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Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2024

By Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner   Tweet this
March 14, 2024
Press release

Sections

The big picture

10 Myths

High costs of low-level offenses

Youth, immigration & involuntary commitment

Beyond the Pie: Community supervision, poverty, age, race, and gender

Necessary reforms

Sources

Further complicating matters is the fact that the U.S. doesn’t have one criminal legal system; instead, we have thousands of federal, state, local, and tribal systems. Together, these systems hold over 1.9 million people in 1,566 state prisons, 98 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails, 1,323 juvenile correctional facilities, 142 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian country jails, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories — at a system-wide cost of at least $182 billion each year. ^{1 2}

This report offers some much-needed clarity by piecing together the data about this country’s disparate systems of confinement. It provides a detailed look at where and why people are locked up in the U.S., and dispels some common myths about mass incarceration to focus attention on overlooked issues that urgently require reform.

This big-picture view is a lens through which the main drivers of mass incarceration come into focus; ³ it allows us to identify important, but often ignored, systems of confinement, from immigration detention to involuntary commitment and youth confinement. In particular, local jails often receive short shrift in larger discussions about criminal legal system reform, but they play a critical role as “incarceration’s front door” and have a far greater impact than the daily population suggests.

While this pie chart provides a comprehensive snapshot of our correctional system, the graphic does not capture the enormous churn in and out of our correctional facilities, nor the far larger universe of people whose lives are affected by the criminal legal system. In 2022, about 469,000 people entered prison gates, but people went to jail more than 7 million times.⁴⁵ Some have just been arrested and will make bail within hours or days, while many others are too poor to make bail and remain in jail until their trial.⁶ Only a small number (about 102,700 on any given day) have been convicted, and are generally serving misdemeanors sentences of under a year. At least 1 in 4 people who go to jail will be arrested again within the same year — often those dealing with poverty, mental illness, and substance use disorders, whose problems only worsen with incarceration.

With a sense of the big picture, the next question is: why are so many people locked up? How many are incarcerated for drug offenses? Are the profit motives of private companies driving incarceration? Or is it really about public safety and keeping dangerous people off the streets? There are a plethora of modern myths about incarceration. Most have a kernel of truth, but these myths distract us from focusing on the most important drivers of incarceration.

Ten myths about mass incarceration

The overcriminalization of drug use, the use of private prisons, and low-paid or unpaid prison labor are among the most contentious issues in the criminal legal system today because they inspire moral outrage. But they do not answer the question of why most people are incarcerated or how we can dramatically — and safely — reduce our use of confinement. Likewise, emotional responses to sexual and violent offenses often derail important conversations about the social, economic, and moral costs of incarceration and lifelong punishment. False notions of what a “violent crime” conviction means about an individual’s dangerousness continue to be used in an attempt to justify long sentences — even though incarceration does not deter crime and more incarceration is not what victims want. At the same time, misguided beliefs about the “services” provided by jails are used to rationalize the construction of massive new “mental health jails.” Finally, simplistic solutions to reducing incarceration, such as moving people from jails and prisons to community supervision, ignore the fact that “alternatives” to incarceration often lead to incarceration anyway. Focusing on the policy changes that can end mass incarceration, and not just put a dent in it, requires the public to put these issues into perspective.

The first myth: Private prisons are the corrupt heart of mass incarceration

In fact, just 8% of all incarcerated people are held in private prisons; the vast majority are in publicly-owned prisons and jails.⁹ Some states have more people in private prisons than others, of course, and the industry has lobbied to maintain high levels of incarceration, but private prisons are essentially a parasite on the massive publicly-owned system — not the root of it.

Nevertheless, a range of private industries and even some public agencies continue to profit from mass incarceration. Many city and county jails rent space to other agencies, including state prison systems,¹⁰ the U.S. Marshals Service, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Private companies are frequently granted contracts to operate prison food and health services (often so bad they result in major lawsuits), and prison and jail telecom and commissary functions have spawned multi-billion dollar private industries. By privatizing services like phone calls, medical care, and commissary, prisons and jails are offloading the costs of incarceration onto incarcerated people and their families, trimming their budgets at an unconscionable social cost.

Private prisons and jails hold just 8% of all incarcerated people, making them a relatively small part of a mostly publicly-run correctional system.

The second myth: Prisons are “factories behind fences” that exist to provide companies with a huge slave labor force

Simply put, private companies using prison labor are not what stands in the way of ending mass incarceration, nor are they the source of most prison jobs. Only about 6,000 people in prison — less than 1% — are employed by private companies through the federal PIECP program, which requires them to pay at least minimum wage before deductions. (A larger portion work for state-owned “correctional industries,” which pay much less, but this still only represents about 6% of people incarcerated in state prisons.)¹¹

But prisons do rely on the labor of incarcerated people for food service, laundry, and other operations, and they pay incarcerated workers unconscionably low wages: our 2017 study found that on average, incarcerated people earn between 86 cents and $3.45 per day for the most common prison jobs.¹² In at least five states, those jobs pay nothing at all. Moreover, work in prison is compulsory, with little regulation or oversight, and incarcerated workers have few rights and protections. If they refuse to work, incarcerated people face disciplinary action. For those who do work, the paltry wages they receive often go right back to the prison, which charges them for basic necessities like medical visits and hygiene items. Forcing people to work for low or no pay and no benefits, while charging them for necessities, allows prisons to shift the costs of incarceration to incarcerated people — hiding the true cost of running prisons from most Americans.

The third myth: Releasing “nonviolent drug offenders” would end mass incarceration

It’s true that police, prosecutors, and judges continue to punish people harshly for nothing more than drug possession. Drug offenses still account for the incarceration of over 360,000 people, and drug convictions remain a defining feature of the federal prison system. And until the pandemic hit (and the official crime data became less reliable), police were still making over 1 million drug possession arrests each year,¹³ many of which lead to prison sentences. Drug arrests continue to give residents of over-policed communities criminal records, hurting their employment prospects and increasing the likelihood of longer sentences for any future offenses.

Nevertheless, 4 out of 5 people in prison or jail are locked up for something other than a drug offense — either a more serious offense or an even less serious one. To end mass incarceration, we will have to change how our society and our criminal legal system respond to crimes more serious than drug possession. We must also stop incarcerating people for behaviors that are even more benign.

The fourth myth: By definition, “violent crime” involves physical harm

The distinction between “violent” and “nonviolent” crime means less than you might think; in fact, these terms are so widely misused that they are generally unhelpful in a policy context. In the public discourse about crime, people typically use “violent” and “nonviolent” as substitutes for serious versus nonserious criminal acts. That alone is a fallacy, but worse, these terms are also used as coded (often racialized) language to label individuals as inherently dangerous versus non-dangerous.

In reality, state and federal laws apply the term “violent” to a surprisingly wide range of criminal acts — including many that don’t involve any physical harm. In some states, purse-snatching, manufacturing methamphetamines, and stealing drugs are considered violent crimes. Burglary is generally considered a property crime, but an array of state and federal laws classify burglary as a violent crime in certain situations, such as when it occurs at night, in a residence, or with a weapon present. So even if the building was unoccupied, someone convicted of burglary could be punished for a violent crime and end up with a long prison sentence and a “violent” record.

The common misunderstanding of what “violent crime” really refers to — a legal distinction that often has little to do with actual or intended harm — is one of the main barriers to meaningful criminal legal system reform. Reactionary responses to the idea of violent crime often lead policymakers to categorically exclude from reforms people convicted of legally “violent” crimes. But almost half (47%) of people in prison and jail are there for offenses classified as “violent,” so these carveouts end up gutting the impact of otherwise well-crafted policies. As we and many others have explained before, cutting incarceration rates to anything near international norms will be impossible without changing how we respond to violent crime. To start, we have to be clearer about what that loaded term really means.

The fifth myth: People in prison for violent or sexual crimes are too dangerous to be released

Of course, many people convicted of violent offenses have caused serious harm to others. But how does the criminal legal system determine the risk that they pose to their communities? Again, the answer is too often “we judge them by their offense type,” rather than “we evaluate their individual circumstances.” This reflects the particularly harmful myth that people who commit violent or sexual crimes are incapable of rehabilitation and thus warrant many decades or even a lifetime of punishment.

As lawmakers and the public increasingly agree that past policies have led to unnecessary incarceration, it’s time to consider policy changes that go beyond the low-hanging fruit of “non-non-nons” — people convicted of non-violent, non-serious, non-sexual offenses. Again, if we are serious about ending mass incarceration, we will have to change our responses to more serious and violent crime.

Recidivism data do not support the belief that people who commit violent crimes ought to be locked away for decades for the sake of public safety. People convicted of violent and sexual offenses are actually among the least likely to be rearrested, and those convicted of rape or sexual assault have rearrest rates 20% lower than all other offense categories combined. One reason for the lower rates of recidivism among people convicted of violent offenses: age is one of the main predictors of violence. The risk for violence peaks in adolescence or early adulthood and then declines with age, yet we incarcerate people long after their risk has declined.¹⁴

The sixth myth: Reforming the criminal legal system leads to more crime

The specter of “rising crime” has re-emerged as a central issue among elected officials, political candidates, and in media commentary. Their explanations and exaggerations of recent crime trends don’t add up, but these lies have serious consequences. After ticking up slightly in 2020, the violent crime rate appears to have fallen dramatically in 2023. In general, violent crime has remained remarkably steady over the last 15 years; property crime has trended steeply downward and remains near historic lows (with the exception of auto theft). Overall, the crime rate appears to be the lowest it’s been since 1963.¹⁵

Jail and prison populations have continued to rebound toward their pre-pandemic levels — not because of rising crime, but because pandemic-related delays in the system have subsided.¹⁶ Politics present another important explanation: many in law enforcement and on the right (and some Democrats, too) have rushed to blame recent reforms for minor shifts in crime trends in an effort to resurrect the same “tough on crime” policies that failed in the 1980s and 90s. The combination of restored court capacity and the return to 90s-era crime policies crime policies — not COVID-era releases,¹⁷ bail reform, changes to police budgets, “progressive” prosecutors, or other popular reforms — best explain why more people are behind bars this year than last. In reality, a number of studies have shown:

• No evidence that progressive prosecutors were to blame for the increase in homicides during the pandemic or in the five years before it.¹⁸
• Murder rates were an average of 40% higher in “red” states compared to “blue” states in 2020; more broadly, murder rates over the years 2000-2020 were 23% higher on average in “red” states.
• Releasing people pretrial doesn’t harm public safety. Moreover, the increases in certain types of crime were seen in cities across the country, most of which have not enacted bail reforms.
• Far from being “defunded,” police budgets have increased in the vast majority of cities and counties. And again, cities that increased funding, enacted no bail reforms, and did not elect “progressive” prosecutors also saw increases in homicides in 2020 and 2021.

While crime rates remain near historic lows, what has actually changed most is the public’s perception of crime, which is driven less by first-hand experience than by the false claims of reform opponents. These false claims are deliberately stoked to undo the hard-won, evidence supported, common sense reforms that have only begun to put a dent in mass incarceration.

The seventh myth: Harsh punishments deter crime, making us safer

Many people mistakenly believe that long sentences, paired with austere and even brutal prison conditions, will have a deterrent effect on crime. But research has consistently found that harsher sentences do not serve as effective “examples” that would prevent new people from committing serious crimes. In 2016, the National Institute of Justice summarized the research on deterrence, finding that prison sentences, and especially long sentences, do little to deter future crime.¹⁹ Another study concluded that, compared to punishments that don’t involve prison or jail time, incarceration has either no effect or — worse — even a “mildly criminogenic impact” on future lawbreaking. In other words, incarceration is counterproductive: While a prison sentence can incapacitate people in the short term, it actually increases the risk that someone will commit a crime after their release.

People face extremely poor living conditions in practically every jail and prison, which negatively impacts their odds of success upon release, their families, and public health at large. Routine failure to provide for the medical needs of incarcerated people is harmful (even deadly) for those inside, and strains family resources and healthcare infrastructure after they’re released — and nearly everyone will eventually be released. Poor nutrition compounds health problems, as does contaminated water, pests, and exposure to extreme heat and cold. The physical and psychological effects of incarceration, including the PTSD-like Post-Incarceration Syndrome, make it harder to maintain employment and housing, trapping people in cycles of incarceration. Put simply, when people are released from prison, their health and wellbeing are intertwined with that of the community, so the harms visited upon them inside impact everyone.

The eighth myth: Crime victims support long prison sentences

Policymakers, judges, and prosecutors often invoke the name of victims to justify long sentences for violent offenses. But contrary to the popular narrative, most victims of violence want violence prevention, not incarceration. Again, harsh sentences don’t deter violent crime, and many victims understand that incarceration can make people more of a public safety risk. National survey data show that most victims support violence prevention, social investment, and alternatives to incarceration that address the root causes of crime, not more investment in carceral systems that cause more harm.²⁰ This suggests that they care more about the health and safety of their communities than they do about retribution.

Victims and survivors of crime prefer investments in crime prevention rather than long prison sentences.

Moreover, people convicted of crimes are often victims themselves, complicating the moral argument for harsh punishments as “justice.” While conversations about justice tend to treat perpetrators and victims of crime as two entirely separate groups, people who engage in criminal acts are often victims of violence and trauma, too — a fact behind the adage that “hurt people hurt people.”²¹ As victims of crime know, breaking this cycle of harm will require greater investments in communities, not the carceral system.

The ninth myth: Some people need to go to jail to get treatment and services

It’s absolutely true that people ensnared in the criminal legal system have a lot of unmet needs. But jails and prisons are no place to recover from a mental health crisis or substance use disorder — they are designed for punishment, not care. Local jails, especially, are filled with people who need medical care and social services, but jails have repeatedly failed to provide these services. For example, while two-thirds of people in local jails have substance use disorders, only a tiny fraction of all jails provide medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for opioid use disorder — the gold standard for care. That means that rather than providing drug treatment, jails more often interrupt drug treatment by cutting patients off from their medications. Between 2000 and 2018, the number of people who died of intoxication while in jail increased by almost 400%; typically, these individuals died within just one day of admission.²²

Similarly, jails often put people with mental health problems in solitary confinement, provide limited access to counseling, and leave them unmonitored due to constant staffing shortages. The result: suicide is the leading cause of death in local jails, with death rates far exceeding those found in the general U.S. population. Given this track record, the trend of proposing new “mental health jails” to respond to decades of disinvestment in community-based services is particularly alarming. Jails are not safe detox facilities, nor are they capable of providing the therapeutic environment people require for long-term recovery and healing. Even when other options for providing mental health and substance use treatment are scarce, decisionmakers should not rely on correctional settings to do so.

The tenth myth: Expanding community supervision is the best way to reduce incarceration

Community supervision, which includes probation, parole, and pretrial supervision, is often seen as a “lenient” punishment or as an ideal “alternative” to incarceration. But while remaining in the community is generally preferable to being locked up, the conditions²³ imposed on those under supervision are often so restrictive that they set people up to fail.²⁴ The long supervision terms, numerous and burdensome requirements, and constant surveillance result in frequent “failures,” often for minor infractions like breaking curfew or failing to pay unaffordable supervision fees.

At last count, at least 128,000 people were incarcerated for such non-criminal “technical violations” of probation or parole.²⁵ These supervision violations accounted for 27% of all admissions to state and federal prisons. In fact, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that almost a quarter (24%) of people in state prisons were on probation at the time of their arrest, underscoring how this “alternative to incarceration” often simply delays incarceration.

Newer methods of community supervision don’t simply delay incarceration; they replicate the experience so closely through the use of technology that they amount to “e-carceration” or “electronic prisons.”²⁶ The use of electronic monitoring, in particular — whether via ankle shackle, phone app, or other technology — has exploded in recent years, especially in the contexts of pretrial supervision and immigration enforcement.²⁷ Proponents argue the technology improves court compliance and public safety, but a recent study found the practice accomplishes neither of these goals. The technology is unreliable, frequently leading to security breaches and false alarms, and it has created yet another path to incarceration via technical violations.²⁸ Like probation before it, electronic monitoring is touted as an “alternative” to incarceration, but in reality it is expanding the scope of correctional control, not reducing the number of people behind bars.

The high costs of low-level offenses

Most people in the U.S. criminal legal system are not accused of serious crimes; more often, they are charged with misdemeanors or non-criminal violations. Yet even low-level offenses, like technical violations of probation and parole, can lead to incarceration and other serious consequences. Rather than investing in community-driven safety initiatives, cities and counties are still pouring vast amounts of public resources into the processing and punishment of these minor offenses.

Probation & parole violations and “holds” lead to unnecessary incarceration

Often overlooked in discussions about mass incarceration are the various “holds” that keep people behind bars for administrative reasons. A common example is when people on probation or parole are jailed for violating their supervision, either for a new crime or a non-criminal (or “technical”) violation. If a parole or probation officer suspects that someone has violated supervision conditions, they can file a “detainer” (or “hold”), rendering that person ineligible for release on bail. For people struggling to rebuild their lives after conviction or incarceration, returning to jail for a minor infraction can be profoundly destabilizing. The most recent data show that nationally, almost 1 in 5 (19%) people in jail are there for a violation of probation or parole, though in some places these violations or detainers account for over one-third of the jail population. This problem is not limited to local jails, either; in 2019, the Council of State Governments found that nearly 1 in 4 people in state prisons are incarcerated as a result of supervision violations.

A particularly disturbing type of “hold” is becoming increasingly common: people held in jails while awaiting transfer to psychiatric facilities. One recent study reports that “thousands of [people] with serious mental illness languish in jail for months, or even years, waiting for a state hospital bed to open.”²⁹ Typically, these vulnerable adults are in need of evaluation or restoration of their competency to stand trial. But being held in jails puts them at heightened risk of victimization, self-harm, and even additional criminal charges for behaviors that are actually symptoms of their illness. The result of disinvestment in mental health infrastructure and the criminalization of mental illness, these “holds” are not only unnecessary, but unconscionable.

Misdemeanors: Minor offenses with major consequences

The “massive misdemeanor system” in the U.S. is another important but overlooked contributor to overcriminalization and mass incarceration. For behaviors as benign as jaywalking or sitting on a sidewalk, an estimated 13 million misdemeanor charges sweep droves of Americans into the criminal legal system each year (and that’s excluding civil violations and speeding). These low-level offenses, along with other non-felony offenses, typically account for about 25% of the daily jail population nationally, and much more in some states and counties. The rampant criminalization of homelessness and aggressive enforcement of these laws — almost all misdemeanors — also contributes to harmful and costly cycles of homelessness and incarceration.

Misdemeanor charges may sound trivial, but they carry serious financial, personal, and social costs, especially for defendants but also for broader society, which finances the processing of these court cases and all of the unnecessary incarceration that comes with them. And then there are the moral costs: People charged with misdemeanors are often not appointed counsel and are pressured to plead guilty and accept a probation sentence to avoid jail time. This means that innocent people routinely plead guilty and are then burdened with the many collateral consequences that come with a criminal record, as well as the heightened risk of future incarceration for probation violations. A misdemeanor system that pressures innocent defendants to plead guilty seriously undermines American principles of justice.

“Low-level fugitives” live in fear of incarceration for missed court dates and unpaid fines

Defendants can end up in jail even if their offense is not punishable with jail time. Why? Because if a defendant fails to appear in court or to pay fines and fees, the judge can issue a “bench warrant” for their arrest, directing law enforcement to jail them in order to bring them to court. While there is currently no national estimate of the number of active bench warrants, their use is widespread and, in some places, incredibly common. In Monroe County, N.Y., for example, over 3,000 people have an active bench warrant at any time, more than 3 times the number of people in the county jails.

But bench warrants are often unnecessary. Most people who miss court are not trying to avoid the law; more often, they forget, are confused by the court process, or have a schedule conflict. Once a bench warrant is issued, however, defendants frequently end up living as “low-level fugitives,” quitting their jobs, becoming transient, and/or avoiding public life (even hospitals) to avoid having to go to jail.

Lessons from the smaller “slices”: Youth, immigration, and involuntary commitment

Looking more closely at incarceration by offense type also exposes some disturbing facts about the 35,500 youth in confinement in the United States: too many are there for a “most serious offense” that is not even a crime. For example, there are 2,700 youth behind bars for non-criminal violations of their probation rather than for a new offense. An additional 700 youth are locked up for “status” offenses, which are “behaviors that are not law violations for adults such as running away, truancy, and incorrigibility.”³⁰ About 1 in 11 youth held for a criminal or delinquent offense is locked in an adult jail or prison, and most of the others are held in juvenile facilities that look and operate a lot like prisons and jails.

We also know that for many children, legal system involvement overlaps with other kinds of “systems” involvement, such as the foster care system: almost half of youth in foster care have an encounter with the criminal legal system by age 17. The criminalization of youth is apparent in the adult prison population: more than one-third (38%) of people in state prisons were first arrested before they turned 16.The early criminalization of youth is apparent in the adult prison population: more than one-third (38%) of people in state prisons were first arrested before they turned 16.

Turning to the people who are locked up criminally and civilly for immigration-related reasons, we find that over 6,000 people are in federal prisons for criminal convictions of immigration offenses, and 12,400 more are held pretrial or presentence by the U.S. Marshals Service. The vast majority of people incarcerated for criminal immigration offenses are accused of illegal entry or illegal reentry — in other words, for no more serious offense than crossing the border without permission.³¹

Another 38,000 people are civilly detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) not for any crime, but simply because they are facing deportation.³² People detained by ICE are physically confined in federally-run or privately-run immigration detention facilities, or in local jails under contract with ICE. While this number is below what it was pre-pandemic, it’s actually climbed back up from a record low of 13,500 people in ICE detention in early 2021.³³ In fact, ICE is very rapidly expanding its overall surveillance and control over the non-criminal migrant population by growing its electronic monitoring-based “alternatives to detention” program.³⁴

An additional 8,000 unaccompanied children are held in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), awaiting placement with parents, family members, or friends. Their number has more than doubled since January of 2020. While these children are not held for any criminal or delinquent offense, most are held in shelters or even juvenile placement facilities under detention-like conditions.³⁵

Adding to the universe of people who are confined because of criminal legal system involvement, 25,000 people are involuntarily committed in state psychiatric hospitals and civil commitment centers.³⁶³⁷ Many of these people are not even convicted, and some are held indefinitely. These “forensic patients” include people being evaluated or treated for incompetency to stand trial, as well as those found not guilty by reason of insanity or guilty but mentally ill, who may remain hospitalized for decades or for life.³⁸ Roughly 6,000 are people convicted of sex-related crimes who are involuntarily committed or detained after their prison sentences are complete. While the facilities they are held in aren’t typically run by departments of correction, they are in reality much like prisons. Meanwhile, at least 38 states allow involuntary commitment for substance use disorder treatment, and in many cases, people are sent to actual prisons and jails, which are inappropriate places for treatment.³⁹

Beyond the “Whole Pie”: Community supervision, poverty, age, and race and gender disparities

Once we have wrapped our minds around the “whole pie” of mass incarceration, we should zoom out and note that people who are incarcerated are only a fraction of those impacted by the criminal legal system. There are another 800,000 people on parole and a staggering 2.9 million people on probation. Many millions more have completed their sentences but are still living with a criminal record, a stigmatizing label that comes with collateral consequences such as barriers to employment and housing.

Far more people are impacted by mass incarceration than the 1.9 million currently confined. An estimated 19 million people are burdened with the collateral consequences of a felony conviction (this includes those currently and formerly incarcerated), and an estimated 79 million have a criminal record of some kind; even this is likely an underestimate, leaving out many people who have been arrested for misdemeanors. Finally, FWD.us reports that 113 million adults (45%) have had an immediate family member incarcerated for at least one night.

Beyond identifying how many people are impacted by the criminal legal system, we should also focus on who is most impacted and who is left behind by policy change. Poverty, for example, plays a central role in mass incarceration. People in prison and jail are disproportionately poor compared to the overall U.S. population.⁴⁰ The criminal legal system punishes poverty, beginning with the high price of money bail: The median felony bail bond amount ($10,000) is the equivalent of 8 months’ income for the typical detained defendant. As a result, people with low incomes are more likely to face the harms of pretrial detention. Poverty is not only a predictor of incarceration; it is also frequently the outcome, as a criminal record and time spent in prison destroys wealth, creates debt, initiates or perpetuates cycles of homelessness, and decimates job opportunities.⁴¹

It’s no surprise that people of color — who face much greater rates of poverty — are dramatically overrepresented in the nation’s prisons and jails. These racial disparities are particularly stark for Black Americans, who make up 35% of the prison and jail populations but only 14% of all U.S residents.⁴² The same is true for women, whose incarceration rates have for decades risen faster than men’s, and who are often behind bars because of financial obstacles such as an inability to pay bail. As policymakers continue to push for reforms that reduce incarceration, they should avoid changes that will widen disparities, as has happened with juvenile confinement and with women in state prisons.

Finally, while states have made progress in reducing youth confinement — due to developments in adolescent brain research, mounting evidence that confinement leads to worse outcomes, and dogged advocacy to protect youth — the elder population in prison has only grown. Many are stuck serving excessively long sentences, despite the evidence that their incarceration is both extremely costly and unnecessary to ensure public safety.

• How can we effectively invest in communities to make it less likely that someone comes into contact with the criminal legal system in the first place? And what measures can help aid successful reentry and end the vicious cycle of re-incarceration that so many individuals and families experience?
• Can we persuade government officials and prosecutors to revisit the reflexive, simplistic policymaking that has served to increase incarceration for “violent” offenses? How can we eliminate policy “carveouts” that exclude broad categories of people from reforms and end up gutting the impact of reforms?
• What will it take to embolden policymakers and the public to do what it takes to shrink the second largest slice of the pie — the thousands of local jails? And what will it take to redirect public spending to smarter investments like community-based drug treatment and job training?
• While the federal prison system is a small slice of the total pie, how can improved federal policies and financial incentives be used to advance state and county-level reforms? And for their part, how can elected sheriffs, district attorneys, and judges — who all control larger shares of the correctional pie — slow the flow of people into the criminal legal system?
• Given that the companies with the greatest impact on incarcerated people are not private prison operators, but service providers that contract with public facilities, how can governments end contracts that squeeze money from those behind bars and their families?
• What reforms can we implement to both reduce the number of people incarcerated in the U.S. and the well-known racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal legal system?
• What lessons can we learn from the pandemic? Are federal, state, and local governments prepared to respond to future pandemics, epidemics, natural disasters, and other emergencies, including with plans to decarcerate? And how can states and the federal government better utilize compassionate release and clemency powers moving forward?

The United States has the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate of virtually any democratic nation on earth. Looking at the big picture of the 1.9 million people locked up in the United States on any given day, we can see that something needs to change. Both policymakers and the public have the responsibility to carefully consider each individual slice of the carceral “pie” and ask whether legitimate social goals are served by putting each group behind bars, and whether any benefit really outweighs the social and fiscal costs.

Even narrow policy changes, such as ending incarceration for “technical” violations, can meaningfully reduce our society’s use of incarceration. At the same time, we should be wary of proposed reforms that seem promising but will have only minimal effect, because they simply transfer people from one slice of the correctional “pie” to another or needlessly exclude broad swaths of people. Keeping the big picture in mind is critical if we hope to develop strategies that actually shrink the “whole pie.”

Acknowledgments

All Prison Policy Initiative reports are collaborative endeavors, but this report builds on the successful collaborations of the several versions of this report we have produced since 2014. For this year’s report, the authors are particularly indebted to Shan Jumper for sharing updated civil detention and commitment data, Brian Nam-Sonenstein and Emily Widra for research and editing support, and Ed Epping for help with one of the visuals. However, any errors or omissions, and final responsibility for all of the many value judgements required to produce a data visualization like this, are the sole responsibility of the authors.

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 also thank Public Welfare Foundation for their support of our reports that fill key data and messaging gaps. Finally, we’d like to thank each of our individual donors — your commitment to ending mass incarceration makes our work possible.

About the authors

Wendy Sawyer is the Research Director at the Prison Policy Initiative. Along with directing the organization’s research priorities, Wendy is the author (or co-author) of several major reports, including Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie, Beyond the Count: A deep dive into state prison populations, All Profit, No Risk: How the bail industry exploits the justice system and Arrest, Release, Repeat: How police and jails are misused to respond to social problems. Wendy also frequently publishes briefings on recent data releases, academic research, women’s incarceration, pretrial detention, probation, and more.

Peter Wagner is an attorney and the Executive Director of the Prison Policy Initiative. He co-founded the Prison Policy Initiative in 2001 in order to spark a national discussion about mass incarceration.

About the Prison Policy Initiative

The non-profit, non-partisan Prison Policy Initiative was founded in 2001 to expose the broader harm of mass criminalization and spark advocacy campaigns to create a more just society. Alongside reports like this that help the public more fully engage in criminal legal system reform, the organization leads the nation’s fight to keep the prison system from exerting undue influence on the political process (a.k.a. prison gerrymandering) and has helped to protect the families of incarcerated people from the predatory prison and jail telephone industry and the video visitation industry.

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