State prisons and local jails appear indifferent to COVID outbreaks, refuse to depopulate dangerous facilities

While some prison systems and local jails have maintained historically low populations, others have returned to pre-pandemic levels, despite the ongoing dangers of COVID-19 and new, more transmissible variants.

by Emily Widra, February 10, 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, particularly inside prisons and jails. The death rate from COVID-19 in prisons is more than double that of the general U.S. population.¹ As cases and hospitalizations climb outside prison walls, there is no doubt that cases are spiking in jails and prisons across the country. In state and federal prisons, over 2,900 people have died of COVID-19, almost 476,000 people have been infected, and thousands of additional cases are linked to individual county jails. Even now, when more than 75% of people in the U.S. have received at least one dose of the vaccine, correctional staff are hesitant to get vaccinated or receive boosters, and prison systems are slow to roll out boosters to incarcerated people.² As the more contagious Omicron variant ravages parts of the nation and renders hospitals completely overrun, nearly three quarters of prisons³ are experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks; public health officials continue to recommend reducing prison populations as a primary method of risk reduction. In fact, in October 2021, the American Public Health Association⁴ adopted a policy in support of decarceration as a public health matter and new research shows the detrimental effect of COVID-19 on all-cause mortality in state prisons. Despite the clear need for smaller confined populations, the data show that with just a few exceptions, state and local authorities are allowing their prison and jail populations to return to dangerous, pre-pandemic levels.

The federal Bureau of Prisons, state governments and departments of corrections, and local justice system officials have a responsibility to protect the health and lives of those who are incarcerated. After almost two years of outbreak after outbreak in prisons and jails, correctional authorities must be held accountable for their repeated failure to reduce populations enough to prevent the illness and death of those who are incarcerated and in surrounding communities.

Prisons

Even in states where prison populations have dropped, there are still too many people behind bars to accommodate social distancing, effective isolation and quarantine, and the increased health care needs of incarcerated people. For example, although California has reduced the state prison population by about 18% since the start of the pandemic, it has not been enough to prevent large COVID-19 outbreaks in the state’s prisons, and the prison system has witnessed a 300% increase in infections among incarcerated people over the past few weeks and a 212% increase in cases among staff. In fact, as of December 15th, 2021, California’s prisons were still holding more people than they were designed for, at 113% of their design capacity (and up from 103% in January 2021). Considering the continued overcrowding in the California prison system, it’s not surprising that the state is responsible for eight out of the ten largest COVID-19 prison clusters.

Figure 1. Prison population data for 50 state prison systems as reported directly from the state Departments of Correction and the Marshall Project and federal data as published weekly by the federal Bureau of Prisons. For the available population data for these 50 states and the Bureau of Prisons, see Appendix A.

Many states’ prison populations are the lowest they’ve been in decades, but this is not because more people are being released from prisons; in fact, fewer people are. Data from 2020, recently released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, shows that prisons nationwide released 10% fewer people in 2020 than in 2019. Instead, data suggest most of the population drops we’ve seen over the past 20 months are due to reduced prison admissions, not increasing releases. In the states for which we have recent data, both admissions and releases have decreased in recent years, making clear that prisons are not using all available tools at their disposal to stop the spread of the virus in their facilities. The significant drop in admissions to prisons was largely an unintended consequence of court delays and suspension of transfers from local jails early in the pandemic, rather than any dedicated decarceration efforts. Finding ways to continue reducing the number of people admitted to correctional facilities is critical to lowering the number of people behind bars, but to quickly decarcerate, states should release far more people, too.

Figure 2. These twelve states publish monthly release and admission data for 2018, 2019, 2020, and most of 2021. These data show us a pattern of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic: reducing prison admissions, while releasing fewer people from prison.

Despite evidence that large-scale releases — which have been used periodically in states across the U.S. — do not inherently endanger public safety, most states have elected to release people from prison on a mostly case-by-case basis, which an October 2020 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine charitably described as “procedurally slow and not well suited to crisis situations.” In short, this choice ignores the crisis of COVID-19.

Thankfully, some states have recognized the inefficiency of case-by-case releases and the necessity of larger-scale releases. For example, in New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy signed bill S2519 in October 2020, which allowed for the early release of people with less than a year left on their sentences. A few weeks after the bill was signed, more than 2,000 people were released from New Jersey state prisons on November 4th, 2020.⁵ In February 2021, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper announced a legal settlement had been reached to release 3,500 people in state custody (with 1,500 of those releases to take place within 90 days). The releases were the result of a NAACP lawsuit challenging prison conditions in North Carolina during COVID-19. The state said it would release people using discretionary sentence credits (similar to “good time credits”), home confinement, and post-release supervision. But these instances of larger-scale release efforts taking place in state prison systems are the exception, not the rule.

Jails

Jail populations, like prison populations, are lower now than they were pre-pandemic. Initially, many local officials — including sheriffs, prosecutors, and judges — responded quickly to COVID-19 and reduced their jail populations. In a national sample of 415 county jails of varying sizes, almost all (98%) decreased their populations from March to May of 2020, resulting in an average change of a 33% population decrease across all 415 jails at the start of COVID-19. These population reductions came as the result of various policy changes, including police issuing citations in lieu of arrests, prosecutors declining to charge people for “low-level offenses,” courts reducing cash bail amounts, and jail administrators releasing people detained pretrial or those serving short sentences for “nonviolent” offenses.

But those early-pandemic, common-sense policy changes didn’t last long. Between May 2020 and February 2021, the populations of 83% of the jails in our sample increased, reversing course from the earlier months of the pandemic. As of December 2021, 28% of the jails in our sample have higher populations now than they did in March 2020.⁶ Overall, the average population change across these 415 jails from March 2020 to December 2021 has diminished to only a 10% decrease, while the average population change from July 2021 to December 2021 has dropped to 0%, suggesting that the early reforms instituted to mitigate COVID-19 have largely been abandoned.

For example, by mid-April 2020, the Philadelphia city jail population reportedly dropped by more than 17% after city police suspended low-level arrests and judges released “certain nonviolent detainees” jailed for “low-level charges.” But just two weeks later — as the pandemic raged on — the Philadelphia police force announced that they would resume arrests for property crimes, effectively reversing the earlier reduction efforts. Similarly, on July 10th, 2020, the sheriff of Jefferson County (Birmingham), Alabama, announced that the jail would limit admissions to only “violent felons that cannot make bond.” That effort was quickly abandoned when the jail resumed normal admission operations just one week later. The increasing jail populations across the country suggest that after the first wave of responses to COVID-19, many local officials have allowed jail admissions to return to business as usual.

Figure 3. Jails across the country initially responded to COVID-19 by reducing the number of people detained, but that trend reversed direction in May 2020, only two months after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Since May 2020, the data show a trend of jail populations slowly increasing. This graph contains aggregated data collected and provided by NYU’s Public Safety Lab and updates a graph in our October 2021 analysis. It includes all jails where the Lab was able to report data on March 10th and for at least 75% of the days in our research period, which ended December 31, 2021. (Data are not available for all facilities for all days, and the Lab interpolated missing data to fill those gaps.) This graph presents the data as 7-day rolling averages, which smooths out most of the variations caused by individual facilities not reporting population data on particular days. To see county level data for all 415 jails included in this analysis, see Appendix B.

In New York City, the jail population sharply declined after the pandemic was declared. Importantly, NYC jails – particularly Rikers Island – were some of the first jails in the country to witness a COVID-19 outbreak. And yet, across different demographics, NYC jail populations have slowly leveled out, suggesting that the policies responsible for the necessary decarceration are no longer in practice. In addition to suffering the effects of COVID-19, Rikers Island is also facing an unprecedented crisis following a history of over-incarceration and, according to a federal monitor, “decades of mismanagement.” At a time when jail populations should be at an all-time low, Rikers Island’s confined population surpassed the pre-COVID-19 population in July 2021. The population only dropped back down below the pre-pandemic level at the end of September 2021, when Gov. Hochul signed the Less is More Act, which reduced the number jailed for technical violations of supervision.

Figure 4. Graph showing the daily count of the NYC jail population by 5 key metrics. By all metrics, the NYC jail population dropped quickly at the start of the pandemic, but then started to rise again. On July 29, 2021 the total NYC jail population was higher than before the pandemic. Critically, the number of people detained pretrial has actually grown — from 4,284 on January 1, 2020 to 4,881 people on December 31, 2021 (with a peak of 5,768 in early July 2021) — likely because of the rollback of significant bail reform efforts last year. The population drops in September 2021 are encouraging but are largely the consequence of Governor Hochul signing the Less is More Act, releasing people on technical violations from jail, and therefore represent a helpful policy change that will reduce the population. However, the steep slope of the decline in September 2021 is unlikely to continue at that rate on its own without additional policy changes. Even with these reforms, the October 1st NYC jail population was only 7% below its pre-pandemic levels.
(Dotted lines connect periods with missing data, so the start of each dotted line and their bends represent specific historical data points.)

Even before COVID-19, prisons and jails were a threat to public health and considered notoriously dangerous places during any sort of viral outbreak. As the U.S. Supreme Court recognized years before the pandemic, by taking away a person’s ability to care for their own medical needs, carceral facilities must make sure that those who are incarcerated receive proper medical care–failure to do so can constitute a violation of of the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment and necessitate a reduction in the carceral population. And yet, correctional facilities continue to be the source of a large number of infections in the U.S. The COVID-19 death rate in prisons is almost three times higher than among the general U.S. population, even when adjusted for age and sex (as the prison population is disproportionately young and male). Since the early days of the pandemic, public health professionals, corrections officials, and criminal justice reform advocates have agreed that decarceration is necessary to protect incarcerated people and the community at large from COVID-19. Decarceration efforts must include releasing more people from prisons and jails. Despite this knowledge, state, federal, and local authorities have failed to release people from prisons and jails on a scale sufficient to protect incarcerated people’s lives – and by extension, the lives of everyone in the communities where incarcerated people eventually return, and where correctional staff live and work.

Prison populations for the federal Bureau of Prisons and all 50 state prison systems from January 2020 through December 2021. When available, we used prison populations as reported by Departments of Correction to The Marshall Project. If that data point was not available, we then used either the monthly average daily population (ADP) or point-in-time population counts. For the federal system, we used the first weekly population each week as reported by the Bureau of Prisons.

This table shows the jail populations for 415 county jails where data was available where data was available for March 10th, 2020 (the day before the pandemic was declared) and for 75% of the days between March 10th, 2020 and December, 2021. (This table is a subset of the population data available for over 1,000 local jails from the NYU Public Safety Lab Jail Data Initiative.)

New data on formerly incarcerated people’s employment reveal labor market injustices

Newly released data doubles down on what we’ve reported before: Formerly incarcerated people face huge obstacles to finding stable employment, leading to detrimental society-wide effects. Considering the current labor market, there may be plenty of jobs available, but they don’t guarantee stability or economic mobility for this vulnerable population.

by Leah Wang and Wanda Bertram, February 8, 2022

How many formerly incarcerated people are jobless at the moment? A good guess would be 60%, to generalize from a new report released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). The report shows that of more than 50,000 people released from federal prisons in 2010, a staggering 33% found no employment at all over four years post-release, and at any given time, no more than 40% of the cohort was employed. People who did find jobs struggled, too: Formerly incarcerated people in the sample had an average of 3.4 jobs throughout the four-year study period, suggesting that they were landing jobs that didn’t offer security or upward mobility.

As the data show, not only is reentry difficult in the first months of release from prison, but the struggle to find a job actually grew over time for the study cohort of people leaving federal prison in 2010. We show these increasing jobless rates next to one of the most dire economic moments of recent years — when the US unemployment rate reached its highest point of around 15% in mid-2020.¹

We warn readers that we can’t call the 60% jobless rate an “unemployment rate” — joblessness is different from unemployment, which refers to people actively looking for work. We calculated the first and only national unemployment rate for formerly incarcerated people in our 2018 report Out of Prison and Out of Work, and we can’t update that analysis, because we based it on data that the government only collected once.² Nevertheless, the new BJS data suggest that employment rates among people who have been to prison aren’t improving.

Formerly incarcerated individuals tend to experience joblessness and poverty that started long before they were ever locked up. When they’re released from prison, the pressure is on to get a job: People on parole (or “supervised release”) often must maintain employment or face reincarceration,³ while struggling to access social services, and trying to make ends meet in a job market more hostile to them than ever before. This combination of pressures amounts to a perpetual punishment. And it’s not just formerly incarcerated individuals who are punished: Policies that weaken their ability to turn down jobs with low wages may depress wages for other workers in their industries, as we’ll explain in this briefing.

Harsh parole conditions, a lack of social welfare programs, and a tough job market are forcing formerly incarcerated people — already a low-income, majority-minority demographic — into the least desirable jobs. But not everybody is losing: Businesses have found a way to capitalize on the desperation of applicants with conviction histories and exploit the fact that these these individuals have less bargaining power to demand changes in conditions of employment, such as better wages benefits and protections. This results in lower overall wages and more harmful working conditions in certain industries.

Post-release, months of searching and moving between jobs is common

The overall employment rate over four years after the study population was released hovered between 34.9% and 37.9% — in other words, about two-thirds of the population were jobless at any given time.

For those who did find employment after release, their earnings were lower than the general population: In the first few months, formerly incarcerated people were earning just 53% of the median US worker’s wage. And after four years of seeking and obtaining irregular employment, the study population was making less than 84 cents for every dollar of the US median wage (which, in 2014, was about $28,851 annually).

Earnings were lowest for Black and Native American people released from federal prison;⁵ in fact, racial and ethnic disparities in earnings seemed to grow over time. These findings probably reflect an unfortunate “racialized re-entry” process for people leaving prison, where the stigma of incarceration itself and differences in social networks for job-seekers vary across racial and ethnic groups. Researchers of this concept noted that white people getting out of prison actually appeared more disadvantaged and less employable “on paper” due to higher rates of substance use and longer sentences, but still ended up with better employment and income than Black and Hispanic people leaving prison.

Employment may be one of the most important benchmarks of reentry, yet it took formerly incarcerated people an average of over six months to find their first job after release. As such, many did not maintain employment over the entire four-year study period, and the average person in the study had 3.4 jobs over that time. If that sounds erratic, it is: The average person is employed for 78% of the weeks between ages 18 and 54, while people in the study’s cohort were employed just 58% of the time post-release. When people are moving from job to job, families and the economy suffer, and people risk violating their post-release supervision and being returned to incarceration.

Lastly, though it’s not clear exactly why, people who served less than a year in federal prison actually had a harder time finding and maintaining employment post-release, and spent more time without a job than the other groups.⁶ Given this devastating impact on their long-term employment prospects, it’s evident that people who are given short sentences — and who pose no safety risk — should not be incarcerated to begin with.⁷

The struggle to find a good job

The fact that most people released from prison have spotty, sporadic employment may mean that the jobs they’re getting are difficult jobs to keep, even for an extremely motivated worker. These could be temporary jobs, jobs where workers aren’t protected from wrongful termination, or dangerous or low-wage jobs that are unsustainable.

According to the BJS report, the major industries employing formerly incarcerated people include waste management services, construction, and food service. A 2021 study released by the U.S. Census Bureau affirms this finding. The study analyzed thousands of people with felony convictions, tracking their employment and income in the years around the Great Recession (2006-2018), and found that rebounds in construction and various service industries after the recession were associated with a bump in employment and income levels for these individuals. However, the people in that study saw their employment levels plateau after a few years, even in areas where construction and manufacturing thrived.

It’s true that industries like manufacturing and construction tend to boost employment and reduce recidivism for those leaving prison. But while these jobs did, at one time, allow people to build wealth and support a family, they don’t as much anymore, meaning that they are likely not alleviating poverty among formerly incarcerated people. The fact that formerly incarcerated people are not obtaining steady, reliable work is likely related to the industries in which they’re most commonly employed.

When the workforce is under mass supervision, key industries lose employee bargaining power

Looking more closely at the “low-skill” jobs that formerly incarcerated people tend to get can help us understand how mass incarceration and supervision may be hurting whole sectors of workers. In construction and manufacturing, union membership has declined significantly over the last twenty years.⁸ During the same period — between 2000 and 2019 — the number of people on parole grew by more than 150,000, and the number of people with felony convictions swelled from 13.2 million to an estimated 24 million.

While it’s impossible to draw a causal relationship between these two trends — given the numerous factors at play — there is serious potential for exploitation of formerly incarcerated people. For example, The New York Times has reported that New Yorkers with conviction histories are shuttled into non-union construction jobs with low to no benefits. Formerly incarcerated employees placed at such companies have described being “taken aback” at the low wages, and many have had to work other jobs to supplement their pay from their day jobs in construction.

A rising number of people with felony convictions — which is the result of, among other things, overly punitive sentencing — may be depressing wages and hurting working conditions for all workers in certain industries. Formerly incarcerated workers are not to blame, especially as many have likely been working in these industries for the better part of their adult lives. Prison does nothing to improve their qualifications as workers; meanwhile, the struggle of reentry makes them more desperate for job offers, as the new data make abundantly clear.

Formerly incarcerated people need greater opportunity from today’s labor market

The new BJS data confirm that formerly incarcerated people still suffer from sky-high jobless rates (despite evidence that virtually all want to work), and that those who do find work are getting unstable jobs. Formerly incarcerated people are typically poor before they go to prison, and joblessness during reentry can push them into even deeper poverty and have a permanent impact on their wealth accumulation.

These devastating statistics have implications for workers without criminal records as well. When industries can use vulnerable workers to replace or supplement workers who demand decent wages and benefits, the price of labor declines. When burdensome supervision requirements, unnecessary occupational licensing restrictions, and a lack of social welfare programs combine to make formerly incarcerated people desperate for work, all workers suffer.

Indeed, during the labor shortages we’ve seen in 2021 and 2022, employers are turning to currently or formerly incarcerated people as a convenient solution. (And sadly, a rising awareness of formerly incarcerated people’s unjust barriers to employment has allowed some of these employers to frame their actions as enlightened.) These shifts may manifest in depressed wages, benefits, and worker protections sector-wide.

People leaving prison need expanded access to job opportunities so that successful reentry can begin immediately and provide stability, not uncertainty. Policy solutions like occupational licensing reform and automatic record expungement, as well as “banning the box” on all initial employment applications, are respectable first steps. Even better would be including those with conviction histories as a protected class⁹ in employment non-discrimination statutes. In-prison training programs for jobs in construction and similar industries may also boost employment and wages in some areas, according to some research, but it’s not a universal solution, nor does it solve underlying problems of low educational attainment and economic immobility.

It’s critical that lawmakers support workers with and without criminal records who are working together to end the exploitative practices that hurt them all. Without leveling the playing field for formerly incarcerated people, not only will their jobless rates remain high, but self-serving employers will continue to benefit from a disposable labor pool, with detrimental impacts on everyone.

COVID looks like it may stay. That means prison medical copays must go.

Forty states and the federal prison system continue to charge incarcerated people unaffordable copays for medical care.

by Tiana Herring, February 1, 2022

In 2017, our analysis of medical copays in prisons across the country brought to light the common but utterly backwards practice of charging incarcerated people unaffordable fees for their health care. At that time, only eight states did not charge medical copays: Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Wyoming. While several other states have since added themselves to this list, the vast majority have still not eliminated medical copays. With a new legislative session starting in many states, we reviewed each state’s policy — and any temporary changes they’ve made in response to the COVID-19 crisis — to identify places where repealing these fees should be on the agenda. (Looking for your state’s policies? See the appendix tables.)

40 states & the federal prison system still need to eliminate medical copays

Since 2017, two additional prison systems — California and Illinois — have eliminated medical copays, and, for the last two years, Virginia has suspended medical copays as part of a pilot program. Texas reduced its exorbitant $100 yearly health care fee to a less atrocious, but still out-of-reach, $13.55 per-visit fee. Idaho also reduced its medical copays in prison from $5 to $3 in 2018.

Even a $3 copay, though, is unaffordable for most incarcerated people, given the obscenely low wages that incarcerated people earn. For people earning 14 to 63 cents an hour in prison (and many earning nothing at all for their work), a typical $2-5 copay is the equivalent of charging a free-world worker $200 or $500 for a medical visit.

Unaffordable copays in prisons and jails have two inevitable and dangerous consequences. First, when sick people avoid the doctor, disease is more likely to spread to others in the facility and into the community, when people are released before being treated or when diseases are carried by correctional staff back to their homes. Second, illnesses are likely to worsen as long as people avoid the doctor, which means more aggressive (and expensive) treatment when they can no longer go without it. Medical copays encourage a dangerous waiting game for incarcerated people, correctional agencies, and the public, with little payoff in terms of offsetting medical costs and reducing “unnecessary” office visits. In fact, when evaluating the costs versus benefits of charging copays, the Oregon Department of Corrections concluded, “copay systems do not seem to lower overall health care costs,” and “triage on a case-by-case basis is more cost effective than implementing system-wide copayment plans.”

Policy changes made during the pandemic are already being rolled back

In the face of COVID-19, we’ve found that many prison systems relaxed their medical copay policies to avoid disincentivizing people in prison from seeking necessary medical care. Before these changes, medical copays in prisons typically ranged from $2 to $5. Twenty-eight states modified their policies during the first few months of the pandemic, and, ultimately, all but one state — Nevada — temporarily changed their policies. Of the states that do charge medical copays as a matter of policy, only 10 completely suspended these fees at some point in the pandemic. The federal Bureau of Prisons, on the other hand, did not modify their copay policy until March 2021, and only suspended copays for COVID-19 related care for three months before the waiver expired.¹

Most states that have modified their copay policies during the pandemic only suspended copays for respiratory, flu-related, or COVID-19 symptoms. But these limitations ignore the facts that not all COVID-19 symptoms fall within these vague categories, and many people don’t display symptoms at all.

Our survey of all 50 state prison systems found that a handful of states have already returned to their pre-COVID-19 medical copay policies, disincentivizing people from seeking early and frequent medical care behind bars, despite the continued pandemic.

As states stop publishing data about COVID-19 in prisons and start rolling back basic policies that do the bare minimum to protect incarcerated people, it’s important to remember that the pandemic is still ongoing and cases, hospitalizations, and deaths continue to rise. Five states — Alabama, Arkansas,² Idaho,³ Minnesota, and Texas — rolled back their COVID-19 copay modifications at some point during the pandemic. Alabama went from suspending all copays to reinstating them for all cases in December 2020. Similarly, Minnesota and Texas had modified copays to accommodate people with COVID-19 symptoms, but reinstated all copays in December 2020 and September 2021, respectively. We confirmed that 22 states⁴ continue to operate with their COVID-19 copay policy changes in place, but in 15 states⁵ we were unable to confirm whether these modified policies remain in place.

Copays never make sense behind bars, particularly during a highly contagious viral pandemic. They are cruel, counterintuitive, and disincentivize people from seeking medical care when they need it. As our nation enters the third year of dealing with a virus that has ravaged prisons and jails — and increasingly looks endemic — it is urgent that lawmakers take action to permanently eliminate copays for incarcerated people.

Appendices

New data: The changes in prisons, jails, probation, and parole in the first year of the pandemic

Newly released data from 2020 show the impact of early-pandemic correctional policy choices and what kind of change is possible under pressure. But the data also show how inadequate, uneven, and unsustained policy changes have been: most have already been reversed.

by Wendy Sawyer, January 11, 2022

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has released a lot of new data over the past few weeks that help us finally see — both nationally and state-by-state — how policy choices made in the first year of the pandemic impacted correctional populations. Unsurprisingly, the numbers document the tragedy of thousands of lives lost behind bars, and evidence of some of the policy decisions that contributed to the death toll. Drilling down, we also see a (very) few reasons to be hopeful and, for those of us paying close attention, a few notable improvements in what the BJS is able to collect and how they report it. Above all, we see how quickly things can change — for better or for worse — when under pressure, and discuss some of the issues and policy choices these data tell us to watch out for.

Key findings from the BJS reports Prisoners in 2020, Jail Inmates in 2020, and Probation and Parole in the United States, 2020:

• Prison, jail, and probation populations dropped dramatically from 2019-2020,¹ but these drops were due to mainly to emergency responses to COVID-19, and correctional populations have already started rebounding toward pre-pandemic levels.
  
• Nationwide, states and the federal government actually released fewer people from prison in 2020 than in 2019.² The decrease in the incarcerated population was not related to releases, but rather the 40% drop in prison admissions and 16% drop in jail admissions.
• Deaths increased 46% in prisons from 2019 to 2020, 32% among people on parole, and 6% among people on probation. Jail deaths in 2020 have not yet been reported.
• Even under the pressure of the pandemic, local jails held a larger share of unconvicted people than ever, and continued to hold far too many people for low-level offenses and technical violations.
• State and federal policy responses to the threat of COVID-19 to incarcerated people varied widely, with a few states appearing to basically ignore the pandemic altogether.

It’s not all bad news: A few “silver linings” for women, youth, and others

While most of the significant changes in correctional populations are unlikely to be sustained after — or even during — the pandemic (more on that in the next section), there are a few positive changes that represent possible tipping points or reversals of seemingly intractable problems. With persistent pressure on policymakers, these changes have the potential to stick:

• Women’s prison and jail populations, and incarceration rates, dropped by a larger percentage than men’s populations did.³ This trend held in all but one state prison system (Alaska), reversing the “gender divide” we’ve observed in the past decade of decarceration efforts.
• Indigenous people experienced the greatest drop, proportionally, in jail populations and jail incarceration rates — nearly 35%. Before 2020, American Indians and Alaska Natives had been a population experiencing disproportionate jail growth, almost doubling between 2000-2019.⁴
• Probation populations were down by over a quarter of a million people in 2020, with far more people going off probation than going on it. With over 3 million people under its thumb, probation is still the leading form of correctional control, and this drop contributed most to the 11% reduction in the overall “footprint” of correctional control.⁵
• The number of youth held in adult prisons dropped by almost half (46%), and three more states joined the ranks of those no longer holding anyone under 18 in adult prisons, bringing the total to 21.⁶ Six other states that held large shares (5% or more) of the roughly 650 youth in prison in 2019 also reduced the number of youth held by at least a third in 2020.⁷

Overall, the “positive trends” in 2020 are nothing to get excited about

In 2020, we did see the kinds of reductions in the number of people under correctional control that we’ll need to see year after year to actually end mass incarceration. And these BJS reports express some of that optimism, with comments like “In 2020, the imprisonment rate was… the lowest since 1992” and “The 15% decrease in persons in state and federal prisons… was the largest single year decrease recorded since… 1926.”

Such dramatic drops in the nation’s use of incarceration would truly be cause for celebration if they weren’t temporary and if they weren’t still “too little, too late” for the thousands of people who got sick or died in a prison or jail ravaged by COVID-19. Unfortunately, there is little reason to think that these drops will be sustained in a post-pandemic world, especially since they have already begun to rebound to pre-pandemic levels, even amid some of the worst outbreaks the U.S. has seen. Above all, we should not expect these trends to hold without sustained reforms, as opposed to temporary “emergency response” changes.

Here, we offer some important context for the trends observed in 2020:

• Nationwide, jail populations have already rebounded to near pre-pandemic levels. While the BJS reports a 25% reduction in jail populations in 2020, that data only covers through midyear 2020 (i.e. the end of June). Because our work trying to shift the nation’s justice system response to COVID couldn’t wait for the official BJS data, we’ve been tracking jail population changes during the pandemic in over 400 county jails using data collected by the NYU Jail Data Initiative. Using that data, we’ve found that the populations of most jails in the sample started climbing back up after July 2020. Overall, the average population change since March 2020 among those jails had diminished to only a 7% decrease by October 2021.
• Jail populations were still too high, even when they were at their lowest in mid-2020. Even in the summer of 2020, after county and city officials had slashed their local jail populations as much as they would at any point in the pandemic (to date, anyway), 1 in 14 jails was still badly overcrowded, holding more people than their rated capacity allows. And in mid-2020, the U.S. still locked up more people per capita in jails alone than most countries do in any type of confinement facilities. That “low” rate of 167 per 100,000 residents is still more than double what it was in 1980.
• The decrease in the prison population was also temporary — and has started to bounce back up. Like the jail population changes, the 15% drop in the nation’s state and federal prison population is explained by temporary conditions caused by COVID-19, not long-term policy changes, nor even particularly intentional changes. The combination of trial and sentencing delays in courts and the refusal of some prisons to accept transfers from jails to prevent COVID transmission resulted in far fewer (40% fewer) admissions than usual. With only a few exceptions, state and federal officials made no effort to release large numbers of people from prison. In fact, there were fewer releases in 2020 than in 2019.

  

• Most of the drop in prison populations occurred within the federal Bureau of Prisons and just three states: California, Florida, and Texas. And even states that reduced prison populations didn’t necessarily reach “safe” population levels (if any prison can be called “safe”). At the end of 2020, 1 in 5 state prison systems were at or above their design or rated capacity. Even California, which reduced its prison population more than any other state (down 25,000) was still locking up more people than its prisons were designed for, and it’s only added more people since then.
• Among people “exiting” parole — either because their sentence was over, they were returned to incarceration, they died, or something else happened — roughly 1 in 5 (over 70,000) were returned to incarceration. This percentage was the smallest it’s been since at least 2005, but during a deadly pandemic that spreads easily in prisons, taking people off of community supervision and returning them to prison should not have been an option. Furthermore, the drop in re-incarceration compared to other years is most likely explained by changes in parole operations, not intentional policy choices: A quarter of agencies responding to a supplementary BJS survey reported suspending reporting requirements for at least a part of 2020.
• As with other forms of correctional control, the reduction in the probation population was due to the COVID-19 emergency, not policy changes, and probation populations were also trending up by the end of 2020. And as with parole, the 35% decrease in returns to incarceration for technical violations, while a welcome change, is largely explained by interruptions in probation operations, and therefore is almost certainly temporary. About half of the agencies responding to BJS’s supplemental survey reported that they suspended all supervision and closed agencies for a period of time in 2020.

Deeply troubling findings: Deaths as “releases” and “exits,” fewer releases amid a pandemic, and bad jail policy choices

Beyond adding context to some of what would otherwise appear to be “positive trends,” our analysis of the 2020 BJS data surfaced some deeply troubling findings about deaths in prison and on community supervision, the failure of states to release more people during the pandemic, and jail policy choices that reveal backwards priorities.

In prisons, BJS reports several disturbing changes from pre-pandemic 2019 to the end of 2020:

• Deaths in prison increased by 46% nationwide. More than 6,100 people died in prison in 2020, which was 1,930 more deaths than in 2019.⁸ California, Florida, Texas, and the federal Bureau of Prisons all saw more than 500 people die in their prisons in 2020 alone (there have been more deaths since).
  
• State and federal prisons released ten percent fewer people during the first year of the pandemic, a significant change compared to the typical 1-3% annual fluctuation in the number of releases. Some of this decrease may be explained by slowdowns in parole board functions (we see a lot of drops in “conditional” releases, which would include releases on parole), but in eight states, at least 2% of “releases” were, in fact, deaths. At a time when vaccines were not available and families, advocates, and public health officials were sounding the alarms about the extreme risks of COVID in and around correctional facilities, far more people should have been released from prisons — not far fewer.