The most commonly cited statistic is that are about 2. Department of Justice, which found that on June 30, , the United States housed , Federal prisoners, 1,, State prisoners, and , detainees in local jails. In addition, it is estimated that more than 80, youth are held in juvenile detention facilities on any given day.
Finally, the Bureau of Indian Affairs oversees jails in Indian Country, and the Department of Defense has its own network of more than sixty detention facilities all over the globe.
Hundreds of thousands more individuals are also housed in halfway houses and police lockups; no one knows the exact number. Although the public and the media may not fully recognize the differences between a jail and a prison and often use the two terms interchangeably, both are secure facilities in which individuals are physically confined and denied certain personal freedoms.
There are also facilities referred to as lockups. At that time, the total rated capacity of these facilities stood at , Note that rated capacity refers to the number of inmates or beds determined by an official body and often based on architectural design and construction. Rated capacity represents the number of inmates at which a facility can operate safely. This number is usually determined by the agency head or facility supervisor.
A lockup is defined as a temporary hold facility, usually operated by a police department that holds offenders pending bail or transport to the local jail for processing, inebriates those offenders arrested for public drunkenness until they are ready or sober enough to be released, and juvenile offenders pending release to parental custody or placement in a juvenile detention center at the order of juvenile court. Due to the various locations of lockups, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly how many lockups there actually are in the United States.
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. 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. For people struggling to rebuild their lives after conviction or incarceration, returning to jail for a minor infraction can be profoundly destabilizing.
The national data do not exist to say exactly how many people are in jail because of probation or parole violations or detainers, but initial evidence shows that these account for over one-third of some jail populations. This problem is not limited to local jails, either; in , the Council of State Governments found that 1 in 4 people in state prisons are incarcerated as a result of supervision violations. Misdemeanor charges may sound like small potatoes, 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.
Defendants can end up in jail even if their offense is not punishable with jail time. 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. 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. To understand the main drivers of incarceration, the public needs to see how many people are incarcerated for different offense types.
But the reported offense data oversimplifies how people interact with the criminal justice system in two important ways: it reports only one offense category per person, and it reflects the outcome of the legal process, obscuring important details of actual events.
First, when a person is in prison for multiple offenses, only the most serious offense is reported. This makes it hard to grasp the complexity of criminal events, such as the role drugs may have played in violent or property offenses. We must also consider that almost all convictions are the result of plea bargains, where defendants plead guilty to a lesser offense, possibly in a different category, or one that they did not actually commit.
Secondly, many of these categories group together people convicted of a wide range of offenses. It also includes offenses that the average person may not consider to be murder at all. In particular, the felony murder rule says that if someone dies during the commission of a felony, everyone involved can be as guilty of murder as the person who pulled the trigger.
Acting as lookout during a break-in where someone was accidentally killed is indeed a serious offense, but many may be surprised that this can be considered murder in the U. For example, there are over 6, youth behind bars for technical violations of their probation, rather than for a new offense.
Turning to the people who are locked up criminally and civilly for immigration-related reasons , we find that 11, people are in federal prisons for criminal convictions of immigration offenses, and 13, more are held pretrial by the U.
The vast majority of people incarcerated for criminal immigration offenses are accused of illegal entry or illegal re-entry — in other words, for no more serious offense than crossing the border without permission. Slideshow 5. Swipe for more detail about youth confinement, immigrant confinement and psychiatric confinement.
Another 39, people are civilly detained by U. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE not for any crime, but simply for their undocumented immigrant status. ICE detainees are physically confined in federally-run or privately-run immigration detention facilities, or in local jails under contract with ICE.
An additional 3, unaccompanied children are held in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement ORR , awaiting placement with parents, family members, or friends. 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.
Adding to the universe of people who are confined because of justice system involvement, 22, people are involuntarily detained or committed to state psychiatric hospitals and civil commitment centers.
Many of these people are not even convicted, and some are held indefinitely. There are another , people on parole and a staggering 3. 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.
Beyond identifying how many people are impacted by the criminal justice 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. 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, and decimates job opportunities. S residents. 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.
Slideshow 6. Swipe for more detail about race, gender and income disparities. 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. The National Research Council study concludes:. As a result, the excessive sentencing practices in the U.
This is partially a result of declining crime rates, but has largely been achieved through pragmatic changes in policy and practice.
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