One in seven people in prison are serving life with parole, life without parole, or virtual life 50 years or more. Mass incarceration has not touched all communities equally The racial impact of mass incarceration Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men and Latinos are 2.
For Black men in their thirties, about 1 in every 12 is in prison or jail on any given day. Crime rates have declined substantially since the early s, but studies suggest that rising imprisonment has not played a major role in this trend. First, incarceration is particularly ineffective at reducing certain kinds of crimes: in particular, youth crimes, many of which are committed in groups, and drug crimes. When people get locked up for these offenses, they are easily replaced on the streets by others seeking an income or struggling with addiction.
Research shows that crime starts to peak in the mid- to late- teenage years and begins to decline when individuals are in their mids. After that, crime drops sharply as adults reach their 30s and 40s.
Denying Treatment. Tolerating Abuse. Enriching Corporations. Our Work. Escalating Violence The Constitution requires that prison and jail officials protect incarcerated people from physical harm and sexual assault. But facilities nationwide are failing to meet this fundamental duty, putting incarcerated people at risk of being beaten, stabbed, and raped.
Denying Treatment The number of incarcerated people who have a mental illness is growing across the country, raising critical questions about using prisons instead of hospitals to manage serious mental health problems. Tolerating Abuse Corruption and abuse of power among correctional staff runs rampant because prison officials are not held accountable for failing to protect incarcerated people. Enriching Corporations Private corrections companies are heavily invested in keeping more than two million Americans behind bars.
Investigating Sexual Abuse EJI exposed the widespread sexual abuse of women incarcerated at Tutwiler Prison for Women, leading to a federal investigation. Exposing Corruption, Violence, and Abuse EJI has documented severe physical and sexual abuse and violence perpetrated by correctional officers and officials in three Alabama prisons for men. Related Articles. View more. Explore more in Criminal Justice Reform.
Of course, de Tocqueville also saw much to criticize in the young United States, including its commitment to slavery. That legacy continues to haunt the country today, even as most of the world has adopted punishment systems more in line with what de Tocqueville hoped to find. Today, the U. Simply put, other countries do not use prison as a one-size-fits-all solution to crime. In , the Brennan Center examined convictions and sentences for the 1.
But even if they were all released, the U. The prison population began to grow in the s, when politicians from both parties used fear and thinly veiled racial rhetoric to push increasingly punitive policies.
When Reagan took office in , the total prison population was , , and when he left office eight years later, the prison population had essentially doubled, to , This staggering rise in incarceration hit communities of color hardest: They were disproportionately incarcerated then and remain so today.
The number of prisoners grew in every state — blue, red, urban, and rural. In Texas, for example, the state incarceration rate quadrupled: In , the state incarcerated people for every , residents. By , that figure was Every year, over , people enter prison gates, but people go to jail Only a small number about , on any given day have been convicted, and are generally serving misdemeanors sentences 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.
Slideshow 2. Swipe for more detail on pre-trial detention. 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. The overcriminalization of drug use, the use of private prisons, and low-paid or unpaid prison labor are among the most contentious issues in criminal justice 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.
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. Drug offenses still account for the incarceration of almost half a million people, 4 and nonviolent drug convictions remain a defining feature of the federal prison system.
Police still make over 1 million drug possession arrests each year, 5 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 justice system responds to crimes more serious than drug possession. We must also stop incarcerating people for behaviors that are even more benign. Slideshow 3. Swipe for more detail on the War on Drugs.
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, 7 the U. 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 unloading the costs of incarceration onto incarcerated people and their families, trimming their budgets at an unconscionable social cost. Private prisons and jails hold less than 9 percent of all incarcerated people, making them a relatively small part of a mostly publicly-run correctional system.
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. 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. Forcing people to work for low or no pay and no benefits allows prisons to shift the costs of incarceration to incarcerated people — hiding the true cost of running prisons from most Americans.
Particularly harmful is the myth that people who commit violent or sexual crimes are incapable of rehabilitation and thus warrant many decades or even a lifetime of punishment.
If we are serious about ending mass incarceration, we will have to change our responses to more serious and violent crime.
As long as we are considering recidivism rates as a measure of public safety risk, we should also consider how recidivism is defined and measured. But what is a valid sign of criminal offending: self-reported behavior, arrest, conviction, or incarceration? Defining recidivism as rearrest casts the widest net and results in the highest rates, but arrest does not suggest conviction, nor actual guilt. More useful measures than rearrest include conviction for a new crime, re-incarceration, or a new sentence of imprisonment; the latter may be most relevant, since it measures offenses serious enough to warrant a prison sentence.
Importantly, people convicted of violent offenses have the lowest recidivism rates by each of these measures.
However, the recidivism rate for violent offenses is a whopping 48 percentage points higher when rearrest, rather than imprisonment, is used to define recidivism. The longer the time period, the higher the reported recidivism rate — but the lower the actual threat to public safety.
A related question is whether it matters what the post-release offense is. If someone convicted of robbery is arrested years later for a liquor law violation, it makes no sense to view this very different, much less serious, offense the same way we would another arrest for robbery.
A final note about recidivism: While policymakers frequently cite reducing recidivism as a priority, few states collect the data that would allow them to monitor and improve their own performance in real time.
For example, the Council of State Governments asked correctional systems what kind of recidivism data they collect and publish for people leaving prison and people starting probation. What they found is that states typically track just one measure of post-release recidivism, and few states track recidivism while on probation at all:.
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. More broadly, people convicted of any violent offense are less likely to be rearrested in the years after release than those convicted of property, drug, or public order offenses. One reason: 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.
Despite this evidence, people convicted of violent offenses often face decades of incarceration, and those convicted of sexual offenses can be committed to indefinite confinement or stigmatized by sex offender registries long after completing their sentences.
National survey data show that most victims want 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.
But while remaining in the community is certainly preferable to being locked up, the conditions imposed on those under supervision are often so restrictive that they set people up to fail. Slideshow 4. Swipe for more detail about what the data on recividism really shows. Most justice-involved people in the U. Yet even low-level offenses, like technical violations of probation and parole, can lead to incarceration and other serious consequences.
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