![]() But since they had more to do with unintentional court slowdowns than purposeful government action to decarcerate, there is little reason to think that these changes will be sustained in a post-pandemic world. Of course, it’s encouraging to see significant, rapid population drops in prisons and jails and to see that, when pressed, states and counties can find ways to function without so much reliance on incarceration. ![]() 3 Jails also continued to hold large numbers of people for low-level offenses like misdemeanors, civil infractions, and non-criminal violations of probation and parole. People awaiting trial in jail made up an even larger share of jail populations in 2020, when they should have been the first people released and diverted to depopulate crowded facilities. Instead, the population changes are explained by a 40% drop in prison admissions, which itself was the unintended consequence of pandemic-related court delays and the temporary suspension of transfers from local jails.Ĭity and county officials in charge of jail populations also failed to make the obvious choices to safely reduce populations. While prison populations are the lowest they’ve been in decades, this is not because officials are releasing more people in fact, they are releasing fewer people than before the pandemic. 2 For these reasons, we caution readers against interpreting the population changes reflected in this report too optimistically. And as the criminal legal system has returned to “business as usual,” prison and jail populations have already begun to rebound to pre-pandemic levels. Unfortunately, the changes that led to such dramatic population drops were largely the result of pandemic-related slowdowns in the criminal legal system - not permanent policy changes. These are the kinds of year-over-year changes needed to actually end mass incarceration. In the first year of the pandemic, we saw significant reductions in prison and jail populations: the number of people in prisons dropped by 15% during 2020, and jail populations fell even faster, down 25% by the summer of 2020. It provides a detailed look at where and why people are locked up in the U.S., and dispels some modern myths to focus attention on the real drivers of mass incarceration and overlooked issues that call for reform. This report offers some much-needed clarity by piecing together the data about this country’s disparate systems of confinement. 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 immigration detention facilities, and 82 Indian country jails, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. doesn’t have one “criminal justice system ” instead, we have thousands of federal, state, local, and tribal systems. As public support for criminal justice reform continues to build - and as the pandemic raises the stakes higher - it’s more important than ever that we get the facts straight and understand the big picture.įurther complicating matters is the fact that the U.S. The various government agencies involved in the criminal legal system collect a lot of data, but very little is designed to help policymakers or the public understand what’s going on. Can it really be true that most people in jail are legally innocent? How much of mass incarceration is a result of the war on drugs, or the profit motives of private prisons? How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed decisions about how people are punished when they break the law? These essential questions are harder to answer than you might expect.
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