What does it mean to be a political prisoner as opposed to a prisoner jailed for a criminal offense?

Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2022

Past Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner Tweet this
March fourteen, 2022
Press release

Sections

The big motion picture

The touch on of COVID

8 Myths

High costs of low-level offenses

Youth, immigration & involuntary delivery

Beyond the Pie: Customs supervision, poverty, race, and gender

Necessary reforms

Sources

Tin can it really be true that most people in jail are legally innocent? How much of mass incarceration is a event of the state of war on drugs, or the profit motives of individual prisons? How has the COVID-19 pandemic inverse decisions nearly how people are punished when they interruption the law? These essential questions are harder to answer than you lot might look. The diverse authorities agencies involved in the criminal legal system collect a lot of data, simply very little is designed to help policymakers or the public empathize what'south going on. As public support for criminal justice reform continues to build — and equally the pandemic raises the stakes higher — information technology's more important than ever that we get the facts directly and understand the big picture.

Further complicating matters is the fact that the U.Southward. doesn't have one "criminal justice system;" instead, we have thousands of federal, state, local, and tribal systems. Together, these systems hold almost 2 million people in 1,566 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 2,850 local jails, 1,510 juvenile correctional facilities, 186 clearing detention facilities, and 82 Indian country jails, too as in war machine prisons, civil delivery centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.South. territories. ^ane

This report offers some much-needed clarity by piecing together the data about this land'south disparate systems of confinement. Information technology provides a detailed wait at where and why people are locked up in the U.S., and dispels some modern myths to focus attending on the real drivers of mass incarceration and overlooked issues that phone call for reform.

Slideshow 1. Swipe for more detailed views. For source dates and links, meet the Methodology.

This big-picture view is a lens through which the chief drivers of mass incarceration come into focus;^four it allows the states to identify important, but ofttimes ignored, systems of confinement. The detailed views bring these overlooked systems to light, from immigration detention to ceremonious delivery and youth solitude. In particular, local jails often receive short shrift in larger discussions about criminal justice, but they play a critical role equally "incarceration'southward forepart door" and have a far greater bear upon than the daily population suggests.

While this pie chart provides a comprehensive snapshot of our correctional arrangement, 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 afflicted by the criminal justice system. In a typical twelvemonth, near 600,000 people enter prison house gates,⁵ but people go to jail over 10 one thousand thousand times each year.^{6 7} Jail churn is particularly loftier because most people in jails have not been convicted.⁸ Some have but been arrested and will make bail inside hours or days, while many others are too poor to make bail and remain behind bars until their trial. Only a small number (about 103,000 on any given solar day) take been convicted, and are generally serving misdemeanors sentences nether a year. At least one in four people who get to jail will be arrested again inside the aforementioned yr — oftentimes those dealing with poverty, mental illness, and substance use disorders, whose issues only worsen with incarceration.

Slideshow 2. Swipe for more detail on pretrial detention.

With a sense of the big picture, the side by side 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, just these myths distract us from focusing on the about important drivers of incarceration.

Viii myths about mass incarceration

The overcriminalization of drug use, the use of private prisons, and low-paid or unpaid prison house labor are amid the most contentious bug in criminal justice today because they inspire moral outrage. Only 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 virtually the social, economical, and moral costs of incarceration and lifelong punishment. Simulated notions of what a "fierce criminal offense" confidence ways about an individual'due south dangerousness go on to be used in an attempt to justify long sentences — even though that's not what victims desire. At the same fourth dimension, misguided beliefs virtually the "services" provided by jails are used to rationalize the construction of massive new "mental wellness jails." Finally, simplistic solutions to reducing incarceration, such every bit 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 tin can end mass incarceration, and non just put a dent in it, requires the public to put these bug into perspective.

The first myth: Individual prisons are the decadent center of mass incarceration

In fact, less than 8% of all incarcerated people are held in individual prisons; the vast majority are in publicly-owned prisons and jails.^xi Some states accept more people in individual prisons than others, of course, and the industry has lobbied to maintain high levels of incarceration, but individual prisons are essentially a parasite on the massive publicly-owned organization — non the root of it.

However, a range of private industries and even some public agencies continue to turn a profit from mass incarceration. Many city and county jails rent space to other agencies, including state prison systems,¹² the U.Due south. Marshals Service, and Clearing and Customs Enforcement (Water ice). Private companies are frequently granted contracts to operate prison food and wellness services (often so bad they result in major lawsuits), and prison and jail telecom and commissary functions have spawned multi-billion dollar private industries. Past 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 toll.

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

The 2d myth: Prisons are "factories behind fences" that be to provide companies with a huge slave labor strength

Only put, private companies using prison labor are not what stands in the fashion of ending mass incarceration, nor are they the source of near prison jobs. Only about 5,000 people in prison house — less than 1% — are employed by private companies through the federal PIECP program, which requires them to pay at least minimum wage earlier deductions. (A larger portion piece of work for country-owned "correctional industries," which pay much less, but this still only represents almost 6% of people incarcerated in country prisons.)^thirteen

Only prisons do rely on the labor of incarcerated people for nutrient service, laundry, and other operations, and they pay incarcerated workers unconscionably low wages: our 2017 report establish that on average, incarcerated people earn between 86 cents and $3.45 per 24-hour interval for the most common prison jobs. In at least five states, those jobs pay nothing at all. Moreover, piece of work in prison is compulsory, with little regulation or oversight, and incarcerated workers take few rights and protections. If they reject to work, incarcerated people face disciplinary activity. For those who practise work, the paltry wages they receive ofttimes become right back to the prison house, 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 truthful cost of running prisons from most Americans.

The 3rd myth: Releasing "nonviolent drug offenders" would terminate mass incarceration

It's true that constabulary, prosecutors, and judges keep to punish people harshly for nothing more than than drug possession. Drug offenses still account for the incarceration of about 400,000 people, and drug convictions remain a defining feature of the federal prison arrangement. Police still make over 1 million drug possession arrests each twelvemonth,¹⁴ many of which pb 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 hereafter offenses.

Nevertheless, iv out of 5 people in prison house or jail are locked up for something other than a drug law-breaking — either a more serious criminal offence or an fifty-fifty less serious one. To end mass incarceration, nosotros will have to change how our gild and our criminal legal system responds to crimes more serious than drug possession. We must also cease incarcerating people for behaviors that are fifty-fifty more beneficial.

Slideshow 3. Swipe for more particular on the War on Drugs

The 4th myth: By definition, "tearing crime" involves concrete damage

The distinction between "tearing" and "nonviolent" crime ways less than you might think; in fact, these terms are and so widely misused that they are mostly unhelpful in a policy context. In the public soapbox well-nigh law-breaking, people typically use "violent" and "nonviolent" as substitutes for serious versus nonserious criminal acts. That alone is a fallacy, but worse, these terms are as well used every bit coded (ofttimes racialized) language to characterization individuals as inherently unsafe versus non-dangerous.

In reality, state and federal laws apply the term "fierce" to a surprisingly wide range of criminal acts — including many that don't involve any physical damage. In some states, purse-snatching, manufacturing methamphetamines, and stealing drugs are considered violent crimes. Burglary is generally considered a belongings offense, simply an array of country and federal laws classify burglary every bit a violent law-breaking in certain situations, such as when information technology occurs at night, in a residence, or with a weapon present. So even if the building was unoccupied, someone convicted of burglary could exist punished for a violent criminal offence and end up with a long prison house sentence and "violent" tape.

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 justice reform. Reactionary responses to the idea of vehement crime often lead policymakers to categorically exclude from reforms people bedevilled of legally "violent" crimes. But over 40% of people in prison house and jail are there for offenses classified as "violent," and so these carveouts stop up gutting the touch on of otherwise well-crafted policies. As we and many others accept explained before, cutting incarceration rates to anything virtually international norms will be impossible without changing how we respond to violent crime. To start, we accept to be clearer about what that loaded term really ways.

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

Of form, many people convicted of violent offenses have caused serious harm to others. Just how does the criminal legal system determine the risk that they pose to their communities? Again, the answer is too often "we judge them past their offense blazon," rather than "nosotros evaluate their private 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 fifty-fifty a lifetime of punishment.

Every bit lawmakers and the public increasingly agree that past policies have led to unnecessary incarceration, it'south time to consider policy changes that go beyond the low-hanging fruit of "non-not-nons" — people convicted of non-violent, not-serious, not-sexual offenses. Again, if we are serious virtually ending mass incarceration, we will have to alter our responses to more serious and fierce crime.

Recidivism information do not support the belief that people who commit violent crimes ought to be locked away for decades for the sake of public rubber. People bedevilled of violent and sexual offenses are really among the to the lowest degree likely to be rearrested, and those convicted of rape or sexual assault accept rearrest rates xx% lower than all other criminal offence categories combined. One reason for the lower rates of recidivism among people convicted of violent offenses: age is i of the master predictors of violence. The risk for violence peaks in boyhood or early adulthood and so declines with age, nonetheless nosotros incarcerate people long after their run a risk has declined.^fifteen

Sadly, most country officials ignored this evidence fifty-fifty equally the pandemic made obvious the need to reduce the number of people trapped in prisons and jails, where COVID-19 ran rampant. Instead of considering the release of people based on their age or individual circumstances, virtually officials categorically refused to consider people convicted of violent or sexual offenses, dramatically reducing the number of people eligible for before release.¹⁶

The sixth myth: Criminal offence victims support long prison house sentences

Policymakers, judges, and prosecutors often invoke the name of victims to justify long sentences for violent offenses. Only contrary to the popular narrative, most victims of violence want violence prevention, non incarceration. Harsh sentences don't deter trigger-happy criminal offence, and many victims believe that incarceration tin make people more likely to appoint in crime. National survey information show that most victims support violence prevention, social investment, and alternatives to incarceration that address the root causes of criminal offense, not more investment in carceral systems that cause more harm.¹⁷ This suggests that they care more almost the health and safety of their communities than they exercise well-nigh retribution.

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

Moreover, people convicted of crimes are frequently victims themselves, complicating the moral statement for harsh punishments as "justice." While conversations virtually justice tend to treat perpetrators and victims of crime as two entirely separate groups, people who appoint in criminal acts are oftentimes victims of violence and trauma, likewise — a fact behind the adage that "hurt people hurt people."¹⁸ As victims of offense know, breaking this cycle of harm volition require greater investments in communities, not the carceral system.

The seventh myth: Some people demand to go to jail to get treatment and services

It's absolutely true that people ensnared in the criminal legal system accept a lot of unmet needs. But nosotros shouldn't misconstrue the "services" offered in jails and prisons as reasons to lock people up. Local jails, specially, are filled with people who demand medical care and social services, only jails take repeatedly failed to provide these services. Many people end up cycling in and out of jail without ever receiving the help they need. People with mental health problems are ofttimes put in solitary confinement, accept limited access to counseling, and are left unmonitored due to constant staffing shortages. The result: suicide is the leading cause of expiry in local jails. Given this track tape, edifice new "mental health jails" to respond to decades of disinvestment in community-based services is specially alarming.

Similarly, while two-thirds of people in jail take substance utilize disorders, jails consistently fail to provide adequate treatment. 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 than often interrupt drug handling 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 only i mean solar day of admission. Jails are non safe detox facilities, nor are they capable of providing the therapeutic environment people require for long-term recovery and healing.

The eighth myth: Expanding customs supervision is the best way to reduce incarceration

Community supervision, which includes probation, parole, and pretrial supervision, is often seen every bit a "lenient" punishment or as an ideal "culling" to incarceration. But while remaining in the community is certainly preferable to existence locked up, the atmospheric condition imposed on those under supervision are oftentimes then restrictive that they set people upwardly to fail. The long supervision terms, numerous and burdensome requirements, and constant surveillance (specially with electronic monitoring) result in frequent "failures," often for minor infractions similar breaking curfew or failing to pay unaffordable supervision fees.

In 2019, at to the lowest degree 153,000 people were incarcerated for not-criminal violations of probation or parole, often chosen "technical violations."^{19 20} Probation, in detail, leads to unnecessary incarceration; until it is reformed to support and advantage success rather than detect mistakes, it is not a reliable "alternative."

Slideshow 4. Swipe for more details about what the information on recidivism really shows.

The high costs of low-level offenses

Most justice-involved people in the U.Due south. are not accused of serious crimes; more often, they are charged with misdemeanors or not-criminal violations. Yet fifty-fifty low-level offenses, similar technical violations of probation and parole, can pb to incarceration and other serious consequences. Rather than investing in community-driven rubber initiatives, cities and counties are all the same pouring vast amounts of public resources into the processing and punishment of these minor offenses.

Probation & parole violations and "holds" pb to unnecessary incarceration

Ofttimes disregarded in discussions about mass incarceration are the various "holds" that keep people behind bars for administrative reasons. A mutual case 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 weather condition, 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 modest infraction tin can be profoundly destabilizing. The most recent information testify that nationally, almost 1 in v (18%) people in jail are there for a violation of probation or parole, though in some places these violations or detainers account for over one-tertiary of the jail population. This problem is non limited to local jails, either; in 2019, the Council of Country Governments found that nearly 1 in 4 people in state prisons are incarcerated as a event of supervision violations. During the beginning year of the pandemic, that number dropped but slightly, to 1 in v people in state prisons.

Misdemeanors: Minor offenses with major consequences

The "massive misdemeanor system" in the U.S. is some other important merely overlooked correspondent to overcriminalization and mass incarceration. For behaviors as benign as jaywalking or sitting on a sidewalk, an estimated thirteen million misdemeanor charges sweep droves of Americans into the criminal justice system each year (and that'southward excluding civil violations and speeding). These low-level offenses typically business relationship for virtually 25% of the daily jail population nationally, and much more in some states and counties.

Misdemeanor charges may sound trivial, but they carry serious financial, personal, and social costs, peculiarly for defendants but as well for broader order, 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 up with a criminal tape, as well as the heightened adventure of hereafter incarceration for probation violations. A misdemeanor organization that pressures innocent defendants to plead guilty seriously undermines American principles of justice.

"Depression-level fugitives" live in fright of incarceration for missed court dates and unpaid fines

Defendants can end up in jail even if their offense is non punishable with jail time. Why? Because if a defendant fails to announced in court or to pay fines and fees, the approximate can issue a "demote warrant" for their arrest, directing law enforcement to jail them in lodge 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 Canton, N.Y., for example, over 3,000 people have an active demote warrant at any fourth dimension, more than than iii times the number of people in the county jails.

But bench warrants are often unnecessary. Most people who miss court are non trying to avoid the law; more often, they forget, are dislocated past the court procedure, or have a schedule disharmonize. Once a bench warrant is issued, all the same, defendants oftentimes end up living every bit "low-level fugitives," quitting their jobs, becoming transient, and/or avoiding public life (fifty-fifty hospitals) to avoid having to go to jail.

Lessons from the smaller "slices": Youth, immigration, and involuntary delivery

Looking more closely at incarceration by law-breaking type as well exposes some disturbing facts about the 49,000 youth in solitude in the U.s.: besides many are there for a "near serious offense" that is not fifty-fifty a crime. For example, there are over 5,000 youth behind bars for non-criminal violations of their probation rather than for a new offense. An additional 1,400 youth are locked up for "condition" offenses, which are "behaviors that are not law violations for adults such equally running away, truancy, and incorrigibility."²¹ About one in 14 youth held for a criminal or delinquent offense is locked in an adult jail or prison, and about of the others are held in juvenile facilities that look and operate a lot like prisons and jails.

Turning to the people who are locked upward criminally and civilly for immigration-related reasons, nosotros find that almost six,000 people are in federal prisons for criminal convictions of clearing offenses, and xvi,000 more than are held pretrial by the U.S. Marshals. 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 law-breaking than crossing the edge without permission.²²

Slideshow 5. Swipe for more than detail about youth confinement, immigrant confinement, and psychiatric confinement.

Another 22,000 people are civilly detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Water ice) not for whatsoever criminal offense, only simply considering they are facing deportation.²³ Water ice detainees are physically bars in federally-run or privately-run immigration detention facilities, or in local jails under contract with ICE. This number is almost half what information technology was pre-pandemic, but it's actually climbing back up from a record low of 13,500 people in ICE detention in early 2021. Equally in the criminal legal system, these pandemic-era trends should non be interpreted as show of reforms.²⁴ In fact, ICE is rapidly expanding its overall surveillance and control over the non-criminal migrant population past growing its electronic monitoring-based "alternatives to detention" program.²⁵

An additional nine,800 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 Jan of 2020. While these children are not held for whatever criminal or delinquent offense, nearly are held in shelters or even juvenile placement facilities under detention-like weather.²⁶

Adding to the universe of people who are confined because of justice system interest, 22,000 people are involuntarily detained or committed to state psychiatric hospitals and ceremonious commitment centers. Many of these people are non even convicted, and some are held indefinitely. 9,000 are existence evaluated pretrial or treated for incompetency to stand trial; 6,000 have been found non guilty by reason of insanity or guilty just mentally ill; another half-dozen,000 are people convicted of sexual crimes who are involuntarily committed or detained after their prison sentences are complete. While these facilities aren't typically run by departments of correction, they are in reality much similar prisons. Meanwhile, at least 38 states allow civil commitment for involuntary treatment for substance utilise, and in many cases, people are sent to actual prisons and jails, which are inappropriate places for treatment.²⁷

One time we have wrapped our minds effectually the "whole pie" of mass incarceration, we should zoom out and notation that people who are incarcerated are only a fraction of those impacted past the criminal justice system. At that place are another 822,000 people on parole and a staggering ii.9 one thousand thousand people on probation. Many millions more have completed their sentences just are still living with a criminal tape, 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 i.9 million currently confined. An estimated nineteen million people are burdened with the collateral consequences of a felony conviction (this includes those currently and formerly incarcerated), and an estimated 79 million accept a criminal record of some kind; fifty-fifty 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 to the lowest degree one nighttime.

Across identifying how many people are impacted by the criminal justice system, we should also focus on who is nearly impacted and who is left behind by policy change. Poverty, for instance, plays a fundamental part in mass incarceration. People in prison house and jail are unduly poor compared to the overall U.S. population.²⁸ The criminal justice system punishes poverty, beginning with the high price of coin bond: The median felony bond bond amount ($ten,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 merely a predictor of incarceration; it is also often the outcome, equally a criminal record and time spent in prison destroys wealth, creates debt, and decimates job opportunities.²⁹

It'south no surprise that people of color — who confront 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 brand upwardly 38% of the incarcerated population despite representing just 12% of U.S residents. The same is true for women, whose incarceration rates have for decades risen faster than men'south, and who are often backside bars because of financial obstacles such every bit an inability to pay bond. As policymakers continue to push for reforms that reduce incarceration, they should avoid changes that volition widen disparities, every bit has happened with juvenile solitude and with women in country prisons.

Slideshow 6. Swipe for more than item about race, gender, and income disparities.

Equipped with the full picture of how many people are locked up in the Usa, where, and why, nosotros all accept a better foundation for moving the conversation about criminal justice reform forward. For example, the data makes it clear that ending the war on drugs will non alone cease mass incarceration, though the federal government and some states have taken an important footstep by reducing the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses. Looking at the "whole pie" of mass incarceration opens upward conversations virtually where it makes sense to focus our energies at the local, state, and national levels. For example:

• How tin we finer invest in communities to make information technology less likely that someone comes into contact with the criminal legal system in the first place? And what measures can assist assist successful reentry and end the barbarous wheel of re-incarceration that and then many individuals and families experience?
• Tin can we persuade regime officials and prosecutors to revisit the reflexive, simplistic policymaking that has served to increase incarceration for "vehement" offenses? How can we eliminate policy "carveouts" that exclude wide categories of people from reforms and end upward gutting the impact of reforms?
• What volition it take to embolden policymakers and the public to practise what it takes to shrink the second largest slice of the pie — the thousands of local jails? And what will it accept to redirect public spending to smarter investments similar community-based drug treatment and job training?
• While the federal prison organization is a small slice of the total pie, how tin can improved federal policies and financial incentives be used to advance state and county level reforms? And for their role, how tin can elected sheriffs, district attorneys, and judges — who all control larger shares of the correctional pie — deadening the flow of people into the criminal justice organization?
• Given that the companies with the greatest bear on on incarcerated people are not private prison operators, but service providers that contract with public facilities, how tin governments end contracts that clasp money from those behind confined and their families?
• What reforms can we implement to both reduce the number of people incarcerated in the U.Due south. and the well-known racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system?
• What lessons can we learn from the pandemic? Are federal, state, and local governments prepared to respond to time to come pandemics, epidemics, natural disasters, and other emergencies, including with plans to decarcerate? And how can states and the federal authorities better utilise empathetic release and clemency powers both during the ongoing pandemic and in the future?

The The states has the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in the world. Looking at the big picture of the 1.ix million people locked up in the Usa on any given mean solar day, nosotros can run into that something needs to change. Both policymakers and the public have the responsibility to advisedly consider each individual slice of the carceral pie and ask whether legitimate social goals are served by putting each group behind bars, and whether whatsoever benefit really outweighs the social and fiscal costs.

Fifty-fifty narrow policy changes, like reforms to bail, tin can meaningfully reduce our social club'south use of incarceration. At the same time, nosotros should exist wary of proposed reforms that seem promising but will have only minimal consequence, considering they merely transfer people from one piece of the correctional "pie" to another or needlessly exclude broad swaths of people. Keeping the large picture in mind is disquisitional if we hope to develop strategies that actually shrink the "whole pie."

People new to criminal justice issues might reasonably expect that a large picture analysis like this would exist produced non by reform advocates, simply by the criminal justice system itself. The unfortunate reality is that there isn't 1 centralized criminal justice system to do such an assay. Instead, even thinking just about adult corrections, we accept a federal organization, 50 state systems, three,000+ county systems, 25,000+ municipal systems, and then on. Each of these systems collects information for its own purposes that may or may not be compatible with information from other systems and that might indistinguishable or omit people counted by other systems.

This isn't to discount the work of the Agency of Justice Statistics, which, despite limited resources, undertakes the Herculean task of organizing and standardizing the data on correctional facilities. And it'south non to say that the FBI doesn't piece of work hard to aggregate and standardize police force abort and crime report data. But the fact is that the local, country, and federal agencies that carry out the work of the criminal justice organization — and are the sources of BJS and FBI data — weren't set upward to answer many of the simple-sounding questions virtually the "arrangement."

Similarly, there are systems involved in the solitude of justice-involved people that might non consider themselves role of the criminal justice organization, but should be included in a holistic view of incarceration. Juvenile justice, civil detention and delivery, immigration detention, and commitment to psychiatric hospitals for criminal justice involvement are examples of this broader universe of solitude that is often ignored. The "whole pie" incorporates data from these systems to provide the most comprehensive view of incarceration possible.

To produce this study, we took the most recent data available for each part of these systems, and, where necessary, adjusted the information to ensure that each person was merely counted one time, only once, and in the right identify.

Finally, readers who rely on this report year afterwards twelvemonth may be pleased to learn that since the terminal version was published in 2020, the delays in government data reports that made tracking trends so difficult under the previous assistants take shortened, with publications almost returning to their previous cycles. Even so, having entered the third year of the pandemic, it's frustrating that we still only have national data from year one for most systems of confinement.

The ongoing problem of data delays is non limited to the regular information publications that this study relies on, simply also special information collections that provide richly detailed, self-reported data nigh incarcerated people and their experiences in prison and jail, namely the Survey of Prison Inmates (conducted in 2016 for the offset fourth dimension since 2004) and the Survey of Inmates in Local Jails (last conducted in 2002 and as of March 2020, next slated for 2022 — which would make a 2025 study on the data almost eighteen years off-schedule).

Data sources

This briefing uses the most recent information bachelor on the number of people in diverse types of facilities and the near pregnant accuse or conviction. Considering the various systems of solitude collect and report data on different schedules, this report reflects population information collected between 2019 and 2022 (and some of the data for people in psychiatric facilities dates back to 2014). Furthermore, considering non all types of data are updated each year, we sometimes had to calculate estimates; for example, we applied the percentage distribution of criminal offence types from the previous year to the current yr's total count information. For this reason, we chose to circular most labels in the graphics to the nearest thousand, except where rounding to the nearest ten, nearest one hundred, or (in two cases in the jails detail slide) the nearest 500 was more than informative in that context. This rounding process may also result in some parts not calculation up precisely to the total.

Our information sources were:

• State prisons: Vera Found of Justice, People in Prison in Winter 2021-22 Tabular array 2 provides the full yearend 2021 population. This report does non include criminal offense information, however, so we applied the ratio of offense types calculated from the almost recent Bureau of Justice Statistics study on this population, Prisoners in 2020 Tabular array 14 (as of Dec 31, 2019) to the 2021 total state prison population.
• Jails: Agency of Justice Statistics, Jail Inmates in 2020 Table 1 and Table 5, reporting average daily population and convicted status for midyear 2020, and our analysis of the Survey of Inmates in Local Jails, 2002³⁰ for law-breaking types. See beneath and Who is in jail? Deep dive for why we used our ain analysis rather than the otherwise excellent Bureau of Justice Statistics analysis of the same dataset, Contour of Jail Inmates, 2002.
• Federal:
  • Bureau of Prisons: Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) Population Statistics, reporting data as of February 17, 2022 (total population of 153,053), and Prisoners in 2020 Tabular array xviii, reporting data as of September 30, 2020 (we applied the per centum distribution of offense types from that tabular array to the 2022 convicted population).
  • U.S. Marshals Service published its most recent population count in its 2022 Fact Sheet, reporting the average daily population in fiscal twelvemonth 2021. It also provided a more than detailed breakdown of its "Prisoner Operations" population equally of September 2019 by facility type (state and local, private contracted, federal, and non-paid facilities) in response to our public records asking. The number held in federal detention centers (8,376) came from the Fact Sheet; the number held in local jails (31,500) came from Jail Inmates in 2020 Tabular array viii, and the number in private, contracted facilities (21,480) came from the September 2019 breakdown. To estimate the number held in land prisons for the Marshals Service (2,323), we calculated the difference between the total average daily population and the sum of those held in federal detention centers, local jails, and private facilities. We created our own estimated law-breaking breakdown by applying the ratios of reported offense types (excluding the vague "other new criminal offense" and "not reported" categories") to the total average daily population in 2021. Information technology is worth noting that the U.South. Marshals detainees held in federal facilities and private contracted facilities were not included in several previous editions of this report, equally they are not included in near of the Bureau of Justice Statistics' jails or prisons data sets.
• Youth: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Piece of cake Access to the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement (EZACJRP), reporting full population and facility data for October 23, 2019. Our data on youth incarcerated in adult prisons comes from Prisoners in 2020 Table 13, reporting data for December 31, 2020, and youth in adult jails from Jail Inmates in 2020 Tabular array 2, reporting data for the last weekday in June 2020. The number of youth reported in Indian Country facilities comes from the Bureau of Justice Statistics report Jails in Indian Land, 2019-2020 and the Bear on of COVID-19 on the Tribal Jail Population Tabular array 8, besides reporting information for the final weekday in June, 2020. For more data on the geography of the juvenile system, see the No Kids in Prison campaign.
• Immigration detention: The boilerplate daily population of 22,041³¹ in Clearing and Community Enforcement (Ice) detention comes from Water ice'southward FY 2022 Water ice Statistics spreadsheet as of February 17, 2022. The count of 9,781 youth in Role of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) custody comes from the Unaccompanied Conflicting Children (UAC) Program Fact Canvas, reporting the population as of February 16, 2022. Our estimates of how many ICE detainees are held in federal, private, and local facilities come from our analysis of a comprehensive Ice detention facility list from November 2017, obtained by the National Immigrant Justice Heart. 7% were in federal Service Processing Centers, 66% in private contract facilities, and 27% in city and canton-operated jails.
• Justice-related involuntary delivery:
  • Land psychiatric hospitals (people committed to state psychiatric hospitals by courts after beingness found "not guilty by reason of insanity" (NGRI) or, in some states, "guilty but mentally ill" (GBMI) and others held for pretrial evaluation or for treatment as "incompetent to stand trial" (IST)): These counts are from pages 92, 99, and 104 of the August 2017 NRI report, Forensic Patients in State Psychiatric Hospitals: 1999-2016, reporting information from 37 states for 2014. The categories NGRI and GBMI are combined in this data set, and for pretrial, nosotros chose to combine pretrial evaluation and those receiving services to restore competency for trial, because in most cases, these indicate people who have non yet been convicted or sentenced. This is not a complete view of all justice-related involuntary commitments, but we believe these categories and these facilities capture the largest share.
  • Civil detention and delivery: (At least 20 states and the federal government operate facilities for the purposes of detaining people convicted of sexual crimes after their sentences are complete. These facilities and the confinement there are technically ceremonious, only in reality are quite similar prisons. People under civil commitment are held in custody continuously from the time they start serving their sentence at a correctional facility through their solitude in the civil facility.) The civil commitment counts come from an almanac survey conducted by the Sex Offender Ceremonious Commitment Programs Network shared by SOCCPN President Shan Jumper. Counts for almost states are from the 2021 survey, but for states that did not participate in 2021, we included the near recent figures available: Nebraska's counts and the Federal Agency of Prisons' (BOP) committed population count are from 2018; the BOP'due south detained population count is from 2017.
• Territorial prisons (correctional facilities in the U.Due south. Territories of American Samoa, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and U.Due south. Commonwealths of the Northern Mariana Islands and Puerto Rico): Prisoners in 2020 Table 23, reporting data for December 31, 2020.
• Indian Country jails (correctional facilities operated by tribal authorities or the U.S. Department of the Interior'due south Agency of Indian Affairs): Jails in Indian State, 2019-2020 and the Touch of COVID-nineteen on the Tribal Jail Population Table 1, reporting data for the last weekday in June, 2020.
• Military: Prisoners in 2020 Tables 21 (for full population) and 22 (for offense types) reporting data as of December 31, 2020.
• Probation and parole: Our counts of the number of people on probation and parole are from the Bureau of Justice Statistics report Probation and Parole in the Us, 2020 Table 1, reporting data for December 31, 2020, and were adjusted to ensure that people with multiple statuses were counted just once in their well-nigh restrictive category. (Our information on the number of people on probation and on parole who were also in jails is as of mid-twelvemonth 2020 from Jail Inmates in 2020, Table vii. Our data on the number of people on probation or parole who were likewise in state or federal prisons is as of December 31, 2019 from Correctional Populations in the United States, 2019, Table 5. Our data on the number of people on probation who are also on parole is as of December 31, 2020 from Probation and Parole in the United States, 2020, Tabular array ix.) For readers interested in knowing the total number of people on parole and probation, ignoring whatsoever double-counting with other forms of correctional control, there are 862,100 people on parole and 3,053,700 people on probation as of Dec 31, 2020.
• Private facilities: Except for local jails (which we volition explain in the "Adjustments to avoid double counting" section below), our identification of the number of people held in private facilities was straightforward:
  • For country prisons, the number of people in private prisons came from Table 12 in Prisoners in 2020.
  • For the Federal Bureau of Prisons, we included the half-dozen,085 people in "privately managed facilities, the 6,561 in Residential Reentry Centers (halfway houses), and the 5,462 in home confinement every bit of February 17, 2022, according to the Bureau of Prisons "Population Statistics" webpage. This definition is consistent with the one used by the Agency of Justice Statistics in Table 12 of Prisoners in 2020, just uses more than recent data.
  • For the U.S. Marshals Service, we used the FOIA response reporting the average daily population as of September 2019, including both "individual, in-direct" and "private, direct contract" facilities.
  • For youth, we used the 2019 Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement, which provides a breakdown of the number of youth held in publicly and privately operated facilities.
  • For immigration detention, nosotros relied on the work of the Tara Tidwell Cullen of the National Immigrant Justice Center, applying the percentage held in private facilities as of Nov 2017 to the February 2022 Ice population.

Adjustments to avoid double counting

To avoid counting anyone twice, nosotros performed the following adjustments:

• To avoid anyone in clearing detention existence counted twice, we removed the 27% (5,951) of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detained population that is held under contract in local jails from the total jail population. We removed 34.1% of these Water ice detainees from the jail convicted population and the remainder from the unconvicted population. (We based these percentages of the population held for ICE on our analysis of the Profile of Jail Inmates, 2002, as detailed in our report, Era of Mass Expansion: Why State Officials Should Fight Jail Growth.)
• To avoid anyone in local jails on behalf of land or federal prison authorities from being counted twice, we removed the 73,321 people — cited in Table 12 of Prisoners in 2020 — confined in local jails on behalf of federal or state prison systems from the full jail population and from the numbers we calculated for those in local jails that are convicted. To avoid those being held by the U.S. Marshals Service from being counted twice, we removed from the jail total 31,500 Marshals detainees reported equally held in local jails in Jail Inmates in 2020 Tabular array 8. Nosotros removed 75.9% of these people held in jails for the Marshals from the jail convicted population, and the residue from the unconvicted jail population. (Over again, nosotros based these percentages on our assay of the Contour of Jail Inmates, 2002.)
• Considering we removed Water ice detainees and people nether the jurisdiction of federal and state regime from the jail population, we had to recalculate the offense distribution reported in Contour of Jail Inmates, 2002 who were "convicted" or "not convicted" without the people who reported that they were existence held on behalf of state authorities, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the U.Due south. Marshals Service, or U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service/U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Water ice).³² Our definition of "convicted" was those who reported that they were "To serve a judgement in this jail," "To look sentencing for an offense," or "To await transfer to serve a sentence somewhere else." Our definition of not bedevilled was "To stand trial for an offense," "To await arraignment," or "To await a hearing for revocation of probation/parole or community release."
• For our analysis of people held in private jails for local authorities, nosotros applied the percentage of the total custody population held in private facilities in midyear 2019 (calculated from Table 20 of Census of Jails, 2005-2019) to our count of people held in jails for local regime (547,328) in 2020, subsequently making the adjustments described in this department.

Our graph of the racial and ethnic disparities in correctional facilities (as shown in Slideshow 6) uses the merely information source that has data for all types of adult correctional facilities: the U.Southward. Census. Because the relevant tables from the 2020 decennial Census have non been published all the same, we used the 2019 American Community Survey tables B02001and DP05 and represented the iv named racial and ethnic groups that account for at least 2%, nationally, of the population in correctional facilities. Not included on the graphic are Asian people, who make up 1% of the correctional population, Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders, who make upwardly 0.iii%, people identifying as "Some other race," who account for vi.iii%, and those of "Two or more races," who make upward 4% of the full national correctional population.

Notation that because Latinos may exist of any race and considering of how the Demography Bureau published race and ethnicity information in the relevant table, we used the Census data for "White alone, Not Hispanic or Latino" for white people, only the Census Bureau'south information for "Blackness or African American" and "American Indian and Alaska Native" people may include people who identify every bit both that race and Latino. Because this particular table is non appropriate for state-level analyses, but the Prison Policy Initiative will explore using the 2020 Demographic and Housing Characteristics file when information technology is published by the Census Bureau in late 2022 to provide detailed racial and indigenous data for the combined incarcerated population in each state. In by decades, this data was particularly useful in states where the system — especially jails — did non publish race and ethnicity data or did non publish data with more precision than just "white, Black and other."

Read the entire methodology

To assistance readers link to specific images in this report, nosotros created these special urls:

How many people are locked up in the United States?

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow1/1

ane in 3 people behind confined is in a jail. Most have yet to be tried in court.

https://world wide web.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow1/2

Despite reforms, drug offenses are still a defining characteristic of the federal organisation

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow1/3

Beyond "federal prison," multiple agencies and thousands of local facilities confine people for the federal government

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow1/four

Prison population drops have leveled off since 2020

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#covid

Jail populations are creeping back to normal

https://world wide web.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#covid

Pretrial Detention

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow2/ane

Pretrial policies drive jail growth

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow2/2

Local Jails: The real scandal is the churn

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow2/3

Why are so many people detained in jails earlier trial?

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow2/4

Simply eight% of confined people are held in individual prisons

https://world wide web.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#private_facilities

1 in 5 incarcerated people is locked up for a drug offense

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow3/one

Police make over a million drug possession arrests each year

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow3/2

Some states take largely concluded the War on Drugs. Other states, non and then much.

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow3/iii

Nigh states track and publish just i measure of postal service-release recidivism

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#releaserecidivism

Very few states track and publish whatsoever backsliding data for people on probation

https://world wide web.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#probationrecidivism

What do victims of trigger-happy crimes really desire?

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#victimswant

Not-criminal (or "technical") violations are the main reason for incarceration of people on probation and parole

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow4/1

Contrary to myth, people incarcerated for violent offenses and released are least probable to be arrested once more

https://world wide web.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow4/ane

Well-nigh confined youth are held for non-person offenses, many for acts that are not "crimes" at all

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow5/1

Well-nigh 54,000 people are confined for immigration reasons

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow5/2

Psychiatric facilities confine 22,000 justice-involved people every day

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow5/three

Nigh people in Indian Land jails are locked upward for property, drug, and public order charges

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow5/four

Mass incarceration straight impacts millions of people: Simply merely how many, and in what ways?

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#impacted

Incarceration is just 1 piece of the much larger organization of correctional command

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow6/1

Racial and ethnic disparities in correctional facilities

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow6/two

Women's incarceration patterns are very unlike than men's

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow6/3

Women's prison house populations have grown faster than men'southward (and before the pandemic, women'south populations were declining more than slowly)

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow6/4

Most people in prison house are poor, and the poorest are women and people of color

https://world wide web.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow6/5

1 out of 5 incarcerated people in the world is incarcerated in the U.S.

https://world wide web.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow6/vi

To help readers link to specific study sections or paragraphs, we created these special urls:

What actually happened to prison and jail populations during the pandemic?

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#covid

Jails vs. prisons: What'south the departure?

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#jailsvprisons

Eight myths nigh mass incarceration

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#myths

The starting time myth: Private prisons are the decadent center of mass incarceration

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#firstmyth

Offense categories might not hateful what you call back

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#offensecategories

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

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#secondmyth

The tertiary myth: Releasing "nonviolent drug offenders" would finish mass incarceration

https://world wide web.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#thirdmyth

The quaternary myth: By definition, "violent crime" involves physical harm

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#fourthmyth

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

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#fifthmyth

Backsliding: A slippery statistic

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#recidivism_measures

The sixth myth: Crime victims support long prison sentences

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#fifthmyth

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

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#fifthmyth

The eighth myth: Expanding community supervision is the all-time style to reduce incarceration

https://world wide web.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#fifthmyth

The high costs of low-level offenses

https://world wide web.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#lowlevel

Probation & parole violations and "holds" pb to unnecessary incarceration

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#holds

Misdemeanors: Minor offenses with major consequences

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#misdemeanors

"Low-level fugitives" alive in fear of incarceration for missed court dates and unpaid fines

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#benchwarrants

Lessons from the smaller "slices": Youth, immigration, and involuntary delivery

https://world wide web.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#smallerslices

Beyond the "Whole Pie": Community supervision, poverty, and race and gender disparities

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#community

Each paragraph is also numbered, so you can use urls in this format:

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#paragraph1
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#paragraph2
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#paragraph3
etc…

Learn how to link to specific images and sections

Acknowledgments

All Prison house Policy Initiative reports are collaborative endeavors, just this report builds on the successful collaborations of the 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 versions. For this year'south report, the authors are specially indebted to Lena Graber of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center and Heidi Altman of the National Immigrant Justice Middle for their feedback and help putting the changes to immigration detention into context, Jacob Kang-Brown of the Vera Institute of Justice for sharing state prison data, Shan Jumper for sharing updated civil detention and delivery data, Emily Widra and Leah Wang for research support, Naila Awan and Wanda Bertram for their helpful edits, Ed Epping for help with one of the visuals, and Jordan Miner for upgrading our slideshow technology. Notwithstanding, whatsoever errors or omissions, and terminal responsibility for all of the many value judgements required to produce a data visualization similar this, are the sole responsibility of the authors.

We thank the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Rubber and Justice Challenge for their support of our research into the use and misuse of jails in this country. We besides give thanks Public Welfare Foundation for their support of our reports that fill key data and messaging gaps. Finally, we'd similar 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. She is the author of Youth Solitude: The Whole Pie, The Gender Split: Tracking women's state prison house growth, and the 2016 report Punishing Poverty: The high cost of probation fees in Massachusetts. She recently co-authored Abort, Release, Repeat: How police and jails are misused to respond to social problems with Alexi Jones. In addition to these reports, Wendy oft contributes briefings on recent data releases, academic research, women'southward incarceration, pretrial detention, probation, and more.

Peter Wagner is an chaser and the Executive Director of the Prison Policy Initiative. He co-founded the Prison house Policy Initiative in 2001 in guild 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 betrayal the broader damage of mass criminalization and spark advocacy campaigns to create a more just society. Alongside reports similar this that help the public more fully appoint in criminal justice reform, the organization leads the nation'south fight to go on the prison system from exerting undue influence on the political process (a.k.a. prison gerrymandering) and plays a leading part in protecting the families of incarcerated people from the predatory prison and jail telephone manufacture and the video visitation industry. The system besides sounded the warning in 2020 on the danger of COVID-19 outbreaks in prisons and jails, and throughout the pandemic has provided frequent updates on releases, vaccines, and other prison house policies critical to saving lives behind bars.

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Source: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html

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