prison or jail ravaged by COVID-19. Unfortunately, there is little reason to think that these drops will be sustained in a post-pandemic world, especially since they have already begun to rebound to pre-pandemic levels, even amid some of the worst outbreaks the U.S. has seen. Above all, we should not expect these trends to hold without sustained reforms, as opposed to temporary “emergency response” changes.

Here, we offer some important context for the trends observed in 2020:

• Nationwide, jail populations have already rebounded to near pre-pandemic levels. While the BJS reports a 25% reduction in jail populations in 2020, that data only covers through midyear 2020 (i.e. the end of June). Because our work trying to shift the nation’s justice system response to COVID couldn’t wait for the official BJS data, we’ve been tracking jail population changes during the pandemic in over 400 county jails using data collected by the NYU Jail Data Initiative. Using that data, we’ve found that the populations of most jails in the sample started climbing back up after July 2020. Overall, the average population change since March 2020 among those jails had diminished to only a 7% decrease by October 2021.
• Jail populations were still too high, even when they were at their lowest in mid-2020. Even in the summer of 2020, after county and city officials had slashed their local jail populations as much as they would at any point in the pandemic (to date, anyway), 1 in 14 jails was still badly overcrowded, holding more people than their rated capacity allows. And in mid-2020, the U.S. still locked up more people per capita in jails alone than most countries do in any type of confinement facilities. That “low” rate of 167 per 100,000 residents is still more than double what it was in 1980.
• The decrease in the prison population was also temporary — and has started to bounce back up. Like the jail population changes, the 15% drop in the nation’s state and federal prison population is explained by temporary conditions caused by COVID-19, not long-term policy changes, nor even particularly intentional changes. The combination of trial and sentencing delays in courts and the refusal of some prisons to accept transfers from jails to prevent COVID transmission resulted in far fewer (40% fewer) admissions than usual. With only a few exceptions, state and federal officials made no effort to release large numbers of people from prison. In fact, there were fewer releases in 2020 than in 2019.

  

• Most of the drop in prison populations occurred within the federal Bureau of Prisons and just three states: California, Florida, and Texas. And even states that reduced prison populations didn’t necessarily reach “safe” population levels (if any prison can be called “safe”). At the end of 2020, 1 in 5 state prison systems were at or above their design or rated capacity. Even California, which reduced its prison population more than any other state (down 25,000) was still locking up more people than its prisons were designed for, and it’s only added more people since then.
• Among people “exiting” parole — either because their sentence was over, they were returned to incarceration, they died, or something else happened — roughly 1 in 5 (over 70,000) were returned to incarceration. This percentage was the smallest it’s been since at least 2005, but during a deadly pandemic that spreads easily in prisons, taking people off of community supervision and returning them to prison should not have been an option. Furthermore, the drop in re-incarceration compared to other years is most likely explained by changes in parole operations, not intentional policy choices: A quarter of agencies responding to a supplementary BJS survey reported suspending reporting requirements for at least a part of 2020.
• As with other forms of correctional control, the reduction in the probation population was due to the COVID-19 emergency, not policy changes, and probation populations were also trending up by the end of 2020. And as with parole, the 35% decrease in returns to incarceration for technical violations, while a welcome change, is largely explained by interruptions in probation operations, and therefore is almost certainly temporary. About half of the agencies responding to BJS’s supplemental survey reported that they suspended all supervision and closed agencies for a period of time in 2020.

Deeply troubling findings: Deaths as “releases” and “exits,” fewer releases amid a pandemic, and bad jail policy choices

Beyond adding context to some of what would otherwise appear to be “positive trends,” our analysis of the 2020 BJS data surfaced some deeply troubling findings about deaths in prison and on community supervision, the failure of states to release more people during the pandemic, and jail policy choices that reveal backwards priorities.

In prisons, BJS reports several disturbing changes from pre-pandemic 2019 to the end of 2020:

• Deaths in prison increased by 46% nationwide. More than 6,100 people died in prison in 2020, which was 1,930 more deaths than in 2019.⁸ California, Florida, Texas, and the federal Bureau of Prisons all saw more than 500 people die in their prisons in 2020 alone (there have been more deaths since).
  
• State and federal prisons released ten percent fewer people during the first year of the pandemic, a significant change compared to the typical 1-3% annual fluctuation in the number of releases. Some of this decrease may be explained by slowdowns in parole board functions (we see a lot of drops in “conditional” releases, which would include releases on parole), but in eight states, at least 2% of “releases” were, in fact, deaths. At a time when vaccines were not available and families, advocates, and public health officials were sounding the alarms about the extreme risks of COVID in and around correctional facilities, far more people should have been released from prisons — not far fewer.

As in previous years, there is a lot of data missing about what happens to people on probation and parole; in many states, BJS reports little about how many people complete supervision successfully, how many are returned to jail or prison, why they are returned, etc. But in 2020, one dismal trend was clear: Many so-called “exits” from probation and parole were actually deaths:

• A total of 22,573 people on probation and parole died in 2020, which represents about 2,800 (14%) more deaths than in 2019.
• Exits from parole due to death increased by 32% (1,945 additional deaths) from 2019 to 2020. This accounted for over 2% of parole “exits.”
• Exits from probation due to death increased in 28 of 38 reporting states from 2019 to 2020, an overall increase of over 6% (891 additional deaths). Additionally (and somewhat mysteriously), the number of “other” exits more than doubled (with over 50,000 more “other” exits), but there is no further detail on what those “other” exits might have been.

Getting state-by-state data, such as the BJS made available in the reports on prisons and on probation and parole populations in 2020, is key to bringing some important facts to light that would otherwise be obscured by the larger, nationwide trends. The state-specific data reported by BJS revealed that some states seemed to largely ignore the urgency and seriousness of the pandemic’s impact on correctional populations:

• Alaska’s incarcerated population actually increased by over 2% (over 100 people) in 2020. It was the only state to show an increase during this time. Worse, most of the increase was among the unsentenced (pretrial or pre-sentence) population, which means authorities made a choice to incarcerate many people who weren’t even serving a sentence.
• Nebraska’s prison population dropped only 6.6%, making it one of only three states with less than a 10% decrease. It also has the dubious distinction of being the one state to exceed its most generous measure of capacity,⁹ at 119% of its prisons’ operational capacity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Nebraska saw a greater-than-average (71%) increase in deaths in its prisons compared to 2019.
• Five states held more youth under age 18 in adult prisons in 2020 than in 2019: Alaska, Iowa, Nebraska (where their numbers doubled), Pennsylvania, and Tennessee.
• During the pandemic, most states saw reducing incarceration for violations of probation and parole conditions as “low hanging fruit” for depopulating prisons and jails, resulting in a 35% drop in returns to prison for violations nationwide. But six states returned almost the same number of people to prison for technical violations in 2020 as they did in 2019: Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Virginia. Not only is locking people up for violations of conditions counterproductive for their success and much more costly, it’s a clearly unnecessary and serious health risk during a pandemic.

Finally, while BJS has not yet released data about deaths in jails in 2020, the jail data suggests some truly confounding policy choices at the local level that year:

• One change likely to have long-term implications is that jail capacity actually grew during the pandemic by quite a bit: The capacity of jails nationwide grew by 6,000 beds in one year (compare that to an increase of 700 beds the year before). With this additional capacity, authorities are able to jail over 5% more people than they were ten years ago.
• In 2020, people in jail spent an average of two days longer locked up in dangerous conditions compared to 2019.¹⁰ Overall, the estimated average jail stay has increased by a whole week (31%) between 2010 and 2020. Like the other changes in 2020, the longer jail stays in 2020 are due to changes in courts and prisons related to COVID-19. But whatever the reason, longer stays meant vulnerable people were more exposed to extremely risky jail conditions, when their exposure should have been minimized.
• People who weren’t even convicted of a crime (i.e., those held in jail pretrial) made up a larger share of the total jail population than they have since at least 1995 — probably more than in any other year. At a time when jail populations should have been reduced to the bare minimum, why were jails holding so many legally innocent people?
• In response to the pandemic, many jurisdictions aimed to reduce the use of jails for low-level offenses. But in the summer of 2020, almost 1 in 4 (23%) people in jail were still held for misdemeanors, civil infractions, or unknown offenses — that is, not felonies. Moreover, the practice of jailing people for violations of probation and parole conditions still accounted for almost 1 in 5 (18%) people in jail in mid-2020.¹¹
• Black people made up a larger share of the jail population than they have since 2015, because the 22% jail population drop among Black people was proportionally smaller than the 28% drop among white people. While the difference was not dramatic, this imbalance should serve as a reminder that decarceration efforts must always prioritize racial equity.

Conclusions

The recent data reported by BJS about prison, jail, probation, and parole populations during the first year of the pandemic drive home just how quickly things can change under pressure. By and large, the changes we saw during 2020 were temporary, but they suggest how much is politically and practically feasible when there is a critical mass of support to save lives put at risk by mass incarceration. It’s encouraging to see rapid population drops of 15-25% in prisons and jails, to see the total “footprint” of the carceral system shrink by over 10% in one year, and to see that, when pressed, states and counties can find ways to function without so much reliance on correctional control. It’s also helpful to see the weaknesses in such decision-making, which are put into sharp relief when under the same pressure: Racial equity is too often an afterthought in decarceration efforts, and local-level authorities, in particular, too often lack alternatives to incarceration for low-level offenses and supervision violations, and are too quick to lock up people accused, but not convicted, of crimes. There are many lessons for policymakers and advocates for reform in the data from 2020.

At the same time, the fact that many positive early-pandemic policy changes were so short-lived is disheartening. After all, the pandemic rages on two years later, and correctional populations continue to climb back up — what has changed? For one thing, the narrative has changed: The perception (not a reality) that criminal justice reforms have led to upticks in crime over the past few years has fueled pushback against smart policy changes. That perception is powerful, and history shows that reactionary policies can follow: In the 1980s and 1990s, the last time prison and jail populations were as low as they were in 2020, the knee-jerk reaction to (much bigger) increases in crime was to lock more people up, and for longer. There’s a lesson in that for us, too.

Ultimately, centering the facts in our ongoing discussions about safety and justice — and grounding them with context — will be key to sustaining support for any progress toward ending mass incarceration. Towards that end, the recent data from BJS summarized here about changes during 2020 are essential resources.

11 of our most important reports of 2021

Some highlights from the six major reports and 40+ short reports we've published this year.

by Wanda Bertram, December 20, 2021

Our work in 2021 has exposed little-known forms of exploitation behind bars, heartless COVID-19 policies, and overlooked reasons that mass incarceration persists. With 2021 coming to a close, we thought we’d share the most important reports we published this year:

States of emergency: The failure of prison system responses to COVID-19

We gathered data from all 50 states and the federal government to compare how prison systems responded to the coronavirus in the pandemic’s first year and a half. We graded each state’s pandemic response along almost 30 data points, finding that virtually every state allowed prisons to remain crowded and unsanitary, abandoning incarcerated people to die. Our report includes graphics showing how states compare on key issues — like getting the vaccine to incarcerated people — and appendix tables breaking down all of the data we collected.

Parole boards approved fewer releases in 2020 than in 2019, despite the raging pandemic

Our analysis of parole releases in 13 states shows that in 2020 — amid a global pandemic that infected one in three people in U.S. prisons — parole boards actually held fewer parole hearings and granted fewer releases than in previous years. Parole grant rates are low in ordinary years, but the number of hearings and releases fell even lower during COVID-19, even in “progressive” states like New York.

States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2021

In this report, we compare the incarceration rates of every U.S. state to those of almost every independent country. We find that many states — if they were independent countries — would have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Moreover, every U.S. state incarcerates at least twice as many people (per capita) as do countries like the U.K., Canada, France, and Belgium, even though many of these countries have comparable or higher rates of violent crime.

Smoke and mirrors: A cautionary tale for counties considering a big, costly new jail

One of the many reasons mass incarceration persists is that county governments, dealing with crowded jails, believe the only solution is to build a new, bigger jail — even though their constituents often know better. This year, a resident of Otsego County, Michigan sent us his county’s proposal for a bigger jail, a report that the county had commissioned from a private jail architecture company. Our analysis of the firm’s arguments found that the county, contrary to needing a larger jail, was locking up many people for no good reason and should instead be working to reduce incarceration. Shortly after we released this piece, residents of Otsego County once again voted down the proposed jail expansion.

Building exits off the highway to mass incarceration: Diversion programs, explained

What should counties with crowded jails do, instead of building bigger jails? Policymakers often say the solution is a “diversion program” to keep people out of jail. But what exactly is a diversion program? This report explains the wide variety of programs that can be called “diversion,” and the benefits and drawbacks of each. We envision the criminal legal system as a highway, with diversion programs offering five major “exits” off the road to incarceration. We compare and contrast the different programs, showing how the best programs get people off the highway to incarceration as early as possible, long before arrest or jail time.

Slamming the courthouse door: 25 years of evidence for repealing the Prison Litigation Reform Act

The Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) — one of many damaging Clinton-era crime bills — has made it harder for incarcerated people to file federal lawsuits and seek relief when their civil and human rights are violated. For the 25th anniversary of the PLRA being signed into law, we worked with Professor Margo Schlanger, the nation’s leading expert on the issue, to expose the harm done by this law and explain how it limits access to meaningful justice and makes court orders less effective.

Rigging the Jury: How each state reduces jury diversity by excluding people with criminal records

Our first-of-its-kind report surfaces an important but under-discussed issue: the policies in all 50 states that reduce jury diversity by excluding some people with criminal records from serving. Our report includes an easy-to-read map and detailed table describing each state’s policies, and explains how these policies make criminal trials even less fair.

Native people in the criminal justice system: the data, visualized

For Indigenous People’s Day, we gathered and reported the key facts showing how Native people are overrepresented in the criminal justice system. Most importantly, we explain how the number of Native people locked up in prisons and jails has skyrocketed since 2000, coinciding with a jail-building boom on tribal lands. Our briefing also explains how persistent flaws in data collection obscure the scale and scope of Native people in the criminal justice system.

For the poorest people in prison, it’s a struggle to access even basic necessities

All too often, prisons force people to buy certain basic necessities (such as soap) from the commissary, rather than providing them at no cost. Prisons claim that people who are extremely poor can get certain items for free. But who qualifies as “poor” in prison? We conducted a 50-state survey to find out how prisons determine who “really needs” financial assistance, and discovered requirements so strict that even the poorest people often don’t qualify.

Show me the money: Tracking the companies that have a lock on sending funds to incarcerated people

Our 50-state report breaks down how much it costs to send funds to an incarcerated loved one. As people in prison are increasingly expected to pay for everyday costs like food and hygiene items, a whole industry has arisen to provide faster — but vastly more expensive — electronic money transfers to incarcerated people. Our report shows which companies (if any) hold the contracts to provide money-transfer services in each state prison system, and explains what the fees are to use these services, which harmful clauses are hidden in the “fine print,” and what a better money-transfer system might look like.

New data: state prisons and local jails are increasingly deadly places

Data released this year by the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that prison and jail deaths steadily increased in the several years leading up to 2018, even as correctional populations stayed relatively flat. In a short report, we dive into the new BJS data to explore what has caused in-custody deaths to rise over the past several years — a disturbing trend that anecdotal reports suggest is getting even worse during the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify several key factors at play, including abusive correctional healthcare systems, officials unwilling to give effective care to people with substance use disorders, and cruel policies that hurt incarcerated people’s mental health, driving many to suicide.

This list only scratches the surface of the work we’ve done in 2021. In total, we’ve published six major reports and over 40 shorter research briefings this year. To see more of our work, check out our Reports page and our Briefings page. Or, to see research we’ve conducted about your state, visit our state profile pages. And if you’d like to get more frequent updates on our work in 2022, you can sign up for our approximately-weekly email newsletter.

As we head into a new year, we’ll continue producing cutting-edge research that exposes the ways mass incarceration harms the people behind bars and our society as a whole.

For the poorest people in prison, it’s a struggle to access even basic necessities

Our survey of all 50 states and the BOP reveals that prisons make it hard for people to qualify as indigent—and even those who do qualify receive limited resources.

by Tiana Herring, November 18, 2021

Many people in prison struggle to purchase basic hygiene supplies, stamps, and other necessities of incarcerated life—thanks in part to the low wages they made before entering prison¹ and the mere pennies they earn working behind bars. Most prison systems claim to provide assistance to people who are extremely poor (or, in correctional policy terms, “indigent”). However, our new survey reveals that these “indigence policies” are extremely limited—both in who they help, and the amount of assistance provided.

We found that in almost every state² and the federal prison system, incarcerated people must maintain extremely low balances in their “inmate trust funds”³ before receiving any help with essential items like soap and stamps. And being deemed indigent is only half of the battle, as many states provide very few resources even to those who do qualify. What’s more, in 18 states, the assistance given to indigent people is actually treated as a loan they must repay if their account balance ever goes up, meaning that people are required to go into debt for access to basic necessities.

We gathered information on indigence policies in all 50 states and the federal Bureau of Prisons by looking through state departments of corrections’ websites and contacting public information officers in each system. Here, we offer answers to two questions:

1. How is indigence is defined in each state?
2. What items or services are supposed to be provided to indigent incarcerated people, according to state policies?

Most states have very narrow definitions of who qualifies as “indigent”

We were able to find a definition for indigence in 41 states and the federal Bureau of Prisons. The remaining nine states did not have easily accessible definitions online, and were not able to provide us with the requested information when asked. The lack of transparency is disappointing, and makes it difficult to hold prisons accountable for doing the bare minimum to support the poorest incarcerated people. Worse, this inability to produce policy information may be an indication that some states do not have indigence policies, meaning extremely poor incarcerated people in these states might not receive any assistance at all.

Every single department of corrections with an indigence policy requires people to have very little money before they can qualify. The monetary thresholds for indigence status range from a low of $0 (meaning that people with $1 to their name would not be considered indigent) to a maximum of $25. Over half of states have their limits set between $0 and $10. Additionally, most states require that people keep these low balances for at least a month before qualifying. If someone does get money added to their account that exceeds the indigence limit, they lose their indigence status and have to wait before they can be considered indigent again. In New Mexico, for example, an incarcerated person must have $0 in their account for a month before they qualify as indigent. Going so long with such low account balances means that people are surviving on severely limited access to food⁴ and basic necessities like toilet paper. While 30 days was the most common wait time – and certainly too long to have to wait for soap and envelopes to write home – Alabama, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Utah all require people to wait even longer, from 45 to 90 days.⁵

These arbitrary limits on the amount of money people can have means that people can lose their “indigence” status—and therefore their access to necessary supplies—just because they received a small deposit from a family member or for working a prison job. Many indigence policies specifically prohibit deposits and income of any amount in their definitions. For example, an incarcerated person in Maryland making 15 cents an hour for their labor can’t qualify for indigence status; while $0.15 an hour will hardly make someone rich, people are not allowed to work and receive free access to indigent supplies. These policies often ignore that many incarcerated people have automatic deductions taken from any money deposited into their accounts, including for fines and fees, involuntary savings funds, or repaying the department of corrections for items they received previously while considered indigent.

We also found that four states put additional work-related requirements on who can qualify for indigence, by limiting the status to those who are incapable of working, are “involuntarily unemployed,” or are actively seeking work.

The fact that free basic supplies are provided only to the poorest people—and not to all incarcerated people for free by default—fits with correctional trends of shifting the costs of incarceration onto incarcerated people and their families, as also evidenced through the rise of paid services like tablets and phone calls.

The services offered to indigent people vary from state to state, but they are always very limited

The most common items provided to indigent incarcerated people are hygiene kits⁶ and supplies for sending a limited number of letters to loved ones; the number of free letters allowed range from one per month in Ohio to seven per week in Maryland. Legal mail is also mentioned in many policies, though departments of corrections are more likely to require repayment for these mailings. In some states, people have to choose between using their mail supplies for personal or legal mail, as they aren’t always considered separate services.

Eighteen states require indigent people to pay the department of corrections back for at least some of the services they receive while deemed indigent. In at least seven states, correctional agencies don’t appear to offer any services or supplies for free without the expectation of repayment. The Department of Corrections in Washington State, for example, covers the cost of mailing up to 10 letters per month for indigent incarcerated people. However, if the indigent person ever loses their indigence status, the department will recoup the costs for any letters previously mailed for free by deducting money from their “inmate trust accounts.” In states with repayment policies, the only way for the poorest incarcerated people to stay out of debt is to simply not write letters to their families, despite the fact that communication is crucial for maintaining family ties and increasing the chance of success upon release.

Every prison system can—and should—do more

Every indigence policy we looked at could be improved, but some states have implemented a few decent practices (at no cost to incarcerated people or their families) that others could consider adopting:

• Seven states allow indigent incarcerated people and their families the opportunity—though often very limited—to communicate via phone calls, video calls, email, or texts free of charge.⁷
• Seven states clearly state that feminine hygiene products are provided to those who need them, free of charge.⁸
• Seven states specify that toilet paper is provided to indigent incarcerated people for free.⁹
• New Jersey provides indigent incarcerated people with a $15 monthly allowance for commissary, which is important for access to food and basic necessities.
• California’s code of regulations prohibits charging indigent incarcerated people for mailing services they received while considered indigent (including the cost of materials, copying, and postage) if they lose indigent status.

Stringent indigence policies punish the poorest people in prison by severely limiting the amount of money people can have and still receive free services, dictating how they can spend the little money they do have, and making them wait weeks in extreme poverty before offering help. All incarcerated people deserve, at minimum, access to hygiene items and ways to communicate with loved ones without having to take on even more debt.

Show me the money: Tracking the companies that have a lock on sending funds to incarcerated people

We looked at all fifty state departments of corrections to figure out which companies hold the contracts to provide money-transfer services and what the fees are to use these services.

by Stephen Raher and Tiana Herring, November 9, 2021

Table of Contents

Findings

Fees are high

Three companies dominate

There’s a little competition

Competition may not benefit consumers

Outsourcing

Mailed payments

Terms of use abuse

Recommendations and actions

For families

For regulators

For procurement officials

For companies

Footnotes

As people in prison are increasingly expected to pay for everyday costs (food, hygiene items, correspondence, etc.), the mechanics of how people send money to incarcerated people assumes heightened importance. Family members used to mail a money order to a PO box, and a day or two later, the money would be in the recipient’s trust account.¹ In those days, the most common complaint from family members and incarcerated recipients used to be about delays in processing money orders. Quick to use consumer psychology to turn a buck, a whole industry arose to provide faster–but vastly more expensive–electronic money transfers to incarcerated people.

This “correctional banking” industry includes specialized services like release cards, but at its core the industry makes money off the simple (but highly lucrative) business of facilitating transfers from friends and family members to incarcerated recipients. The industry relentlessly crows about the speed of electronic transfers, while conveniently glossing over the high fees that typically accompany these services. To get a better sense of the landscape, we looked at all fifty state departments of corrections and tried to figure out which companies (if any) hold the contract(s) to provide money-transfer services for each prison system. When possible, we tried to figure out what the fees are to use these services.

Below, we provide the results of our review, identify notable trends in this realm, and highlight steps families of people who are incarcerated, regulators, procurement officials, and companies can take to make money transfers more convenient, affordable, and easy to understand.

Notable trends

Fees for prison money transfers are really high

We live in an age of financial technology (known as “fintech“), where people are accustomed to digitally sending or receiving money from friends and family at little or no cost. A service like Venmo allows no-fee personal transfers from bank accounts or debit cards (payments from a credit card are subject to a 3% fee). Other companies providing similar services charge roughly equivalent fees.² We looked at 33 state prison systems where fee information was available. We found rates ranging from 5% to 37% for online transfers. The average fee is 19% for a $20 online transfer, with a slight decline for higher-dollar transfers (the average fee for a $50 transfer is 12%). Fees for phone or in-person payments (options more likely to appeal to low-income people without a bank account) were generally higher than for online payments. There is no reasonable explanation why prison money transfers are so much more expensive than regular “free world” services like Venmo.

Three companies dominate the market

Three companies dominate the correctional money-transfer market, at least where prisons are concerned (it’s likely that there are smaller “fringe” players that provide this type of service to jails). The three dominant companies are JPay (a Securus subsidiary that was recently fined $6 million for improper practices in its release-card business), Global*Tel Link (which sometimes uses the tradename “Touchpay”), and Access Corrections.

Search contractsSee the companies profiting off money transfers

A few smaller companies also appeared in our survey: a company called JailATM holds a couple of contracts (JailATM is also a minor player in the electronic messaging industry); commissary operator Keefe Group is one of three companies serving the Arizona prison system; and, a company called Cashless Systems, Inc., (a closely-held corporation operated out of a residence in Raleigh, North Carolina and doing business as Premier Services) holds the contract for Mississippi prisons.

There’s a little bit of competition

Most prisons pick one company that receives a monopoly on money-transfer services, but at least eleven states (22%) allow people to choose from two or more different companies.³ Prisons like to give monopoly contracts for things like phone service or operating the commissary. Administrators often cite security concerns as a justification for using only one company as a contractor. But this doesn’t seem to be the case when it comes to money transfers, even though a brief review of corrections-department webpages reveals that prison officials have plenty of security concerns about money transfers.⁴ It’s telling that when it comes to facilitating the flow of money into prison, many corrections departments are suddenly open to competition.

It’s unclear how much competition actually benefits consumers

We took a closer look at fees in states that offered more than one option, and found that those states had slightly lower money-transfer fees. For example, the 11 states with multiple options had an average fee of 16% for a $20 transfer, as opposed to an average of 20% in 26 states that issued monopoly contracts (see table 2).⁵ But this only tells a part of the story. In the states with more than one option, it can be extremely complicated for a consumer to figure out what the lowest-cost option is.

As an example of complexity that can arise from multiple options, consider the California Department of Corrections (which houses over 130,000 people). California contracts with all three of the dominant money-transfer vendors (JPay/Securus, GTL, and Access Corrections). JPay is significantly cheaper than the other companies if you want to send $20. But increase the amount the transfer to $50, and JPay is the most expensive option. Worse yet, the prison department’s webpage doesn’t show a chart of the different companies’ respective fees–so the only way a family member can figure out the different fee options is to create accounts with three different companies, initiate test transactions in each system, and then manually compare the different fees (or maybe hunt around vendor websites for a fee table buried in some non-obvious place). The complexity of the options is outlined in table 3. And keep in mind that this is only an example based on two different amounts–if you wanted to send $30, you’d have to perform another round of test transactions to figure out the cheapest option. This kind of opacity seems purposefully designed to prevent consumers from finding the most cost-effective option.

Prisons don’t have to outsource

Most prison systems appear to have outsourced money transfers, but there are still some that handle these transactions in-house. Several states still process money-order payments sent through the mail. We also identified four states (Arkansas, Maine, Montana, and Texas) that accept online payments through a general-purpose state-operated online payment platform.

Interestingly, Arkansas recently added Access Corrections as an alternative to the state-operated payment platform. Access Corrections’ fees in Arkansas are 25¢ less than the fees for the state-operated system, and are by far the lowest fees we have seen Access Corrections charge in any prison system–thus suggesting that companies set rates based on what other options are available, and they can provide low-cost transfers when they’re forced to.

Mailed payments are still an option in many states

The vast majority of states (around 45) still allow people to mail a money order at no fee. Some states direct people to mail those money orders to the department of corrections’ accounting office; other states outsource the processing to vendors like JPay and Access Corrections. But, just because there’s no fee, doesn’t mean there’s no cost–between the cost of the money order itself, and a stamp, the sender will probably pay around $2, but that’s lower than most online fees.⁶ The issue, of course, is speed. The vendors that hold correctional banking contracts earn their profits from fees charged for payments made online or over the phone. Do we trust them to promptly process money orders for which they receive no fee revenue? If their terms of service are any indication, the companies seem to reserve the right to deliberately delay money-order processing.

Don’t forget the fine print

People can’t use these money-transfer services without agreeing to fine-print provisions (sometimes called “terms of use” or “terms and conditions”). These take-it-or-leave it documents (known to lawyers as contracts of adhesion) are ubiquitous in modern life, but they take on a particularly sinister role in the context of prison money transfers. We all agree to boilerplate terms when we use services like Gmail, Netflix, or Amazon. Even though these giant corporations have the upper hand, there is a faint form of accountability: consumer advocates and journalists routinely scour terms and conditions for unfair surprises; when a particularly egregious term is exposed, companies can be shamed and consumers can “vote with their feet” by switching to other providers. None of these safeguards are applicable to correctional money-transfer services, where the company controls a critical service for incarcerated people.

Terms imposed by the dominant money-transfer vendors are replete with objectionable, misleading, and unfair provisions. We’ve grouped some of the more problematic provisions into five categories, discussed below.

1. Failure to promise anything in return for consumer’s money. Read a money-transfer website, and you’ll understandably be left with the impression that you can pay the vendor a fee to transfer money to someone in prison. But read the fine print, it turns out the companies don’t actually promise to do anything. All three of the leading companies disclaim “any warranty of any kind, express or implied.”⁷ Advertising a certain service (like transferring money) and then using fine print to disclaim any responsibility to actually provide that service is considered a deceptive practice under many consumer-protection laws.
2. Seemingly intentional degradation of money-order payments. As noted above, sending a money order is obviously slower than making an online transfer, but in many cases it can be cheaper. But companies seem to go out of their way to make money-order payments arduously slow and plagued by uncertainty. JPay’s terms, for example, promise that payments will be “transmitted” within 1 or 2 business days, except for money-orders, which “are generally processed within ten (10) business days” (most people would refer to 10 business days as two weeks, which is an inexcusably long amount of time for processing small-dollar consumer payments).⁸ Both JPay and Access Corrections disclaim any liability for money orders that they receive, but which are not credited to the recipient’s account.⁹
3. Privacy and consumer rights. Companies’ terms of use and privacy policies are replete with confusing or troublesome provisions regarding use of customers’ data. Some examples:
   • JPay requires customers to consent to a credit check,¹⁰ which makes no sense because JPay does not extend credit and it’s unclear why the company needs that kind of private information.
   • Companies say that user information can be shared with law enforcement, which at first glance isn’t terribly surprising. But many customers might be surprised that the terms of information sharing are so broad that they vitiate any kind of reasonable safeguards for consumers. Access Corrections, for example, says that it can share information with law enforcement, but it defines law enforcement as “personnel involved in the…investigative (public and private) or public safety purposes” (which, aside from being atrocious grammar, essentially means they can share your information with anyone who says they have a public safety purpose).¹¹ GTL allows personal information to be shared with “law enforcement or correctional staff,” but doesn’t require that such staff have a proper job-related purpose for receiving such information.¹²
   • Access Corrections states that it has the right to use any customer communications to market its services, without notice or compensation to the customer.¹³ (Consumer activists successfully sued Facebook in 2011 for using customer likenesses without consent, but Access Corrections is apparently unconcerned about running afoul of the same laws that tripped up the behemoth Facebook).
4. Poorly designed services. Several miscellaneous provisions indicate how poorly these companies carry out their operations. For example, JPay terms state that the only cost to send money is the “service fee” that must be paid prior to making the transfer.¹⁴ But a different paragraph in JPay’s terms state that if the company owes money to a customer (e.g., for a refund), and the customer does not claim the money, JPay will eat up the amount of the refund by levying a “monthly service fee” (this monthly fee is not mentioned on any of JPay’s fee disclosure pages, nor do the terms of service specify how much the fee is).¹⁵ JPay also requires 2 weeks’ advance notice before cancelling a recurring payment (this is probably not allowed under Visa’s rules, which reference a 7-day maximum advance notice requirement and require a “simple” mechanism for cancelling recurring payments¹⁶).
5. Dispute resolution. A lot of us are forced to agree to arbitration provisions buried in the fine print of consumer contracts. But these clauses, which prevent consumers from going to court to vindicate their legal rights, are especially troublesome when the company imposing the provision has a monopoly on an essential service. GTL allows customers to “opt out” of arbitration, but also states that the company can terminate the accounts of customers who exercise that right.¹⁷ JailATM, meanwhile, requires customers to consent to arbitration conducted by the National Arbitration Forum,¹⁸ a disgraced company that was forced to stop conducting consumer arbitrations in 2009 as part of a legal settlement (in fact, we pointed out this problem in our 2016 report on electronic messaging, but JailATM apparently has not bothered to update their terms in the intervening five years). Other troublesome terms that are unrelated to arbitration include one-sided indemnification provisions¹⁹ and limitations periods for disputes that are substantially shorter than most states’ statutes of limitations for contract claims.²⁰

Suggestions for improvements

The current system is complicated, inconvenient, and expensive. Different people have different opportunities to address these problems, as explained below.

Family members of incarcerated people

It may seem like family members have no leverage in this unfair system, but there are some things they can do to advocate for change.

• Complain about high fees or poor service. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”) has an easy-to-use online complaint system specifically designed for financial services like money transfers. Your state attorney general may also be able to investigate certain abusive or deceptive practices. If the relevant prison system has an ombuds or office of family support, send a copy of your complaint to them as well.
• Talk to legislators. Money-transfer vendors take advantage of the lack of regulatory oversight. It turns out that money-transfer vendors are subject to regulation in nearly all states as “money-transmitters;” however, money-transmitter regulations are focused on the fiscal health of the business (known as “prudential regulation”), not protecting consumers. But legislatures can close this loophole. Tell state legislators (or, in the case of jails, county commissioners) about the economic toll of money-transfer fees, and ask them to pass legislation requiring regulatory agencies to enact rules protecting customers of correctional money-transfer services.
• If possible, plan ahead and send a money order to avoid fees. If there are problems with money orders (slow processing, out of state mailing addresses), tell facility management and point out that “just send money online” isn’t an adequate response, because the online option is so expensive.

Regulators

• Federal law prohibits financial service providers from taking unreasonable advantage of a consumer’s inability to protect their own interests in selecting or using a consumer financial service.²¹ Users of correctional money-transfer services are unable to protect their own interests because they must either use a monopoly provider selected by a correctional facility, or choose from 2 or 3 options, all of which appear to set exorbitant prices in relation to their competitors. The CFPB is tasked with enforcing this law, and it should use its investigative and enforcement powers to crack down on unreasonably high money-transfer fees.
• The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) is also empowered to issue rules prohibiting specific unfair trade practices that cause reasonably foreseeable injury to consumers.²² The FTC should use this authority, either by itself or in conjunction with the CFPB, to develop rules governing maximum allowable fees and what types of contractual terms vendors can (or can’t) impose on customers.

Prison procurement officials

• At least part of the high cost of money transfers comes from some prison systems demanding or accepting “commissions” (or kickbacks) from vendors. As with phone contracts, prisons can help lower costs by refusing commissions.
• Look for in-house alternatives from other parts of state government. Prison systems are departments within state governments. Other state agencies are accustomed to accepting online payments (for vehicle registrations, hunting licenses, tuition, or any number of purposes). Have any of them developed low-cost in-house solutions for processing these payments? And if so, can those solutions be adapted for use in prisons? Arkansas, Maine, Montana, and Texas have figured out how to do it–other states should follow suit.
• Sending a money order by mail is a no-fee option in most states, but the utility of this option is severely limited when vendors deliberately prolong the amount of time it takes to process money orders. States can make this better in a number of ways. If at all possible, keep the processing of money orders in-house. If money-order processing is outsourced, there are two requirements that the state should put into its contract with the money-transfer vendor. First, the vendor should be required to process money orders within one business day of delivery. Second, the vendor should provide an in-state mailing address for all money order payments.²³
• Post all fees on the DOC information page: as noted above, some states sign contracts with multiple vendors, but don’t post the companies’ respective fees in one location. Every DOC webpage about money transfers should include an easy-to-read disclosure of applicable fees so that all family members and all staff members are aware of these fees.
• Provide specific details about garnishments/mandatory deductions. Many prison systems deduct money from incoming transfers to pay for mandatory fines, child support, restitution, cost of confinement, or other fees. Money-transfer vendors, unsurprisingly, disclaim any liability for these deductions. It’s true that these deductions are created by the state, so the state bears responsibility for explaining them. This is important information: if someone in prison needs $20 to pay for hygiene items, then a relative sending money needs to know how much to send so that the recipient actually gets $20 after mandatory deductions. Any webpage that includes information on how to send money should also include detailed information on how much is deducted and what deposits are subject to garnishment. This information should include what deductions apply to everyone, versus which deductions (like child support) only apply to a subset of recipients. Ideally, the webpage should also include a calculator so that users can type in a transfer amount and instantly see how much will be delivered to the recipient.

Companies

Last but not least, money-transfer vendors themselves have the most power to address problems in the industry they have created. While it’s probably unrealistic to expect these companies to voluntarily reduce fees, if companies are serious about their marketing puffery,²⁴ there are other simple steps they could take to make customers’ lives easier.

• To the extent that money-transfer fees are inflated in part due to commissions being paid to correctional facilities, vendors should offer a commission-free alternative in all bids.
• All vendors include vague provisions in their terms of use that transfers from a customer’s credit card “may” be treated as a cash advance. While the vendor probably can’t give a definitive answer (because the bank or entity that issues the credit card the consumer is using has some discretion in how to handle these transactions), the vendors are the ones who create the transaction record, so they know how it’s coded.²⁵ Vendors should provide customers with the precise transaction coding applicable to their payment so that customers can then be fully informed when they ask their own bank how the transaction will be treated.
• It costs very little to write fair and easy-to-understand contracts. Vendors should rewrite their terms and conditions and eliminate things like arbitration provisions, 2-week processing times for mailed payments, and disclaimers of any warranties whatsoever.

The U.S. criminal justice system disproportionately hurts Native people: the data, visualized

We’re lucky when criminal justice data is broken down by race and ethnicity enough to see how Native populations are criminalized and incarcerated. Here’s a roundup of what we know.

by Leah Wang, October 8, 2021

This Monday is Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a holiday dedicated to Native American people, their rich histories, and their cultures. Our way of observing the holiday: sending a reminder that Native people are harmed in unique ways by the U.S. criminal justice system. We offer a roundup of what we know about Native people (those identified by the Census Bureau as American Indian/Alaska Native) who are impacted by prisons, jails, and police, and about the persistent gaps in data collection and disaggregation that hide this layer of racial and ethnic disparity.

The U.S. incarcerates a growing number of Native people, and what little data exist show overrepresentation

In 2019, the latest year for which we have data, there were over 10,000 Native people locked up in local jails. Although this population has fluctuated over the past 10 years, the Native jail population is up a shocking 85% since 2000.¹ And these figures don’t even include those held in “Indian country jails,” which are located on tribal lands: The number of people in Indian country jails increased by 61% between 2000 and 2018.² Meanwhile, the total population of Native people living on tribal lands has actually decreased slightly over the same time period, leaving us to conclude that we are criminalizing Native people at ever-increasing rates.

Government data publications breaking down incarcerated populations by race or ethnicity often omit Native people, or obscure them unhelpfully in a meaningless “Other” category, perhaps because they make up a relatively small share of the total population. The latest incarceration data, however, shows that American Indian and Alaska Native people have high rates of incarceration in both jails and prisons as compared with other racial and ethnic groups. In jails, Native people had more than double the incarceration rate of white people, and in prisons this disparity was even greater.

Native people made up 2.1% of all federally incarcerated people in 2019, larger than their share of the total U.S. population, which was less than one percent.³ Similarly, Native people made up about 2.3% of people on federal community supervision in mid-2018. The reach of the federal justice system into tribal territory is complex: State law often does not apply, and many serious crimes can only be prosecuted at the federal level, where sentences can be harsher than they would be at the state level. This confusing network of jurisdiction sweeps Native people up into federal correctional control in ways that don’t apply to other racial and ethnic groups.⁴

Native women are particularly overrepresented in the incarcerated population: They made up 2.5% of women in prisons and jails in 2010, the most recent year for which we have this data (until the 2020 Census data is published); that year, Native women were just 0.7% of the total U.S. female population.⁵ Their overincarceration is another maddening aspect of our nation’s contributions to human rights crises facing Native women, in addition to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) and high rates of sexual and other violent victimization.⁶

Confinement of Native youth is a crisis

The rampant racial disparities in how Native youth are treated by the juvenile and criminal justice system are somewhat better-documented. Their confinement rates, second only to those of Black youth, exceed those of white, Hispanic and Asian youth combined. Forces contributing to this disparity include disproportionate arrest rates of Native youth for some offense types, the school-to-prison pipeline, and harsher outcomes for court-involved youth, particularly for low-level offenses like technical violations of probation and status offenses.

In absolute numbers, there are fewer Native youth than there are white, Black, Hispanic, or Asian youth, but the rate at which they are in contact with police and youth confinement facilities is alarming. Centuries of historical trauma are manifesting in Native youth as mental health and substance use issues that go untreated, and can lead to status offenses (acts that are only criminal because of one’s age, like skipping school) or other “delinquent” behavior. Once again, federal jurisdiction over tribal lands makes Native youth worse off for being swept up into criminal-legal matters at all, because they’re more likely to receive longer federal sentences and less likely to receive the services and support they need.

Even the best data collection obscures the scale and scope of Native people in the criminal justice system

There is still a long way to go to attain consistent data collection and reporting on Native populations in the criminal justice system. One glaring problem is that pesky “Other” category where we sometimes find Asian, Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian, and American Indian/Alaska Native people. This is clearly an unhelpful category for uncovering bias throughout policing, courts, jails, prisons, and supervision.

One reason that even our most disaggregated data falls short is that often, people reporting two or more races are lumped into various categories depending on who is publishing the data. In 2011, the latest year for which we have this data, the single-race American Indian/Alaska Native jail population was 12,100 while the total number of people who included a Native identity was almost 70,000. This reporting makes it clear that Native people are overrepresented among the incarcerated populations, but we don’t always see the data presented in a way that highlights this disparity.⁷

Even great strides in this area will likely not give us tribal-level data. Native American people are not a monolith; there are 574 federally recognized Native American tribes as of March 2020. On a day that some are beginning to dedicate to Native people, rather than the people seeking to erase them, it’s critical to understand how Native people on both tribal and non-tribal lands are overcriminalized.

Smoke and mirrors: A cautionary tale for counties considering a big, costly new jail

How law enforcement and jail architects almost duped taxpayers into approving a new jail far bigger than the county needs, by offering biased analysis and misleading arguments.

by Wendy Sawyer, July 6, 2021

We’ve called on counties before to ask the right questions before deciding to build a costly new jail, because history has shown that expanded jails are quickly filled with people who wouldn’t have been jailed before, with serious personal and community consequences. A recent jail expansion proposal in Otsego County, Michigan now shows us what happens when a county either doesn’t ask those key questions about how its jail is used – or doesn’t offer the public good answers.

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

Correctional, law enforcement, and court officials in Otsego County, a northern Michigan county with a population of about 25,000, have been pushing to expand their 34-bed jail for fifteen years. They’ve solicited at least three studies to evaluate local correctional systems and recommend solutions to reduce jail overcrowding. So why aren’t voters convinced of the need for a $30 million, 120-170 bed jail? We looked at the arguments offered to the public and quite simply, the arguments aren’t convincing to anyone who doesn’t build new jails or lock people up for a living.

The worst jail assessment we’ve ever seen

In its most recent attempt to justify a much-bigger jail, the county enlisted an architectural firm to conduct a “feasibility study.” The architects were not criminal justice experts – and it shows.¹ The 13 pages of the report dedicated to “analysis” rationalizing the need for a bigger jail are heavy on charts and light on analysis; the 30 pages of architectural and construction plans that follow show where the authors’ expertise and priorities lie. The “Analytics” section of the report includes many charts and arguments that nevertheless fail to advance the case, including:

Sample image from the architects’ report. Why does the scale of this graph appear to change in 2019, so that 24,985 appears lower than 24,665? And why does the chart show the population at 10-year intervals except for 2018 and 2019? What is the community supposed to take away from this inscrutable chart?

• Four charts on county population projections through 2049, ostensibly meant to tie the need for a 253% increase in jail space to the county’s current 0.11% annual growth rate (and some of these charts are nonsensical, as shown in the screenshot here);
• A summary of annual court caseloads from 2008-2018, which shows a trend of decreasing caseloads over time, and also concludes “no apparent relationship to population growth” and “projection modeling does not indicate probability/necessity for future court [sic] within the study milestone periods”;
• A summary of jail bookings, average daily populations, and average length of stay from 2009-2012 and 2014-2018, showing that the jail typically operated at between 100-115% capacity before 2013, but has operated at 70-88% capacity for four out of five years since;²³
• A confusing array of jail population “projection models” based on average daily populations from different years of historical data: The model that includes all nine years of past data predicts an average daily population of 29 people or less through 2049; the model based on only the three most recent years of data projects a maximum average daily population of 66 people in the jail in 2049. There is no discussion of why the county should base its plans on one model over any other, and you can probably guess what projection the authors base their recommendation on (yes, the biggest one).
• Scant attention to the composition of the jail population, making it hard to see how the jail is currently used: There is one chart about the gender breakdown of the daily population. There is no analysis of the population by offense type, sentence length, classification levels, or conviction status. The closest the report gets to evidence-based analysis of how the jail is currently used is one chart showing that, of all the people booked into the jail between 2009-2018, about half were sentenced and half were unsentenced.

The most damning sentence in the architects’ report (our highlighting added) calls the jail population data “unreliable,” even though that data makes up most of their own Analytics section.

The most telling parts of the consultants’ report are its conclusions that the jail population data are “unreliable” and “invalid,” even though those data make up most of the Analytics section. If the data are really “unreliable” or “invalid,” why did the consultants include them and make so many charts about them? Was it simply to give their recommendations the appearance of impartiality and rationality? Instead of basing their recommendations on the data available and presented to the public, the final recommendation for the new jail size is based largely on “interviews with justice and law enforcement personnel” and the “experience of the study team.” And, of course, both groups – justice and law enforcement personnel and the team of architects and engineers – stand to benefit from building a bigger jail.

Law enforcement and judicial officials complained to the consultants that, with the jail often near maximum capacity, they “have one hand tied behind their back,” and have been forced to come up with alternative sanctions instead of jailing people for all of the offenses they’d like to. Ironically, many of the alternatives officials complained about being forced to use are widely considered “best practices” today:

• Issuing citations in lieu of arrest
• Using non-carceral sanctions for violations of probation or drug court conditions
• Sentencing to an alternative-to-incarceration program, such as the drug court or the sheriff’s day reporting “work camp”
• Using restraint in prosecutorial charging decisions to avoid unnecessary incarceration
• Avoiding the misuse of the jail to lock people up for mental health or substance use disorders

Local officials often dodge the question asked by community leaders: “If we let you build a bigger jail, will you just fill it?”

In Otsego County, instead of expanding upon the alternative sanctions already in place, law enforcement and judicial officials estimated that if they had a bigger jail, they “could now have 90-100” people in jail instead of 30-40. And just who are these residents that they “can’t” lock up now, but would, if only they had a bigger jail? According to the feasibility study, these include 45 “potential probation violators” and 20 people who would – with the current system – be sentenced to the alternative work release program. Their intention is clear: if taxpayers let them build a bigger jail, they can and will fill it.

Community members have received mixed messages from local officials in response to their concerns that the new jail will immediately be filled once police have a place to book more people and judges have a place to detain and incarcerate them. In a local newspaper series about the need for a new jail, the county jail administrator said that’s “not necessarily true”: “We have great judges and I don’t see them being overzealous and automatically going to the jail commitment.” But in the same article, one of those local judges commented:

“What it comes down to is it hampers my ability to do my job, which is to protect our community by creating this deterrent effect and this punishment. If I’ve got to give this person work camp or probation, I’m not accomplishing that goal because it doesn’t have the same effect as sitting in jail for 30 or 60 days.”

It’s true that sitting in jail has a different effect than sentences that allow people to remain in the community, such as probation – but the evidence is clear that the costs of locking people up are much greater than the negligible (if any) deterrent effect of incarceration:

• A pair of studies comparing two groups of people convicted of felonies in Michigan – some sentenced to prison and some sentenced to probation – found that (1) incarceration did not reduce the likelihood of future violent crimes after release and (2) incarceration increased the odds of re-incarceration, mainly due to technical violations of post-release supervision. In other words, compared to probation, incarceration had no deterrent effect, but did lead to more incarceration for low-level offenses and violations.
• Even a short stint in jail can seriously destabilize individuals and families: In a study of people detained in jail pretrial before being released on bond, those who were jailed for three days or more were almost 2.5 times less likely to be employed, 40% more likely to struggle with housing instability, and 59% more likely to report negative impacts on their children compared to people jailed for less than three days, when surveyed after release.
• Short sentences to incarceration lead to long-term employment problems: Another study found that young people who were incarcerated after being convicted for the first time were more likely to be unemployed afterwards than similar individuals who were not incarcerated. Even though the average sentence length for the incarcerated individuals was only about four months, the effect on employment lasted for up to six years after their release.
• Jails are dangerous places, with increasingly high death rates, especially for people struggling with mental health and substance use disorders. And higher jail incarceration rates impact the health of surrounding communities, too: A recent study found that, at the county level, increasing jail incarceration rates were linked to increases in overall deaths from infectious diseases, chronic lower respiratory disease, substance use, suicide, and other causes of death. Jail incarceration is very much a public health issue.

Another bad-faith argument from jail proponents: “But we have outstanding warrants!”

In addition to the seriously flawed “feasibility study,” Otsego County law enforcement also point to “over 1,100 outstanding warrants” as evidence that they need a bigger jail. However, a closer look at those warrant details shows that only a fraction are clearly related to public safety. Additionally, many of the underlying offenses are no longer criminal or jailable under Michigan’s recent jail reforms – meaning that even with a bigger jail, very few are likely to actually lead to jail time as our closer look at the warrant list reveals:

Our analysis of the county’s backlog of warrants. We took a close look at the list of outstanding warrants jail proponents point to as evidence that more jail space is needed. In our analysis, we paid particular attention to how old the warrants are, whether or not they are “bench warrants” meant to bring someone back to clear up court matters, whether or not the underlying offenses would likely lead to jail time under Michigan’s recent jail reforms, and whether the offenses are related to public safety. The center image shows just a sample page of the 36-page “warrant details” document, and the highlighted lines of text are illustrative examples of our overall findings, explained in the surrounding text boxes.

Proponents of the Otsego jail expansion rely on some thin and out-of-date arguments to make their case. For example, they point to a summary of drug cases initiated by a regional undercover drug task force that includes Otsego County, which shows that the task force initiated an increasing number of cases in Otsego County from 2016-2019, with a high of 56 cases in 2019. That summary does not offer a detailed breakdown of these cases, but a local news report shows that in 2018, the task force’s work – across all seven counties – most typically involved prescription opiates and marijuana, which accounted for 44% of all cases that year.⁴ Now that Michigan has legalized recreational marijuana use, possession, and licensed sale, the county can expect few, if any, new marijuana arrests. And of course, in 2021, no one would argue that jail is any kind of solution for the prescription opioid problem.

How the county’s jail assessment went wrong and how other counties can get it right

The National Institute of Corrections – part of the U.S. Department of Justice – has a Jails Division for the express purpose of offering technical assistance, information resources, networks and training to local jail systems – including help with jail and justice system assessment and planning. Among the agency’s numerous publicly available resources is a Jail Capacity Planning Guide, which emphasizes “a systems approach.” The authors emphasize the need to look at the ways various parts of the local justice system impact a jail’s population and how the jail is used.

A “systems approach” looks closely at all the moving parts that impact jail populations, instead of focusing on those populations alone. This makes sense: Jails are just one facet of a community’s criminal justice system, and any of those facets can be changed – not just jail size:

• Laws determine which offenses are “jailable” and which should result in a citation or summons at most.
• Law enforcement use their discretion to arrest, issue citations, connect people with services, or simply let people go.
• Prosecutors make charging decisions and can offer diversion programs or decline to prosecute.
• Judges and magistrates order people detained or released pretrial, impact court processes, and make sentencing decisions.
• Court systems, including data and information sharing systems, affect how long a case takes to process, and therefore how long people are detained pretrial or before sentencing.
• Finally, jail administrators can also influence who is held in the jail, under what conditions, and for how long.

Unfortunately, the county’s “jail first” approach looked at the jail population alone as evidence of whether the jail is “big enough.” A community should get a chance to understand how all of these different parts of the system are contributing to the jail situation before taking the huge and irreversible step of sinking tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into a bigger jail that will lock up more of their own.

Conclusion and recommendations: Separating what law enforcement wants from what the community needs

The good news in Otsego County is that despite the aggressive public relations campaign launched by its proponents, taxpayers were not convinced and voted down a tax increase to pay for the new jail. But the argument will surely be back, and the whole experience is a warning to other communities.

Advocates working to prevent criminal justice system expansion should anticipate that local criminal justice officials may frame their professional wants as community needs. But law enforcement have a singular perspective on community needs, a view colored by the particular anxieties, frustrations, and mandates of their job. The power to arrest and detain is also a key tool of the trade. Police and sheriffs are bound to favor solutions that enhance those powers – including more jail space to lock people up for lower-level offenses, probation violations, failure to appear at court hearings, and “quality of life” issues (which Otsego County officials seem to hint at with a mention of the “transient” population).

But most community members do not stand to benefit from a bigger jail or the increase in arrests and detention that are certain to come with it. Yet they are the people expected to pay for the multimillion-dollar project and the hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional annual operational costs.

Of course, the community does need improvements to its justice system. It needs court matters to be resolved rather than being converted to bench warrants that hang over residents’ heads, threatening to send them to jail for offenses as minor as old traffic tickets. It needs more non-jail sanctions to respond to probation violations and low-level offenses, and yes, it needs safety improvements for jail staff, incarcerated people, and their visitors. But none of these needs requires a big, new jail. The community has also made clear, through its vote, that it wants to keep jail-related costs as low as possible, now and moving forward. Ultimately, what the community needs is an unbiased, evidence-based, affordable plan to improve their justice system, starting with an open conversation about what that means to residents versus law enforcement. In all likelihood, the community isn’t looking to lock up more people, but rather for a more robust system of alternative responses and community resources.

We recommend that any county considering a new jail should first:

• Engage the community in conversation about their public safety priorities, including a broad cross-section of community members, not just public safety and administrative officials. This conversation should consider the human costs as well as the economic costs of increasing arrests and jail detention. Any information cited by justice system officials should be provided to community members – with as much detail as possible – to analyze independently.
• Build upon the jail alternatives the county has already implemented to keep people out of jail. For example, Otsego County already operates a drug court program and an alternative to jail, the sheriff’s “work camp” (day reporting program). At least as recently as 2013, the county also used alternative sentencing such as:
  • Community service in lieu of jail or fines and fees
  • Frequent drug testing in lieu of jail
  • Deferred or delayed sentences
  • Residential treatment
  • Maintaining employment or schooling in lieu of jail
  • “Tether” (electronic monitoring) in lieu of jail, and
  • Probation in lieu of jail

  In its public relations materials advocating for a bigger jail, the county government claims that these programs are already “at capacity,” but if the county is willing to spend taxpayer money to expand the jail’s capacity, it should consider first expanding these existing programs.

• Change pretrial policies and practices that result in unnecessary jail detention. Pretrial policies have been driving jail growth for decades. Nationwide, about three-quarters of people held in jails for local authorities are not convicted of any crime, very often because they can’t afford the money bail amount required for release before trial. Pretrial detention is rarely necessary to ensure appearance in court and it causes lasting harm to defendants and their families. Counties across the country have implemented an array of reforms to reduce their pretrial populations without putting community safety at risk.
• Revisit past efforts and recommendations that have been ignored but might be effective under current circumstances. In Otsego County, past jail studies and the Master Plans developed in 2008-2013 by the Criminal Justice Coordinating Committee have recommended further solutions and alternatives that were rejected or abandoned for one reason or another, but which are worth reconsidering now. These include:
  • Resurrecting a restorative justice program that was used successfully to divert prosecution in the 1970s, until the death of the key volunteer
  • Trying new restorative justice programs
  • Seeking additional funding for alternative programs, including by hiring a grant writer
  • Establishing a mental health court, a juvenile drug court, and a peer-led teen court
  • Improving court notifications
  • Educating physicians about available programs to monitor prescription drugs, and
  • Investing in crime prevention programs, such as community-based parenting programs, mental health counseling in schools, affordable after school programs, etc.
• Implement new programs to minimize missed court appearances and the resulting bench warrants: Many counties have begun using electronic and automatic court reminder programs that defendants can opt-in to for text message or email reminders as their court dates approach. Hennepin County, Minnesota, introduced such a program in 2017, and after the first 2.5 years of the program, defendants who received reminders were 35% more likely to appear as scheduled.

  Counties can also create a bench warrant clearing process that encourages defendants who have missed court dates or outstanding fines to appear in court without fear of jail detention, and that cleans out backlogs of old warrants. “Warrant amnesty” programs operated by local courts around the country designate specific time periods during which individuals with eligible outstanding warrants can make arrangements – without arrest – to have their cases go straight to disposition by paying the original fines, participating in diversion programs, etc. The Hennepin County District Court operates a Warrant Hotline for people with outstanding warrants to schedule a hearing over the phone to take care of their case and to get more information about what options are available. In the first six months of the Hotline program, court staff fielded over 500 calls, with 85% of callers who scheduled hearings over the phone appearing in court to clear up their warrants.

• Consult a criminal justice system expert who will evaluate the jail as part of the greater local criminal justice system, not just the historical use of the jail – or worse, simple population projections. Many examples of local jail assessments are available online that demonstrate what a “systems approach” to analysis looks like, including those from Hennepin County, Minn. (2018), Macomb County, Mich. (2016), and Monroe County, Ind. (2021), which demonstrate a range of studies in terms of depth and scope. And again, the National Institute of Corrections’ Jail Division offers local jurisdictions technical assistance – including jail planning services and information.

Acknowledgements

We thank the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Safety and Justice Challenge for their support of our research into the use and misuse of jails in this country. We’re also grateful to the residents of Otsego County who brought their experiences and the relevant documents provided by the County to our attention.

Rise in jail deaths is especially troubling as jail populations become more rural and more female

New data show record high deaths of people locked up in jail, as jail populations have shifted toward smaller, rural jails and growing numbers of women. A lack of accountability and acknowledgement of women’s unique disadvantages all but ensures more deaths to come.

by Leah Wang, June 23, 2021

In so many communities nationwide, jails act as reception centers for those experiencing poverty, mental health crises, or substance use disorders. Just a few days ago, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to jails as “garbage bins for human beings.” This statement tracks with new data that show that even before the COVID-19 pandemic, deaths in jail had reached record high numbers, because they continue to be unregulated, under-resourced places where disadvantaged people are sent to languish.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) recently came out with the 2018 mortality data for local jails. Nationwide, there were 1,120 deaths reported, or a rate of 154 deaths per 100,000 people in jail, the highest levels since BJS’ first report on this topic in 2000. The jail population has grown since 2000, of course, but jail deaths have grown more. These deaths spared no demographic, and almost no state; more jurisdictions than ever reported one or more deaths in 2018.

Dying in jail often happens within days or weeks

As in past years, suicide was the single leading cause of death for people in jails, accounting for almost 30% of deaths. Someone in jail is more than three times as likely to die from suicide as someone in the general U.S. population (and still twice as likely when the population is adjusted for age, sex and race/ethnicity to match jail populations).

Suicide in jail tends to happen quickly: half of all those who died by suicide between 2000 and 2018 had been in jail for 9 days or less – compared to a median stay of 17 days for all causes of death. A short stay in jail can be extremely harmful, a fact that even our nation’s top officials acknowledge, noting that “certain features of the jail environment enhance suicidal behavior.”¹ For suicide and deaths linked to drugs or alcohol, it’s those first few days in jail that are deadliest.

Millions of people are booked into jails each year with alcohol or drug use disorders, and the number who died of reported intoxication while locked up reached record highs in 2018. Since 2000, these deaths are up 381 percent, and over the entire 18 years of data collection, the median time served before a drug or alcohol intoxication death was just 1 day. One Texas woman, for example, was jailed for unpaid traffic tickets and died after 3 days from complications of withdrawal after begging for medical care, and instead, being asked to clean up her own vomit. With 18 years of data showing that jailing people with substance use disorders for low-level offenses so often leads to death, why are we still using jails as de facto detox facilities?

More women are entering – and dying in – jail

Women made up one-sixth of all jail deaths in 2018, slightly more than their share of the total jail population. Women also had a 7% higher mortality rate than men in jails; this isn’t the first year that was true, but because women are a key driver of jail population growth, the rise in their mortality rate should send correctional leaders and policymakers running toward solutions aimed at keeping women out of confinement.²

Previous research offers solid clues as to where to begin addressing the over-incarceration and preventable deaths of women. Between 2000 and 2018, women in jail died of drug and alcohol intoxication at twice the rate of men. (In state prisons, women died this way at half the rate of men.)³ Women are also more likely than men to enter jail with drugs in their system, with a medical problem or chronic condition, or with a serious mental illness.

As we’ve reported before, arrests of women, often for low-level drug offenses like possession, have increased (while men’s arrests have decreased) over the past 35 years. In general, those arrested and put in jail more frequently (a population that is disproportionately Black, too) face other major disadvantages: they’re much more likely to lack health insurance, education, and employment, and to have serious health needs. That’s not to mention the high probability of jail separating a mother from children or the estimated 55,000+ women who enter jail while pregnant and face abysmal nutrition and prenatal care. These statistics paint a bleak picture of what it’s like to be a woman in contact with the criminal justice system, but they also form a clear wishlist of social services that could exist to meet women’s needs outside of jail.

Rural jails, a growing force, had the highest death rates in 2018

Small jails – particularly those with an average daily population of 49 or fewer people – reported the highest mortality rates again in 2018. A long-standing reality, the mortality rate in these smallest jails has actually been more than double the overall jail mortality rate in some years. By absolute numbers, these deaths make up a small portion of all jail deaths each year, but rural areas have become major players in jail incarceration.⁴

And yes, women and rural jails are growing together. Between 2004 and 2014, the number of women in jail increased 43 percent in rural counties, while declining 6 percent in urban counties. For decades, jails in non-urban jurisdictions have quietly proliferated, fueled by increases in pretrial detention. Additionally, researchers have found that women entering rural jails are significantly more likely to have co-occurring serious mental illness and substance use disorder, despite being severely under-identified by their jails as having such needs.

Jail healthcare is sketchy at best, and deadly at worst

But what does the growth of women’s jail populations across America have to do with mortality? In 2020, Reuters published an unsparing 3-part investigation of jail healthcare systems, deaths, and the increasing presence of women entering and dying there. Reporters established a devastating pipeline of women being arrested, locked up, and left to detox, give birth, or go without necessary psychiatric care in jail cells.

According to the report, on average, deaths were higher in those jails with privately contracted healthcare services, and rural jails are likely to go the private healthcare route.⁵ These companies’ profit motives shine through in haunting examples of neglect. At a Georgia jail managed by Corizon – a major private correctional healthcare company – senior leadership routinely overrode the recommendations of medical staff; patient names or prescription orders were simply removed from lists to avoid the bad optics of providing untimely care. But when counties move to end their healthcare contracts, there are few real competitors.

The idea that jails are falling short in their care sometimes fuels short-sighted arguments for expanding or building new facilities. One county in Texas was considering a new women’s facility in order to provide “gender-specific” and “trauma-informed” services to this population; fortunately, county commissioners recently postponed the vote to approve its construction at the suggestion of local activists and the county judge. These myopic projects are expensive and do not help communities – in fact, research shows that jail incarceration drives deaths within those counties.

Jails are shameful replacements for key social and medical services, and too often low-level offenses are used to justify locking people up, out of sight, when they simply need help. For women, “gender-responsive” strategies for diversion and treatment do exist, but policymakers should exercise caution in implementing those that are simply new forms of supervision; these programs will only increase the footprint of the criminal justice system. Decriminalization and the provision of gold-standard medical care, followed by a halt to jail construction, should be top of mind when addressing record mortality in jails; our mass incarceration crisis is troubling enough when people survive.

New data: State prisons are increasingly deadly places

New data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that state prisons are seeing alarming rises in suicide, homicide, and drug and alcohol-related deaths.

by Leah Wang and Wendy Sawyer, June 8, 2021

The latest data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) on mortality in state and federal prisons is a reminder that prisons are in fact “death-making institutions,” in the words of activist Mariame Kaba. The new data is from 2018, not 2020, thanks to ongoing delays in publication, and while it would be nice to see how COVID-19 may have impacted deaths (beyond the obvious), the report indicates that prisons are becoming increasingly dangerous – a finding that should not be ignored. The new numbers show some of the same trends we’ve seen before – that thousands die in custody, largely from a major or unnamed illness – but also reveal that an increasing share of deaths are from discrete unnatural causes, like suicide, homicide, and drug and alcohol intoxication.

State prisons, intended for people sentenced to at least one year, are supposed to be set up for long-term custody, with ongoing programming, treatment and education. According to one formerly incarcerated person, “if you have the choice between jail and prison, prison is usually a much better place to be.”

Deaths in jail receive considerable attention in popular news, and here on our website – which they should, given the deplorable conditions that lead to tragedy among primarily unconvicted people. State prisons, on the other hand, are regarded as more stable places, where life is slightly more predictable for already-sentenced people. Why, then, are suicides up 22 percent from the previous mortality report, just two years prior? Why are deaths by drug and alcohol intoxication up a staggering 139 percent from the previous mortality report, just two years prior?

The answer isn’t just because there are more incarcerated people. The very slight net change in the state prison population since 2001 pales in comparison to the increase in overall deaths occurring in these facilities. (Prison populations have actually decreased since peaking in 2009, but they’re still larger in 2018 compared to 2001.) Prisons have been, and continue to be, dangerous places, exposing incarcerated people to unbearable physical and mental conditions. State prison systems must greatly improve medical and mental healthcare, address the relationship between correctional officers and the health of their populations, and work with parole boards to accelerate release processes. Then, maybe, a state prison sentence would not become a death sentence for so many.

Record-setting deaths in almost all categories

In 2018, state prisons reported 4,135 deaths (not including the 25 people executed in state prisons); this is the highest number on record since BJS began collecting mortality data in 2001. Between 2016 and 2018, the prison mortality rate jumped from 303 to a record 344 per 100,000 people, a shameful superlative. It may seem like a foregone conclusion that more people, serving decades or lifetimes, will die in prison. But for at least 935 people, a sentence for a nonviolent property, drug, or public order offense became a death sentence in 2018.¹

BJS slices mortality data in many ways, one of which is “natural” versus “unnatural” death; “natural” deaths are those attributed to illness, while “unnatural” deaths are those caused by suicide, homicide, accident, and drug or alcohol intoxication. Any death pending investigation or otherwise missing a distinct cause gets filed away as “other,” or “missing/unknown.” Other than accident deaths, every cause of death had its worst year yet in 2018.

Taking BJS’ definitions of “natural” and “unnatural” deaths at face value², the data shows that, like in past years, most (77%) of all prison deaths in 2018 were “natural.” However, “unnatural” or preventable deaths make up an increasing share of overall mortality: In 2018, more than 1 in 6 state prison deaths (17%) were “unnatural,” compared to less than 1 in 10 (9%) in 2001.³ Clearly, prisons are doing poorly at keeping people in their care safe. We must remember that being locked up is the punishment itself; inhumane conditions are not supposed to be part of a prison sentence.

Suicide rates in prison are higher than ever

Incarceration is not only difficult for someone who comes in with mental health needs, but it creates and exacerbates disconnection, despair, and overall psychological distress. Prison is basically a mental health crisis in and of itself, and too many incarcerated people contemplate and/or complete suicide.

In 2018, state prisons saw the highest number of suicides (340) since BJS began collecting this data 20 years ago. Compared to the 1% net growth of state prison populations since 2001, suicides have increased by a shocking 85 percent. Suicide is an affliction for the general U.S. population, but the mortality rate from suicide in state prisons has always been higher.

The BJS data does not allow us to compare death rates by sentence length, but it’s hard to ignore the possibility that longer sentences are contributing to a sense of hopelessness and forcing incarcerated people into harmful situations. Other data collected by BJS shows that between 2001 and 2015, the number of people admitted annually to state prison with a sentence of 5 years or longer grew by nearly 12,000 people, accounting for almost all of the growth in new prison admissions over that time period.⁴

At the end of 2015, 1 in 6 people in state prisons had already served over 10 years. To add insult to injury, between 2016 and 2018, the average state prison sentence grew by about four months.

Not only does a longer incarceration increase the sheer probability of having a mental health crisis inside, but it also creates the conditions for this to happen. With longer periods of separation from loved ones, and a rapidly changing outside world, people serving long sentences are isolated and deprived of purpose.

When someone in prison is clearly in crisis, correctional officers are supposed to act swiftly to prevent suicide and self-harm. Not only do officers routinely fail to recognize mental health warning signs, but they’ve been found allowing and even encouraging self-harm, a disturbing reality. And on an institutional level, prison systems avoid making the necessary changes to protect people in dangerous conditions: In response to a Department of Justice investigation finding that the Massachusetts Department of Correction “exposes [people experiencing a mental health crisis] to conditions that harm them,” the DOC is piloting Fitbit-like bracelets for its population to track changes in vital signs related to mental health distress. Instead of rolling back harsh solitary confinement practices and improving how correctional officers respond to crises, the DOC is increasing surveillance and allowing another private company to profit off of prisons.

Who is committing homicide in prison?

The number of homicides in state prisons reached a record high of 120 deaths in 2018, a reminder that while prisons are secure, they are largely unsafe. Violence in prison is commonplace, tied to trauma prior to incarceration as well as mental health stressors inside. The rate of homicide in state prison is 2.5 times greater than in the U.S. population when adjusted for age, sex, and race/ethnicity.

The age of those who died in prison seems most relevant when talking about illness, but older people were actually more at risk of homicide and all other causes of death, except for accidents. By absolute numbers, more homicide deaths affected people in their 20s, 30s and 40s, but the homicide rate was highest for incarcerated people aged 55 and older. They were twice as likely to die by homicide as anyone aged 25 to 44.

What about who is actually behind the deaths that are ruled homicides? The BJS data does not separate homicide committed by incarcerated people from death “incidental to the use of force by staff,” or even “resulting from injuries sustained prior to incarceration.” While correctional officials might go right to “prison gangs” or otherwise blame incarcerated people for these deaths, it’s a bit more complicated than that. In this terrible instance, a correctional officer heeded a request to close a cell door remotely, allowing someone to fatally wound a 72-year-old man in total privacy. The nuance of who is responsible for prison homicides points to huge gaps in security and staffing, but also a clear indifference to people’s lives and unaddressed anger and trauma.

How can drug and alcohol intoxication deaths be so high, when prison security is so strict?

As we look back to the beginning of mortality data collection in 2001, no manner of death has spiked more than drug overdoses and alcohol intoxications. (Unfortunately, the BJS data does not distinguish between the two.)

With such coarse data, it’s difficult to pinpoint an explanation for this trend with certainty. However, no conversation about illicit substances inside prisons would be complete without mention of contraband, particularly drugs brought in by correctional staff.

In the name of preventing contraband from entering prisons, many state prison systems have cracked down on incoming mail and visitation, two major lifelines for incarcerated people. However, there’s evidence to suggest that the majority of drugs, as well as sought-after items like cell phones and cigarettes, are brought in directly by prison staff. In 2018, we conducted a survey of local news coverage that revealed a dozen instances in that year alone where staff were fired, arrested, or sentenced with smuggling drugs and other items into correctional facilities.

A recent Twitter poll doubles down on the premise that prison security staff are the major players in contraband movement. Initiated by Worth Rises director Bianca Tylek, the poll and resulting thread brought formerly incarcerated voices into what could be the most revealing look to date at how correctional officers in particular are wound up in contraband dealings.

With so many people in state prisons lacking proper treatment for substance use disorders, it’s no wonder corrections staff will use their access to the outside and charge exorbitantly for drugs like Suboxone or potent synthetic cannabinoids. Instead of improving the quality of healthcare and treatment for drug addiction, prisons are imposing costly restrictions on mail and visitation and incentivizing their own staff to carry out illegal activity.

Mortality data for 2020 won’t be released for another two years or so, but we don’t have to wait to see whether drug contraband was drastically reduced when state prisons banned in-person visitation due to the pandemic: it wasn’t. In Virginia, for example, the Department of Corrections found that drugs did not become more scarce; positive drug tests actually increased after pandemic restrictions went into effect. Texas prisons also saw an uptick in drug contraband and related disciplinary reports in 2020, even as prison populations declined and visits were limited or cut off entirely.

Can we relate the thriving drug market in prisons to increasing drug-related deaths? Not directly. Clearly, though, the people working in prisons, who already turn a blind eye to violence and suffering, are responsible for introducing some of the dangerous substances that killed 249 people in 2018.

Illness is still the most common cause of death, but how natural is illness in prison?

Even though most prison deaths each year are attributed to illness, and are therefore “natural,” being sick or old in prison is not quite what it is on the outside. Incarceration can add 10 or 15 years to someone’s physiology, and take two years off of their life expectancy per year served, alarming statistics when considered alongside longer sentences and high costs of healthcare for older people.

The systemic neglect of illness and aging in prison populations isn’t natural at all. Every summer, we hear about prisons in hot climates that lack air conditioning, exposing incarcerated people to consistent temperatures of over 100 degrees. We’ve previously reported on these extreme heat conditions that exacerbate chronic diseases, counteract medications, and increase the risk of dehydration and heat stroke among even the healthiest people. In Texas, for example, when summer incarceration is described as unconstitutional, deadly, and a practice in reckless indifference, how natural are some deaths due to “illness”?

Again, consider the mortality data that will eventually come out for 2020, when prisons and jails played host to the COVID-19 pandemic and over 2,600 incarcerated people (and over 200 staff) died as a result. We know how badly every state handled this situation; it will be important not to brush these deaths aside as simply succumbing to illness – nor the deaths caused by other illnesses that went untreated in understaffed, overwhelmed prison health systems. These thousands of people were failed by state criminal justice systems, and deserved care and precaution while in custody.

State criminal justice systems can improve prison healthcare and loosen their grip on parole processes

We are supposed to trust prison systems to keep people alive and safe, so they can serve their sentences and be released back to their communities. The significant increase in overall “unnatural” deaths, like suicide, homicide, and drug intoxication tells us that state prisons are failing to provide humane conditions for incarcerated people, and it’s killing them. There are many ways that state prisons and related agencies can reduce the risk of death.

• A surefire way to reduce risk is to reduce prison populations, and parole boards are a natural bottleneck to this end. Parole hearings and approval rates must increase in order to move large numbers of incarcerated people back into their communities, despite many states failing to do this in 2020 when it was clearly a matter of life and death. Compassionate release should be ramped up, and no one should be ordered to return to prison after recovering from illness. Burdensome in-person check-ins should also be eliminated to reduce the incidence of low-level technical violations of parole and probation.
• States can also consider major sentencing policy changes to address the scourge of long prison sentences that only worsen physical health, mental health, and preparation for reentry. Dozens of state legislatures are considering “second-look” policies to review cases for those currently serving excessive, costly sentences.
• As one of the most basic services guaranteed to people in custody, healthcare must be improved. And if it feels like prison healthcare spending is already outrageous, releasing people – especially older, sicker people – would certainly mitigate those costs. Medical care aside, correctional officers must respond swiftly to sick calls and emergencies.
• Providing high-quality treatment for substance use disorders would prevent incarcerated people from turning to desperate and dangerous solutions. State correctional agencies must acknowledge the scale of drug smuggling facilitated by correctional staff. Instead of banning in-person visitation and meaningful resources like books, prison staff should be subject to stricter security measures and enduring consequences.
• Improving prison conditions can also prevent many “natural” deaths in prison; for example, there should be universal standards for indoor temperatures where extreme heat can be deadly. In a decently climate-controlled space, medications will work as intended, and people can remain focused on education, employment, and connection with loved ones, and deadly viruses might not spread so easily. And as we have learned through the pandemic, improving ventilation, access to healthcare, coordination with public health departments, and reducing population density by releasing more people from prison can prevent countless deaths when infectious diseases enter prisons.

Under pressure, change does happen, and we have been tracking state-level changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some changes were only temporary or did not go far enough to slow the spread of the deadly virus. Had states taken these actions years ago to reduce other dangers in prisons, we might not have seen record mortality in 2018 – or for that matter, in 2020.