Specialty courts: A disappointing form of diversion

It seems like specialty courts — also called treatment courts, problem-solving courts, or accountability courts — are everywhere, claiming to tackle the root causes of criminalized behavior while reducing the use of jails. But decades of research and advocacy suggest that these courts are no panacea, failing to adhere to best practices or prevent incarceration for many participants.

by Leah Wang, February 2, 2026

Over the past 35 years, specialty courts — also called diversion courts, treatment courts, or problem-solving courts — have exploded in popularity.¹ The first specialty courts, drug treatment courts, came about when judges began facing overwhelming drug caseloads from the “war on drugs.” The idea behind them was that people with substance use disorders facing criminal charges could obtain treatment and avoid rapidly overcrowding jails and prisons, so long as they complied with all conditions ordered by a judge. This subtle shift away from punishment and toward so-called “therapeutic” measures took the criminal legal system by storm, becoming a model for other courts. Today, there are over 4,200 specialty courts in operation, with one in nearly every state.²

Proponents claim that specialty courts are tackling social issues, reducing crime, and saving taxpayer money through fewer days (or years) of costly incarceration.³ Evaluations suggest that some people have turned their lives around by completing specialty court programs, and public opinion toward them is generally very positive, recognizing their rehabilitative potential. The model sounds ideal, and appears to move away from harsh carceral responses to social issues while connecting people with treatment and support.

Figure 1. See our diversion report for more information.

But specialty courts may be receiving more attention and investment than their lukewarm success actually calls for. In reality, attaching treatment opportunities to a traditional court system and the threat of jail time actually expands the punishment system while undermining other community-based public safety solutions. Below, we offer a brief overview of specialty courts and outline six ways that they miss the mark on effectively diverting people from incarceration and providing pathways to long-term health and stability.

The national landscape of specialty courts

Adult drug courts were the first type of specialty court, and have long been the most common, currently making up about 44% of all specialty courts.⁴ Other major categories are aimed at mental health, veterans, family treatment (for parents of minor children who have both substance use issues and active child welfare cases), and domestic violence.⁵ Given that specialty courts try to address underlying factors, most center or deal with substance use in some way; some of these courts are specifically aimed at youth, people who have opioid use disorders or co-occurring disorders, who are part of tribal populations,⁶ or who face charges for driving while impaired (DWI).

Well over 100,000 people go through specialty courts each year,⁷ although not all participants “graduate.”⁸ In a recent (2022) census of specialty courts, the National Treatment Court Resource Center (NTCRC) published national participation data for each major type of court:

How many people go through specialty courts each year?

By the end of 2024, when NTCRC administered another census (without participation data), Connecticut had shuttered its last few drug courts, gaining the distinction as the only U.S. state or territory without a specialty court. It’s unclear why the state did away with them, and state specialty court coordinators could not be reached to provide more information. In the future, Connecticut may serve as a case study on what a state criminal legal system looks like without specialty courts.

Six problems with specialty courts

1. Specialty courts have had mixed success in improving public safety or public health

More research has been published about specialty courts (specifically, drug courts) than virtually all other criminal legal system programs, combined. This fact might suggest that specialty courts come with robust evidence of their success, but outcomes — such as changes in incarceration, crime, or drug use — vary widely by court. A closer look at individual program evaluations, as well as larger meta-analyses, reveals that specialty courts do just “okay” at achieving their purported outcomes. And while some courts show short-term improvements in public safety or public health measures, longer-term outcomes (after about three years) appear to be no different for specialty court participants than for people in the traditional court system.

The evidence, some of which we’ve collected below, should be a warning to lawmakers that the deep investments in specialty courts are not yielding the results that proponents claim or hope to achieve:⁹

• Fewer participants in a Baltimore, Md. drug court were re-arrested than non-participants for two years, but this positive outcome became insignificant after three years. Furthermore, during the three-year follow up period, participants spent approximately the same amount of time incarcerated as did people in the control group as a result of the initial arrest.¹⁰
• In Maricopa County, Ariz., drug court participants showed no reduction in recidivism or drug use after 12 months; a 36-month follow-up study went on to show no difference in the average number of arrests between participants and a control group.
• A review of three mental health courts with similar characteristics found no change in arrests or jail time for court participants compared to a control group.
• A 2022 review of Maryland’s “adult treatment courts” found no changes in arrest rates among participants: Two years after program entry, 46% of participants had been rearrested compared to 45% of the control group. The review’s author argues that participants are being rearrested fewer times than non-participants, but the difference (1.3 versus 1.5 average rearrests over two years) is negligible and not statistically significant.
• Participants in an “opioid intervention court” were less likely to die in the 12 months following their jail booking, but researchers noted that anyone receiving mediation-assisted treatment within 14 days of their booking was less likely to die, regardless of court participation. Emergency department visits and overdose-related deaths fell in the region surrounding the opioid court after its implementation, but it’s unclear how or whether this change can be attributed to the court. Meanwhile, arrests of court participants were much higher than they were for “business as usual” defendants.¹¹

These underwhelming findings persist even though specialty court participants are sometimes “cherry-picked” for their likelihood to do well. And presumably, those who complete specialty courts will indeed be less likely to be rearrested or use substances for which they were treated than those who don’t finish, but graduation rates around 50% are not uncommon.

2. Overly narrow criteria place specialty court programs out of reach for many

Like many other criminal legal system reforms, specialty courts are often designed in a way that includes certain people or criminal charges, and excludes others — a reality known as carveouts. Studies and experts suggest that specialty courts work best when serving high-risk or high-need individuals, even though many courts still exclude people with violent or serious charges, those with a criminal history,¹² or those with greater health needs. For example, a 2013 meta-analysis found that 88% of U.S. drug courts excluded anyone with a prior violent conviction and 63% excluded those with a current violent charge. Some specialty courts are even more specific, excluding people facing firearm or drug trafficking charges.¹³

Ultimately, even when someone meets all eligibility criteria, they may still be excluded from specialty courts because a prosecutor or judge must choose to offer the option.¹⁴ This discretion can work to include some people and to exclude others: Many advocates and skeptics argue that participants are “cherry-picked” or low-risk cases are “skimmed” in order to ensure success. One study, though limited in scope, found that one-third of a cohort of drug court participants did not actually have a clinically significant substance use disorder, suggesting that program spots are not appropriately prioritized.

Furthermore, discretion can lead to racial disparities in specialty court enrollment; research has shown that Black and Latinx people are offered diversion less often than white people, even after controlling for legal circumstances. Charge-based carveouts can just as easily lead to these disparities, given the overwhelming evidence that Black defendants face more — and more severe — charges for the same crimes. It’s difficult to pin down which is the most insidious factor in excluding racial and ethnic minorities, but specialty courts will inevitably fail to make an impact under such exclusionary rules.

3. Outdated public health principles persist in specialty courts

Many specialty courts adhere to woefully outdated ideologies about treatment and accountability instead of using evidence-based public health practices. Specifically, rigid attitudes toward drug use have kept these courts from embracing “what works” for long-term recovery:

Abstinence. The abstinence model of addiction treatment, in which people are punished for failing to completely stop their drug use, runs counter to the reality of substance use disorders as experienced by many specialty court participants. Abstinence also may not align with drug users’ objectives, which may look more like reduced drug use or improved quality of life in other areas. So-called “best practices” for adult drug courts require abstinence in order to advance through their program and graduate. Abstinence may work for some people, but it’s highly controversial (compared to non-abstinence or harm reduction techniques) because of its oversimplified and often unrealistic approach to substance use.¹⁵

Stigma against medication-assisted treatment. Similarly, medication-assisted treatment (MAT) — which should be widely available in all community-based and carceral treatment settings — is not available in all specialty courts. A 2012 survey of drug courts found that most participants were opioid-addicted, but only half were actually offered agonist medication (such as methadone or buprenorphine); additionally, half of programs had blanket prohibitions on some of these medications. And because MAT requires, as the name suggests, the use of medications that have been shown to effectively treat substance use disorders, abstinence-based specialty courts may prohibit MAT altogether. Some judges presiding over specialty courts, showing a personal preference for abstinence, do not look favorably on MAT, and court personnel may have mixed (though misguided) attitudes toward some MAT medications.

Mandatory treatment. Because specialty courts operate as an alternative to incarceration, participants are required to complete a treatment regimen or risk sanctions ranging from light warnings to jail time. But forced drug treatment is widely understood to be harmful, unethical, and ineffective. Instead, drug treatment should always be available to participants on a voluntary basis, and specialty courts can center other efforts, like securing housing or other medical care, as part of a broader harm reduction strategy to support those who continue using drugs.

4. Specialty courts don’t shrink the footprint of mass incarceration — and may in fact enlarge it

There are two major ways that specialty courts do not hold up their end of the bargain as true diversion programs: They do not prevent incarceration to the extent that they claim, and they can actually expand the number of people within the criminal legal system — a phenomenon known as “net-widening.”

Specialty courts have been so appealing to criminal legal system actors that they have been used as a justification for arresting greater numbers of people.¹⁶ Data from Denver, Colo., for instance, shows an unmistakable rise in drug cases after a drug court was established there in 1994. In the words of a former drug court judge, “the very presence” of this court led to an influx of cases that law enforcement and judicial systems otherwise “would not have bothered with before.” And given the typically low graduation rates from specialty courts, this growth in cases means more people are being convicted and sentenced to prison or jail, which is antithetical to the intention behind them — and is hardly saving taxpayer money.

As for those who are selected for specialty court programs, jail incarceration and long wait times are often disappointingly essential to the enrollment process. This length of time can vary widely and is seldom tracked, but some resources suggest a maximum time of 50 days from arrest to program entry (let alone referral to entry). In Maine’s specialty courts, wait times since have long exceeded the 50-day suggestion; we also found arrest-to-referral or referral-to-entry times ranging from a vague “51 or more days” in a Missouri county drug court to an appalling 116 days in Michigan’s drug courts. Meanwhile, participant interviewees in Cook County, Ill. specialty courts talked about being “often incarcerated” during screening processes, with court official interviewees affirming that jail time in this context might last from three to four months.

Figure 2. In some cases, people wait behind bars for a spot to open up.

Finally, most specialty courts — about two-thirds, according to a 2012 census — require participants to plead guilty before enrolling, saddling them with a criminal record just to access treatment. This post-plea model can make participants ineligible for similar opportunities in the future. Graduates of specialty courts may be able to have their criminal conviction vacated or their record expunged, but again, dismal graduation rates and barriers to record clearing mean that many thousands of people have only been punished by this purported “alternative” to punishment.

5. Judges lean too heavily on jail as a response to noncompliance, negating treatment progress

Although specialty court proponents espouse the benefits of team-oriented, less-formal approaches that encourage “graduated” sanctions beginning at light verbal warnings, people who are simply not able to meet program requirements will likely be brought to jail eventually. Jail is not a helpful place for people who are struggling with the very problems that specialty courts claim to address: Isolated and violent environments can cause lasting damage to mental health, and mental health and drug treatment are limited if they exist at all. Meanwhile, though corrections officials are reluctant to admit it, drugs are prevalent behind bars, creating the ultimate foil for anyone seeking help curbing drug use.

Still, judges have the ability to send participants to jail if they find that program requirements aren’t being met — and they often do. Even when jail time is a short-term, last-resort sanction, a recent survey of over 400 courts found that most (72%) use jail sanctions “at least some of the time” for positive drug tests.¹⁷ Jail sanctions from a specialty court can range from a few days to a couple of weeks; one study of Michigan’s drug courts found that the average jail sanction was 15 days. And as we’ve explained before, even short jail stays are harmful, disruptive to treatment and overall stability, and can even be deadly. Unsurprisingly, there is no evidence that jail incarceration actually “works” as part of a sanction system to encourage compliance with specialty courts.¹⁸

6. The team-oriented approach reveals personal and clinical information to judges, leading to undue scrutiny and punishment

Specialty courts typically have a presiding judge working alongside people such as social workers, prosecution and defense attorneys, court personnel, and probation officers to manage each participant’s case. Like other courts, specialty court judges have the final word, but they often consult with their teams and spend more time interacting directly with participants compared to traditional criminal courts. Proponents see this “holistic” approach to treatment and rehabilitation as supportive and humanizing for participants, but this process can also blur professional boundaries because it leads to closer scrutiny of individuals’ behavior compared to a traditional court. When judges have more access to participant’s lives and sensitive clinical information, they have more power to take action on that information.

A recent qualitative study of specialty court judges in Virginia affirms these same concerns (though they are not framed as such in the study, which was published in a pro-specialty court journal). Judges reported asking participants more personal questions than they would in a normal docket in order to establish a positive rapport, calling their role of neutral arbiter into question.¹⁹ They also revealed that in lieu of formal training, many simply followed their predecessor’s protocols in the courtroom. Judges enjoy specialty court roles because they feel impactful and rewarding compared to a strictly-punitive criminal court docket; this strong sentiment may explain why these courts have persisted for so long, and why they remain largely unregulated spaces.²⁰

A multidisciplinary team of service providers and case managers is essential to addressing complex health needs, but including judges and law enforcement in the conversation will ultimately be counterproductive to those ends, and keep people cycling through jails.

Specialty courts should be a last-resort diversion opportunity for people facing criminal charges

On paper, specialty courts make sense as a policy tool with broad appeal, marrying treatment with traditional accountability and punishment. But in the rush to introduce treatment through courts in this way, communities haven’t often considered the question of whether the criminal legal system should be involved at all. Unfortunately, the underwhelming outcomes and systemic issues presented here have not yet been enough to shift the paradigm. One Massachusetts lawmaker who once championed the model recently explained how his attitude toward drug courts has changed (emphasis added):

After roughly 10 years of thinking about how courts could play a role in substance use recovery, I reached the conclusion that a partnership between the treatment system and the criminal justice system was a deeply problematic idea, as appealing as it seemed initially. I formed the view that, although there is a close relationship between addiction and crime, treatment of addictions should generally be a matter left to voluntary participation in the health care system.

While some lawmakers are waking up to the reality of specialty courts, for now this movement has broad bipartisan support and courts are still expanding in many states.²¹ Lawmakers should strongly consider implementing legislation that prioritizes “upstream” diversion opportunities and minimizes the drawbacks of specialty courts:

• Provide medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in any specialty court dealing with substance use disorder. Courts resist MAT due to misconceptions and stigma, but it is widely held as the gold standard treatment. Judges and court personnel should be thoroughly trained on how MAT works and why it’s effective.
• Get rid of charge-based or history-based exclusions. There is no evidence base for excluding certain people or charges from these programs, and carveouts are a moralizing choice that is actually counterproductive; research suggests that specialty courts are less effective for low-risk participants.
• Follow harm reduction principles. Harm reduction incorporates the most person-centered and health-centered practices while rejecting punitive measures. The Center for Court Innovation’s detailed guide on using a harm reduction lens is geared toward drug courts, but it can be used in any type of specialty court setting.
• Eliminate requirements that lead to a criminal record or jail time. People hoping or waiting to be referred to a specialty court should not have to plead guilty or languish behind bars for days or months. And jail should never be a punishment for relapse, as it disrupts treatment and leads to further instability.
• Center clinician roles and decisions, expand screenings for psychological disorders, and require thorough training for judges and court personnel. Judges go through little-to-no training before presiding over a specialty court, and go on to make decisions using participants’ sensitive health information. At the same time, screening protocols can be too brief to understand individual, complex health needs that may send someone down an inappropriate treatment path, setting them up for failure.
• Pass legislation that creates robust standards and oversight. Because of their rapid proliferation and popularity among judges, specialty courts are highly unregulated. Some states working on this include Wyoming and Illinois; in New York, the Treatment Court Expansion Act — supported by a large and diverse coalition of groups — would establish state-mandated, pre-plea mental health courts open to all functional impairments.

Ultimately, specialty courts should be a much smaller piece of the diversion landscape, and community-based interventions should be prioritized as the prevailing solutions to social and public health issues. As new courts are created, the process of referring people to them is increasingly normalized, even though the evidence strongly suggests that specialty courts simply do not improve public safety, public health, or quality of life. Participation tends to involve at least some jail time, and so many participants are unable to complete them that they only just barely qualify as a form of diversion. No matter what specialty courts are called, they are still courts, entrenched in the punitive criminal legal system and accompanied by the many harms of arrest, conviction, and incarceration.

Caging compassion: Recognizing and resisting carceral humanist narratives in criminal justice reform

by Emmett Sanders, January 30, 2026

Advocates for criminal justice reform are often caught between the immediate need to address the dehumanizing conditions people are subjected to and the need to make actual lasting reforms to the systems in which carceral harm is perpetuated. Sometimes, they are faced with reforms, often proposed by prison systems themselves, that fall under the label of “carceral humanism”. Carceral humanist reforms co-opt our compassion and use it to suggest minimal improvements to the carceral system without changing the dehumanization at the core of mass incarceration. Carceral humanist reforms are not genuine change, but rather a public relations strategy that seeks to remove the objection to harm rather than to remove the harm itself.

On February 25 at 1 PM ET, join the Prison Policy Initiative and guests James Kilgore and Mon Mohapatra as we discuss our new toolkit, Caging compassion: Recognizing and resisting carceral humanist narratives in criminal justice reform. We offer useful tips for advocates seeking to avoid superficial carceral humanist reforms in their quest to make genuine, lasting systemic change.

This new guide:

• Explains how carceral humanism manifests in different areas such as jail expansion, halfway houses, and prolonged post-release supervision, as well as in electronic monitoring and other alternatives to incarceration.
• Helps identify some commonly used carceral humanist narratives, as well as offers useful counternarratives and examples of how people have successfully responded to these narratives.
• Offers advice for those seeking to determine whether the proposed reform offers real change or is a carceral humanist reform, and
• Offers advice on identifying non-carceral humanist responses to harm.

This guide is part of our ever-expanding Advocacy Toolkit, a series of resources for criminal legal reform advocates. We hope you’ll join us for this important conversation.

Register for the webinar here.

Resource spotlight: Data projects tracking police misconduct, use of force, and employment histories

The need for law enforcement transparency, oversight, and accountability has never been clearer. We highlight data projects that have helped document and investigate misconduct, as both data sources and as models for others who want to contribute to these collective efforts.

by Wendy Sawyer and Emily Widra, January 26, 2026

Police misconduct is notoriously difficult to track, penalize, and prevent, a problem that advocates have increasingly focused on in the years since the murder of George Floyd. In the time since we published a list of policing resources in 2020, advocates and researchers have been working to collect, analyze, and publish data from public records produced by various state and local law enforcement agencies.¹

More than “bad apples”U.S. police kill civilians at globally high rates

Particularly in the wake of more recent nationally-galvanizing killings, this time at the hands of federal ICE agents, these projects offer a blueprint for community members to track and advance law enforcement accountability. We “spotlight” some of these resources here for anyone interested in digging deeper into questions related to police accountability, especially through public records, because we think they offer compelling information and models that can be used or replicated by others. This is by no means an exhaustive list of resources related to police misconduct; several other groups have compiled far more comprehensive lists of available data sources.

These efforts are particularly essential at a time when the federal government is actively eliminating its own initiatives to enhance police accountability (and even suppressing and mischaracterizing evidence). Last year, for example, the Trump administration deleted the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, which tracked misconduct among federal law enforcement, including U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and federal Bureau of Prisons employees.²

Of course, some cities maintain their own “open data” databases and dashboards (like these), with many more coming online since 2020. But in less populous jurisdictions and those that lack the resources or political will to prioritize police transparency, misconduct continues to be swept under the rug and under-investigated; this is where projects like these come in.

Police misconduct databases

The Louisiana Law Enforcement Accountability Database

The Louisiana Law Enforcement Accountability Database (LLEAD) consolidates data from over 600 law enforcement agencies across Louisiana. The searchable and downloadable LLEAD database includes employment history data, police misconduct records, use of force reports, certifications and qualifications, and other data like salary (when available) and settlement payments. All the data is public information collected from police departments, sheriffs’ offices, civil service commissions, fire and police civil service boards, and courts, typically collected through public records requests.

Screenshot of the data summary for the Louisiana State Police in the Louisiana Law Enforcement Accountability Database

The LLEAD database was initially designed to help Innocence and Justice Louisiana (formerly Innocence Project New Orleans) identify potential cases of wrongful conviction and aid in litigation for their clients, as well as to help identify statewide policing trends. Today, the database is a tool to push for increased law enforcement accountability and transparency across the state, including pressuring the Council on Peace Office Standards and Training (POST) for more transparency on officer employment. The available data can also be used to investigate use of force and misconduct trends across Louisiana agencies, as well as trends in appeals and settlements across jurisdictions.

The California Police Records Access Project

The Police Records Access Project (PRAP), created by the Community Law Enforcement Accountability Network (CLEAN), contains public records from nearly 700 law enforcement agencies across California, including police and sheriffs’ departments, public school and university police forces, prisons, probation departments, district attorneys, coroners, medical examiners, and other government agencies. Prompted by California’s 2018 “Right to Know” Act, which gave the public access to records related to police shootings, use of force, and certain kinds of misconduct, the CLEAN coalition of investigative reporters and data scientists built out this database with thousands of public records. To organize the mountain of information by date and type of case, the team behind PRAP uses generative AI, but they stress that “these uses of GenAI do not directly impact the information that is shown to users,” and searches only return “documents with a literal match to the search term(s) in the source text.” The tool is user-friendly and searchable by officer name, agency name, county, case type (misconduct, force, or shooting) and date.

Screenshot of the Police Records Access Project data tool

The extent of the historical data in the PRAP database varies between agencies, but often stretches back decades. For example, there are documents available about Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office shootings as early as 1977. Beyond researchers and journalists, the database also offers public defenders and attorneys easy access to relevant public information about arresting officer(s) in recent cases.

Illinois Open Police Data

The story of the Invisible Institute’s Civic Police Data Project (CPDP) began almost two decades ago, when journalists filed a lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department forcing the city to release complaint records that ultimately became public information in 2014. The database, which is specific to Chicago, includes (among other things) officer demographics and identifying information, unit information, data on misconduct and outcomes (disciplinary actions and legal settlements), employment history, and a map of complaints, sustained allegations, and use of force reports spanning from 1988 to 2018.

The project also includes community-level information. The database breaks down allegations, officers with complaints, and complaint-level data by community, neighborhood, police district, ward, and police beat. It also includes aggregated demographic data for complainants as well as for accused officers, so, for example, users can see where complaints come disproportionately from Black residents or women. The entire dataset can be downloaded, and the CPDP data tool makes it easy to search and filter using names, places, outcomes, complaint categories, and time periods.

Screenshot of the Civic Police Data Project data tool, showing complaints related to use of force by neighborhood from 1988 to 2018

In a remarkable example of how this dataset (and others) can be used, the Invisible Institute created the Beneath the Surface project, which investigates gender-based police violence against Black women and girls. Project contributors have used the Chicago data to identify patterns in complaints indicating (among other things) misconduct in missing persons cases, officers ignoring and/or mistreating sexual assault survivors, and the failure of Internal Affairs to adequately investigate misconduct in sexual assault cases.

The Invisible Institute is now expanding upon its work from Chicago’s Civic Police Data Project to look into police misconduct in other cities and counties in Illinois. To date, they have created a database from Champaign-Urbana data and are in earlier stages in Rockford, Joliet, and Will County.

The National Police Index: Officer employment history

The National Police Index (NPI) is the largest of the projects we highlight here in terms of geographic coverage, but also has a narrower scope than the others as it is focused mainly on law enforcement employment history. The NPI tool is intended to help identify potential “wandering officers” — that is, officers fired from one department, sometimes for serious misconduct, who then find work at another agency, often leading to a pattern of short stints at multiple agencies across the state or country. Populated by a coalition of news and legal organizations across the country, the data tool offers employment histories for police officers in 24 states and counting.³ Individual-level data include the officer’s current agency and most recent start date, as well as a dated timeline of previous law enforcement positions. While the database does not include many details about disciplinary action, Florida and Georgia also provide information detailing terminations or resignations following department-requested investigations.

Screenshot showing an officer’s employment history in the National Police Index

The Human Rights Data Analysis Group and other projects they support

All of the projects highlighted so far have been facilitated in one way or another by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) and its Data Scientist, Tarak Shah. HRDAG has also supported projects in other jurisdictions that use public records to investigate law enforcement actions. For example, the ACLU of Massachusetts produced a data tool on Boston Police Department SWAT Raids from 2012 to 2020 that includes the number of raids per year, raid locations, raid details, office use of force, and demographics of people targeted by raids. HRDAG also supports Kilometro Cero, a nonprofit organization in Puerto Rico that tracks police use of force documented in official Police Bureau reports and publishes their analyses on their website.

Further, while not a new data collection project, in 2015 two researchers from HRDAG applied findings from studies of unreported killings in other countries to estimate how many homicides committed by police go unreported in the U.S. They concluded that the number reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (which already supplemented official reports with media reports) excludes nearly 30% of police killings, suggesting that more data collection and documentation (i.e., from nongovernmental sources) is needed to accurately gauge the scale of deadly police violence.

Other noteworthy police accountability data projects

This briefing spotlights just a few projects that illustrate how public records can be used to investigate and track police misconduct, discipline, and employment, and in turn, how these projects can put pressure on law enforcement agencies to improve their practices and decisions. Many other projects use similar methods for the same purposes, and are worth exploring further, such as:

• The Chicago Justice Project’s Police Board Information Center compiles, archives, and analyzes Chicago Police Board documents related to allegations of serious misconduct, which it obtains through public records requests. Along with archiving case details, the site tallies the number of cases related to specific rules of conduct, trends in case outcomes, and individual Board member recommendations by case.
• The New York City Legal Aid Society’s Cop Accountability Project (CAP) offers the city’s most comprehensive public database of law enforcement misconduct records, containing over 500,000 records: The Law Enforcement Look Up (LELU). The LELU includes officer demographic and employment information, number of complaints and substantiated complaints, and much more. The project has been used in lawsuits against the NYPD, including a lawsuit regarding brutal policing tactics during the protests in 2020, as well as in detailed analyses of patterns of police enforcement in New York.
• In Philadelphia, the Police Transparency Project’s Unconstitutional Pattern and Practice Database is designed for use by attorneys to share information from court documents about police misconduct, particularly for the purpose of identifying and overturning wrongful convictions.
• The ACLU of Vermont has published a database of “Brady letters” gathered through public records requests. As the organization explains, “when Brady-related issues arise — like an officer exhibiting bias or getting caught lying — state’s attorneys generally send a ‘Brady letter’ to their county’s criminal defense attorneys noting that the officer has known credibility issues. This information may then be raised by defense counsel to call into question the reliability of the officer involved in the case.”
• Journalists at Behind the Badge are using public records to make a comprehensive database of police misconduct across New York State’s 500-plus law enforcement agencies. As of 2024, they had obtained files from 290 of those agencies. Their strategy involves requesting records provided to district attorneys’ offices by law enforcement as part of “Brady” disclosure obligations.
• OpenOversight, a project of Lucy Parsons Labs, is a volunteer-run searchable database of law enforcement officers, including photos and other details wherever possible. Currently, the site offers data from 24 departments across five states, but active projects based on this model have also been developed in Seattle and Virginia.

Building upon this work

For readers interested in starting new projects focused on documenting law enforcement actions, the examples highlighted in this briefing can serve as roadmaps. Additionally, a few organizations offer very detailed “how to” guidance. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Full Disclosure Project offers an excellent guide to getting started tracking police misconduct including tips for effective public records requests, a list of police misconduct data sources to look for, and more. And building off of 30 years of experience, Berkeley Copwatch and WITNESS have created extensive resources from the People’s Database for Community-based Police Accountability, including a planning workbook, sample data models, a database template, and data dictionary. (WITNESS also provides a broader range of resources on filming protests, police misconduct, immigration enforcement, and documenting during internet shutdowns, among other topics.)

Conclusion

Law enforcement officers violate laws and policies designed to protect the public all the time, but very rarely are they held accountable for their actions. This is what makes these data projects so important: when formal accountability mechanisms fail, it’s up to the public to document and distribute evidence of violence and misconduct. Doing so can create pressure for change and educate others about the size and scope of the problem. Collaborative research efforts to compile public law enforcement records into user-friendly databases, like those highlighted in this briefing, exemplify the power of data and analysis to aid in advocacy. They help empower journalists, attorneys, advocates, and the broader public to hold law enforcement accountable when they engage in misconduct. And ultimately, greater transparency helps combat impunity and reduce the harm these systems perpetuate.

New study: Kids who need treatment for opioid use disorder rarely get it

A new nationwide study published in Health Affairs finds that adolescents aged 12 to 17 struggle to access and remain engaged in treatment, often because they are not offered youth-tailored treatment and gold-standard opioid use disorder medications.

by Brian Nam-Sonenstein, January 22, 2026

Opioid use disorder among young people is a serious but often overlooked issue in the United States. In a national 2023 survey, 1.3% of kids between the ages of 12 and 17 reported an opioid use disorder.¹ While 1.3% might not sound like a lot, it represents around 342,000 children — more than the total population of Newark, New Jersey.² The U.S. public health system’s capacity to provide the best treatment programs and medications to these kids has life-altering consequences, influencing children’s health and development.

Unfortunately, such youth treatment opportunities are rare. A new study, published in the September 2025 issue of Health Affairs, shows that fewer than 1 in 3 kids with an opioid use disorder receive critical medications and age appropriate care. These findings have serious implications for youth contact with the criminal and juvenile legal systems, as drug use and treatment access are significant predictors of involvement in both. For the youngest kids already involved in the juvenile legal system, substance misuse is a strong predictor of violent reoffending. But rather than prioritize the delivery of the best available treatments to all children who need them, communities around the U.S. have instead stigmatized kids who use drugs, including through the use of “zero tolerance” school policies. This has created a terrible situation in which kids are routinely denied the care they need. Instead, they face educational and social exclusion on the same premise that has failed countless adults struggling with substance use disorders: that they can only be forced to “get better” through stigma, incarceration, or both.

Youth ConfinementSee the big picture the incarceration of kids

In this briefing, we dive into this new research on the scarcity of treatment for young people with opioid use disorders, based on the most recently available national data. We also look at critical early intervention opportunities highlighted in the research, which can improve treatment access and the quality of care, and divert kids from the school-to-prison pipeline along the way.

Youth lack access to opioid use disorder treatments

Most people who develop a substance use disorder begin using drugs before the age of 18, with the highest risk among those who begin using during their early teenage years. At this stage of life, drug use can influence brain development, so it’s extraordinarily important to connect kids to early, effective treatment during this time.

But the U.S. is not rising to meet this challenge. The researchers who conducted the new study found that less than one-third (31%) of kids aged 12 to 17 with an opioid use disorder received any treatment in the past year — a similar but slightly smaller proportion than that of adults (34%). These low levels of treatment uptake are alarming given how heavily drug use is criminalized, since treatment options are even scarcer and less effective in the juvenile legal system: only around 26% of kids confined for drug offenses were held in residential treatment centers in 2023. Kids should not be removed from their communities and forced into drug treatment, and while this figure is not limited to opioid-related drug cases, it’s nonetheless notable that just over 1 in 4 kids confined for drug offenses are placed in treatment facilities.

This is especially problematic for two reasons: first, treatment is far less effective (and less ethical) in carceral environments, and second, the juvenile legal system is a relatively late-stage gateway for accessing treatment. Earlier interventions in the community (such as in schools) can ensure greater access among youth, and prevent their exposure to the cascading negative effects of criminalization. Community-based interventions are also more effective and consistent, which is important because adolescents have lower treatment retention rates than adults. Because youth struggle to remain engaged in treatment, the earlier they start with the best existing treatment protocols, the better.

The new study also finds that fewer than 1 in 4 (around 23%) treatment facilities reported offering a specifically adolescent-tailored group or program. In other words, a small proportion of treatment facilities serving kids actually design their offerings to meet adolescents’ specific developmental and psychosocial needs. The availability of facilities with adolescent-tailored programs varies considerably by region; generally speaking, there are fewer of these tailored facilities in the southeastern U.S.

Treatment settings. The researchers identified outpatient settings (excluding schools or medical offices) as the most common treatment settings for kids, followed by school health or counseling centers and emergency departments or hospitals. They note that schools (the second-most frequently reported setting for treatment) are particularly critical intervention points for engaging adolescents in screening and treatment because they are the only place that all children are required to attend. Schools present an opportunity to reach the most children from the widest variety of backgrounds, and can yield better access to care and treatment engagement for female, African American, and Hispanic/Latinx adolescents. Engaging kids in school with treatment rather than exclusion would represent a meaningful shift away from the school-to-prison pipeline.

Referrals. Schools had some of the lowest rates of referral (4%) despite their outsized potential for linking kids to treatment. Instead, aside from self-referrals or referrals from friends and families, the criminal legal system was the most common source of referral for adolescent opioid related treatment admissions (nearly 28%) — more so than for adult treatment admissions (17%). This is particularly troubling given that kids are often ushered into the juvenile legal system under the false hope that they can “receive services” while locked up. These settings are exceptionally abusive toward kids and costly to society, but more to the point, they also foster conditions that are counterproductive to actually providing effective treatment.

When kids don’t get the care that they need, they’re at risk of being punished for it through the juvenile legal system. But not all kids fall through the cracks at the same rates; youth drug use and treatment are compounded by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. A separate study found that only around 3% of Black children aged 12 to 17 received medical treatment for substance use disorder in the past year, compared to around 9% of white kids. These disparities follow kids into the juvenile legal system. Even though white youth and youth of color have similar rates of drug use, Black children make up a significantly higher proportion of confined youth for drug offenses compared to their proportion of the overall population: 24% of kids confined for drug offenses were Black, despite making up only 14% of the population.

Medications for opioid use disorder are often out of reach for young people

One reason kids struggle to remain engaged in treatment may be that medications for opioid use disorder are rarely provided to them despite the recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics and Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, which call for greater access to these medications for young people.

In the new study, the researchers found that the rate of receiving medications for opioid use disorder among those who need it was nearly 8% for adolescents in the past year, compared to 19% in adults in the past year. Such medications were listed in treatment plans for less than 10% of adolescent treatment admissions, compared to a much higher proportion of adult admissions (36%). While the researchers found that these medications have been included in a growing proportion of adolescent-tailored treatment plans over the years, they remain too limited compared to the level of need.

The scarcity of these gold-standard treatments is possibly explained by several factors, including stigma among healthcare providers and family concerns. In carceral settings, medications for opioid use disorder are often seen by skeptical non-medical staff as “substituting one drug for another.” But they nonetheless can and should be made more widely available. Buprenorphine has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use by youth aged 16 or older, and it’s also been prescribed off-label for younger adolescents. These medications do more than just treat substance use disorders; they save lives. Between 2018 and 2023, rates of opioid-related deaths among U.S. children aged 12 to 17 grew an astounding 280%.³ To put this into perspective, overdose deaths rose by a comparatively smaller (but no less troubling) 65% in adults aged 18 and over during the same time period.⁴

Conclusion

Effective medications and treatments exist for kids with opioid use disorder, but they are not being provided at scale, nor equitably. There are better, earlier intervention points like schools for reaching the most kids with these treatments, but these same institutions instead cave to stigma and funnel kids into the juvenile punishment system. The end result of these failures is that young people who use drugs are being needlessly set up to suffer and die, and the U.S. is dooming itself to a future in which there are many more adults and communities left to struggle with these same issues.

The best approaches are ones that can connect particularly vulnerable youth populations to direct them into treatment via gateways like schools. This involves community-based treatment, proactive outreach by people who know the local community and culture, and the development of treatment programs tailored to the needs of the participants. Kids should not be removed from their community for treatment (or to be punished). But for youth already involved in the juvenile legal system, courts and probation departments should at the very least ensure young kids who use drugs are offered the most effective substance use treatments.

This new research points toward several opportunities to change course by strengthening community-based adolescent opioid use disorder screening and treatment engagement efforts, pursuing evidenced-based treatment options including gold-standard medications, and tackling geographic disparities in access to treatments tailored for youth. What’s needed is an embrace of these public health measures for the good of all children, and an end to their exclusion, stigmatization, and criminalization.

How many jail stays are due to missed court dates?

Failing to make it to a court appearance – routine for attorneys and witnesses – leads to 19 million additional nights in jail each year for people accused of crimes.

by Jacob Kang-Brown, January 8, 2026

Of all the reasons people get sent to jail, forgetting an appointment has to be among the least justifiable. Around 5.6 million people are booked into local jail each year in the United States. With some people arrested more than once, total jail bookings are even higher, at over 7.9 million in 2024. Produced in collaboration with the Jail Data Initiative (JDI), this briefing provides new evidence on jail bookings for people arrested for “failing to appear” in court — a typically innocent mistake that is treated as a crime in and of itself, sometimes called “bail jumping.” According to our national, lower-bound estimates presented here for the first time, at least 1 in 8 jail bookings are connected to failure to make it to a court appearance (13%), and about half of those had only failure to appear (FTA) charges. This means 546,000 jail bookings were due to arrests where the only matter at hand was an FTA warrant, not any other criminal offense. In fact, if no one was sent to jail for missing court, there would be 52,000 fewer people in jail each day nationwide, and 19 million fewer nights spent in jail each year.

High Stakes MistakesHow courts respond to “failure to appear”

Of course, people charged with a crime have a legal duty to appear in court, as do their attorneys and any witnesses, including police officers. While preventable, missed court dates are common among all of these groups of people, across the board. In particular, police officers called to testify frequently miss scheduled hearings, at rates nearly double those of defendants.¹ Yet, in many places, defendants alone face the harsh consequences of jail for what typically boils down to scheduling problems.

Jailing people shouldn’t be the first response to a court date that can be re-scheduled; it’s harmful to defendants, bogs down courts systems, and it’s expensive to keep people in jail. Instead, courts can implement practical, proven solutions to help prevent non-appearance, such as mailed notices and automated phone calls or text message reminders to ensure people have the information they need to get to court; grace periods for people who could not attend for reasons out of their control; and options to reschedule hearings instead of issuing warrants. Many courts still fail to take these basic steps and instead respond to this common problem by arresting defendants, leading to unnecessary, costly, and harmful jail stays. Further, community-based supports that strengthen the safety net for everyone could provide people what they need to make their day in court. This briefing shows the scope of the problem at the national level, using new evidence from the Jail Data Initiative.

Key findings

In new data from 562 jails, we find that more than 1 in 8 jail bookings (13%) are related to a failure to appear (FTA), and more than half of those are FTA only.² That may not sound like many, but because so many people cycle through jails annually, these numbers add up quickly: Across the United States each year, there are around 1,033,000 jail bookings involving people facing FTA charges (either alone or alongside other criminal charges). Roughly 546,000 — or over half — of those jail bookings are due only to a failure to make it to a court appearance.

The problem is widespread — but it is clearly worse in some communities. In 27% of the jails in our sample, FTAs were associated with 1 in 5 or more bookings — significantly more than the share of bookings nationally. Arrests and bookings into jail for FTA appear to be especially common in Washington (1 in 3 bookings), Alabama (1 in 4 bookings), and Arkansas, Kentucky, and North Carolina (1 in 5 bookings).³ (Unfortunately, the sample of jails that provide this information is not large enough in every state to provide a comprehensive, state-by-state analysis of FTA prevalence among jail bookings.)

For the JDI jail sample that includes booking data by charge and sex, FTA charges make up a larger share of women’s bookings than men’s.⁴ This finding is consistent with other research that finds women are somewhat more likely to miss a court date than men.⁵ In the JDI data, 8.2% of women’s jail bookings have FTA as a sole charge compared to 6.6% of men’s jail bookings. Bookings with FTA in combination with other charges bumps the numbers up to 14.8% for women and 12.7% for men. Researchers have pointed to unmet child care needs, medical issues, and transportation problems that might especially impact women, but the data remain scant on what drives missed court dates for women. Race does not appear to have a meaningful impact on court appearance rates.

Of the jails in the sample that include charge severity (i.e., felony versus misdemeanor) and FTA data, over one-third of all FTA-related bookings were for misdemeanors. While a small share of total bookings, this suggests that a not-insignificant number of people are jailed for missing court dates for what might otherwise be non-jailable offenses.

Troublingly — both for people charged with crimes and for crowded local jails — FTA charges appear to contribute to longer stays in jail. The median length of stay for jail bookings without an FTA is 4 days (average is 32.1 days), but with an FTA-related case, it doubles to 8 days (average is 33.6 days). This is likely because FTA also contributes to higher bail amounts, and in many cases, fewer release options as some courts require detention until a hearing on the case related to the warrant can be scheduled.⁶

How missing a court date can result in a jail booking — and why that’s bad policy

Most people arrested and charged with a crime are released while their case proceeds. While a case can sometimes be resolved (or dismissed) at the first appearance, it often involves multiple court dates after the initial arraignment and before hearings or sentencing. In turn, that means there are often multiple opportunities to “fail to appear” (FTA) in the course of a single case. Since jury trials have all but vanished due to the heavy leverage that prosecutors have to extract a guilty plea, when people miss court, they are usually missing hearings related to testimony or the motions on the case connected to evidence and discovery. Some courts have made it easier for defendants to appear virtually or even to waive certain appearances — practices that can reduce FTA arrests.

While the number of people booked into jail on FTA warrants might suggest a serious problem with court attendance, defendant no-show rates aren’t really unusually high. A 2009 estimate, the most recent national one available, indicated 17% of released defendants in felony cases from large urban counties missed at least one court date.⁷ A recent no-show estimate for medical appointments was 18%.⁸ City-specific studies have shown that when they need to testify as witnesses, police fail to appear in court in 31% of cases, nearly double the rate for defendants. Recent national data on state courts showed about 26% of people contacted for jury duty failed to respond, and that jury nonresponse or failure to appear rates have been trending upward.⁹

Reasons why people miss court include failing to understand the court notification or forgetting the appointment, dealing with competing responsibilities, lack of support for transportation or childcare, and past negative experiences with court. Recently, the Trump administration’s immigration agents have been arresting people that appear in court for hearings on criminal cases as defendants or witnesses, over the objection of local court leaders.¹⁰ Court reminders can’t solve those kinds of barriers.

Missed court appearances impact court operations and other parties. They lead to longer case processing times and add the burden of additional trips to court for victims or witnesses. But enforcement of these FTA warrants has a high cost as well. Issuing and clearing bench warrants and dealing with FTA charges contributes to further court backlogs and delays. Processing FTA arrests takes law enforcement time that could be spent responding to more serious crime. And detaining people while waiting for the next court date (which can be weeks away) leads to expensive jail stays, crowded jail conditions, and the additional burden on jail staff to transport defendants to court. In West Virginia, this expense motivated a 2023 reform that sought to reduce jail stays for failure to appear. Weighing the balance of the evidence, these FTA jail stays are expensive and likely counterproductive, even in terms of the limited goals of law enforcement.

The personal and economic consequences of even short stays in jail raise further questions about these counterproductive FTA jail bookings. Pretrial detention threatens employment, housing, and health, and leads to worse case outcomes. Court practice improvements that use reminders and grace periods can save money in terms of jail costs and reduce unnecessary, harmful disruption in people’s lives.

Potential policy changes

The Trump administration and its state and local counterparts are pushing for more pretrial detention and incarceration, citing public safety concerns despite evidence that pretrial release is associated with better outcomes. This drastic and costly change moves in the wrong direction and would not eliminate missed court appearances. Mandatory pretrial detention doesn’t make sense: people still miss court dates, even if they are locked up. Transportation from jail to court is also frequently unreliable.

In contrast, evidence-based policy reforms exist that can reduce jail bookings for failure to appear (FTA), although they range widely in their impact on jail incarceration and ease of implementation. Automated text reminders can be effective at reducing FTAs, but as “nudges” they only help those who did not receive the information about their appearance or forgot. Still, these low-lift approaches have a proven track record of reducing FTAs, sometimes by as much as 30%.

When communities rely on police to respond to addiction and poverty, far too often this means criminalization and arrest rather than useful connections to community-based services. Automated reminders won’t help when those kinds of cases are churning through jails and court. (And a court reminder may also not help if federal immigration agents are arresting people at criminal courts.)

Technical reforms that make warrant issuance less likely and easier to solve once people appear in court include grace periods, alternative court scheduling or “open hours,” virtual appearance options, and simply making court information clearer. To be more helpful, these policies could be expanded. In West Virginia, the grace period created in 2023 is only 24 hours, but in New York it is 30 days. Mechanisms for clearing warrants without a trip to jail are especially useful. St. Louis County, Missouri developed the Tap In Center, a drop-in clinic at the public library for clearing warrants and getting new court dates in collaboration between public defenders, prosecutors, and The Bail Project.¹¹ These and other voluntary pretrial services have demonstrated strong court appearance rates.

Ultimately, getting to the root of the problem requires a stronger safety net that ensures people’s basic needs are met. Affordable housing, transportation, childcare, and adequate health care could both reduce the kinds of problems where police are called in the first place and help people make it to a court hearing if they have one. Community-based supports that are not system-controlled might be a path forward, such as the 2024 Illinois Pretrial Success Act, which has funded grant programs for transportation and childcare to reduce FTAs.¹² But universal programs that strengthen the safety net for everyone would also provide these kinds of benefits.

Conclusion

An innocently missed court date should not open a Pandora’s box of consequences, making already-difficult involvement in the criminal legal system even worse. There are so many different reasons why someone might miss court; responding to those absences with the blunt instrument of arrest makes little sense. More work is needed to accommodate people who want to attend court but can’t due to matters like a challenging work schedule or a lack of childcare, healthcare, or transportation, which are all out of their control. A strategy combining nudges like court date reminders with technical reforms expanding access to justice represent the floor of what can and should be done to reduce the number of people jailed for missing court.

Advocates can and should look beyond courts for solutions as well, and actually address these structural, routine obstacles to attendance that are part of peoples’ daily lives. This includes doing more to help those that shouldn’t have been arrested and brought to court in the first place. For those kinds of cases, community-based supports that strengthen the safety net for everyone will provide people ensnared in the justice system with the chance to handle their situation, and make their day in court.

Whatever reforms have been implemented, the new JDI data show the widespread use of jails as a response to FTA persists, despite a large body of evidence and lifetimes of lived experience that show just how harmful and counterproductive criminalizing court absences can be.

Methodology

Our favorite journalism about the criminal legal system in 2025

And some commentary and editorial writing, too.

by Wanda Bertram, December 22, 2025

We asked staff of the Prison Policy Initiative to share the stories about the criminal legal system — other than ours — that stood out to them this year. In an eventful year, when there was a lot of essential journalism, here were some of our favorite pieces.

The Prison Next Door, Bolts

Brian Nam-Sonenstein, Senior Editor and Researcher, says:

An incredible long read by Lauren Gill about residents of Franklin County coming together to protest a new mega-prison being forced through by Arkansas state government. The coalition’s fight to stop the prison — and to protect land that residents hoped to leave to their children — highlights consequences of prison-and jail-building that we often don’t think about. In the course of the story, the budget for the prison doubles from $470 million to $825 million, and state lawmakers realize (long after locals had pointed it out) that the cost of upgrading water infrastructure for the prison could be astronomical. The lack of transparency, rushed planning, and unpredictable costs associated with Arkansas’s new mega-prison are an important reminder that prisons are political projects.

TIGER, the algorithm banning Louisiana prisoners from parole, Verite News

Wendy Sawyer, Research Director, says:

One of a wave of recent “tough on crime” reforms to Louisiana’s prison system means that only incarcerated people deemed “low-risk” by an algorithm are eligible for parole release. As Richard Webster chronicles, in practice, that leads to tragedies like this story: A 70-year-old man who is nearly blind, who has been preparing for years for his chance to go home, is told he is no longer eligible because the algorithm deemed him a “moderate risk.” Parole has been at the front of our minds this year as many states have taken steps to curtail it (and because we published a two-part report about it), and this law represents the worst of the regressive changes: a state culling people from parole rosters based on factors totally outside of their control.

Reporting on cities’ and counties’ collaborations with ICE

Jacob Kang-Brown, Senior Researcher, says:

From coast to coast, writers and reporters have helped to uncover the on-the-ground dynamics of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda, which often bely local and state “sanctuary” policies. Some of my favorites: Inadvertent documenting the Glendale City Jail contract with ICE, which the city canceled after their reporting; WTTW exposing 17 Illinois jails whose contracts with the U.S. Marshals allowed collaboration with ICE; Unraveled reporting on the Chicago Police Department providing crowd control at raids; and Judah Schept and Jack Norton, in n+1, explaining how rural jail expansion has created new infrastructure that ICE can take advantage of.

No Exit, Inquest

Danielle Squillante, Development and Communications Associate, says:

Imprisoned people are sold the idea that if they develop a deep insight into why they committed their crime, demonstrate remorse, engage in prison programming and education, and maintain a relatively clean disciplinary history — what prisons call rehabilitation — they will become good candidates for parole. But as Bobbi Cobaugh compellingly articulates, this is a fallacy — one that sows disillusionment in the minds of imprisoned people and their loved ones. As she writes, parole boards focus heavily on static factors that incarcerated people can’t change, like the crime itself, depriving incarcerated people of the second chances they earn.

In North Carolina Prisons, a Missed Opportunity in the Battle Against Opioids, Prison Journalism Project

Danielle Squillante, Development and Communications Associate, says:

As we argued in our article Addicted to punishment, prison administrations would rather invest in punitive responses to drug use than provide medication-assisted treatment, clinical treatment, and peer recovery groups — despite the fact that so many imprisoned people struggle with substance use disorders. As K.C. Johnson writes, prisons not only fail to provide treatment options for people so they can become more stable, but they also fail to curb the influx of drugs into the prisons, putting imprisoned people who use drugs at risk of overdosing. It’s a crisis of their own making, one that has serious consequences for people in prison.

Scorching Cells, Reuters

Regan Huston, Digital Communications Strategist, says:

Everyone knows that summer heat can be intense, but not everyone has felt the sweltering conditions of prison cells – this immersive piece gives readers a glimpse at just how dire the situation can be. The scroll-through animations paired with thorough storytelling provide a unique approach to an often-overlooked issue.

Video explainers from MLK50’s Creator In Residence, Amber Sherman

Regan Huston, Digital Communications Strategist, says:

With more people getting their news from social media, MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, an outlet in Memphis, is meeting audiences where they are at by starting a “Creator In Residence” position in their newsroom. Their Creator in Residence, TikToker Amber Sherman, has an impressive following and an easy rapport with her audience, along with the support of a trustworthy outlet. Her explainers about Memphis’s courts and jails — such as this one about the city juvenile court concealing its proceedings — break down complex issues in the criminal legal system.

@aisforafro Why is juvenile court trying to block people from seeing public court proceedings? 👩🏽‍🏫 #policymadesimple #creatorinresidence In collab w/@MLK50:JusticeThroughJournalism ♬ original sound – AisforAfro

Kentucky Parole Board series, Northern Kentucky Tribune (parts one, two, three and four)

Leah Wang, Senior Research Analyst, says:

How do parole boards work and what principles guide their decisions? We set out to answer these questions this year in our report Parole in Perspective; meanwhile, journalist R.G. Dunlop tackled the same questions — and put a human face to them — in his four-part series on parole in Kentucky. The series is about a lot more than parole, though, diving into the difficulties of aging in prison and the costs — fiscal and moral — that Kentucky has taken on by handing out so many life sentences.

Beth Shelburne’s Substack Moth to Flame

Leah Wang, Senior Research Analyst, says:

Beth is an independent journalist and co-produced the stunning HBO documentary The Alabama Solution. Her Substack, like most of her reporting, focuses on Alabama, which is good because there is a lot to say about Alabama’s broken and deadly prison system. She has touched on corruption and failures of accountability within ADOC, deaths in Alabama prisons and the families who grieve, and following the money behind ADOC contracts and lawsuits. But she’s also a human and that element comes through between her deep investigative stories.

High-priced lawyers for Alabama DOC using AI to file motions (parts one, two, and three), AL.com

Mike Wessler, Communications Director, says:

This series by John Archibald ties together a lot of threads that show how deep the problems in the criminal legal system really are. First, it is based in Alabama, which consistently has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. Next, it highlights that the state is so used to being sued for the inhumane conditions of its prisons that it has enlisted the help of a high-priced law firm to handle the issue, costing taxpayers big time. It also shows the unreasonable hurdles that incarcerated people face when seeking protection from the courts, and the ways that the system defaults to siding with prison officials over the incarcerated. And finally, it highlights the truly insidious ways that artificial intelligence is quickly creeping into the criminal legal system, almost always in ways that will make the lives of incarcerated people and their loved ones even worse.

Reported Crime May Be Falling At A Historic Rate In The US, Jeff-Alytics

Sarah Staudt, Policy and Advocacy Director, says:

We’re seeing an expansion of the carceral state in 2025: ICE raids, counties forcing through massive new jails (and states building new prisons), expansions of electronic monitoring. So it’s important to remember that amid all this, crime is actually at a historic low. Jeff Asher’s levelheaded Substack is a great source of perspective on crime-related issues and trends. In this piece he explains that crime across several categories fell at historic rates in 2025. With everyone from big-box retail stores to the Trump administration claiming that crime is on the rise, and that this merits even more investment in incarceration, this kind of historic view is critical.

Michigan inmates struggle to get help from little-known $19M fund for prisoner needs, Detroit Free Press

Wanda Bertram, Communications Strategist, says:

In Michigan, revenue from incarcerated people’s purchases on commissary and phone calls goes into a “Prisoner Benefit Fund.” But the money has largely sat idle, reporter Paul Egan found. The fund held $19 million at the end of 2024, and has sometimes gone toward maintenance costs, like an $86,500 roofing project. Meanwhile, incarcerated people — who have little say in how the money is spent — have gone without basic needs like toothbrushes, deodorant, and envelopes. This is a great piece highlighting how prisons squeeze incarcerated people and their families to fund operations, laundered through the notion of a charitable fund. (For more on these “welfare funds” in prisons, see our 2024 report Shadow Budgets.)

Priced Out of Phone Calls Home, Bolts

Peter Wagner, Executive Director, says:

Phillip Vance Smith, writing from Neuse Correctional Center in North Carolina, compellingly lays out the consequences of the FCC abruptly suspending its 2024 caps on prison phone and video calling rates. Just after these caps went into effect in the spring, the agency suspended them, yanking an economic justice victory away from millions of families who would have benefited. (After publication, the FCC doubled down, with an October order gutting its 2024 rules.) Smith explains the seriousness of this defeat: People he knows will go on paying hundreds of dollars every month to communicate with a single incarcerated loved one, and those on the inside, who often cannot shoulder the cost of calls, will lose family connections over time.

Large Minnesota study underscores disproportionate rates of health problems among recently incarcerated and unhoused people

In a study of more than 4.3 million people in Minnesota, researchers found widespread disparities in health conditions between the general population and people who were recently unhoused, jailed, or imprisoned.

by Emily Widra, December 18, 2025

The U.S. disproportionately locks up people who are unhoused and in poor health despite the fact that these populations are often better served by social and public health supports outside of jail and prison. A new study from researchers at the Minnesota Electronic Health Record Consortium underscores the desperate need for these additional supports and better, targeted interventions for accessing medical care and housing during reentry.

The Minnesota researchers use data compiled directly from a statewide electronic health record system to analyze the prevalence of various health conditions across more than 4.3 million adults in Minnesota who were seen by healthcare providers between 2021 and 2023.¹ In their comparison of recently incarcerated people, recently unhoused people, and the total statewide population, the researchers find significant disparities: recently incarcerated people face higher rates of many health conditions than the statewide population, and unhoused people face the highest rates of nearly every condition included in the study. By including race and ethnicity in their analysis, the researchers also show how existing racial disparities in health are magnified among these populations. Ultimately, their findings add to mounting evidence that unhoused and recently incarcerated people are overwhelmingly sicker than the general population.²

In this briefing, we unpack some of the most important findings from this new research, focusing primarily on recently incarcerated populations, though we look at the unhoused population at the end as well. We also note that the dataset the researchers used – the Minnesota Electronic Health Record Consortium (MNEHRC) – is a unique collaboration between healthcare systems and public health agencies in Minnesota, offering publicly available and regularly updated population-level health data for millions of people. By linking the health records with data about homelessness and incarceration (as well as other factors, like Medicaid enrollment), this dataset not only serves as a public health monitoring tool, but also allows researchers to conduct large-scale studies like this one.

Rates of all common mental health conditions are higher among recently incarcerated people

Across the board, the researchers find that compared to the total Minnesota population, mental health conditions – depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), bipolar disorder, psychotic disorders, and suicide attempts – are far more prevalent among people who have been recently jailed or imprisoned. Some mental health diagnoses among formerly incarcerated people may have been brought on or exacerbated by incarceration, which is itself a traumatizing experience. Other data tell us that, even well before entering a prison, people who are arrested have much greater odds of serious mental illness or psychological distress than those who are not arrested, reflecting the practice of sweeping people experiencing mental health crises into the criminal legal system instead of redirecting them to community-based services.

Anxiety and mood disorders. In Minnesota, depression and anxiety are more prevalent among recently jailed and imprisoned populations, across almost all racial and ethnic groups, than in the statewide population. This is consistent with other data indicating a vast overrepresentation of people with mood disorders behind bars. Rates of bipolar disorder, too, are higher among recently incarcerated people – at five times the statewide rate.

PTSD. Recently incarcerated people in Minnesota are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at more than four times the statewide rate. Within racial and ethnic categories, the most dramatic disparities in PTSD are concentrated in two groups: recently jailed white people, whose rate is more than four times that of the white population statewide, and recently imprisoned Hispanic people, for whom PTSD is more than five times as prevalent as the statewide Hispanic population.

Suicide. For decades, the rate of suicide deaths has been far higher in prisons and jails than in the national population. In the Minnesota study, recently incarcerated people were also far more likely to have a suicide attempt documented in their medical record than the statewide population. Nearly 9% of recently jailed people and 7% of recently imprisoned people had considered or attempted suicide, compared to less than 2% of the total population. And while Asian and Pacific Islander people generally report some of the lowest rates of diagnosed mental illnesses in the state, the prevalence of serious mental health concerns skyrockets for those recently incarcerated. A history of suicide attempts is almost twelve times as common among Asian and Pacific Islander people who were recently imprisoned, indicated in 12% of their medical records, compared to Asian and Pacific Islander Minnesotans as a whole.

These numbers reflect the nation’s shameful practice of responding to mental illness and mental health crises with criminalization: 40% of people in state and federal prisons in 2016 and more than 44% of people in local jails in 2012 had been diagnosed with a mental illness at some point.³ A number of behaviors associated with mental illness – including loitering, disorderly conduct, and trespassing – can result in arrest, conviction, and incarceration, even while posing little-to-no threat to public safety.⁴ However, access to any sort of mental health treatment is extremely limited for incarcerated people: in state prisons, more than half of people had an indication of a mental health problem in 2016, but only a quarter (26%) received professional help since entering prison. In local jails, suicide is the leading cause of death: someone in jail is more than three times as likely to die from suicide as someone in the general U.S. population.

While we cannot say from the data presented whether these mental health concerns were a contributing factor to – or result of – their contact with the criminal legal system, it’s clear that some of the state’s most vulnerable people are disproportionately incarcerated and returning to their communities with mental health needs. These findings underscore the urgent need to bolster mental health treatment in the community.

One in ten recently incarcerated Minnesotans has a diagnosed substance use disorder

In the Minnesota study, people with a recent experience with incarceration are more likely to have a diagnosed substance use disorder than the statewide population: more than one in ten have an opioid use disorder or an alcohol use disorder. Among recently incarcerated people, the rates of all substance use disorders measured – for alcohol, opioids, hallucinogens, methamphetamine, cocaine, and cannabis – are between 4 and 22 times the rates of those disorders among the total state population.

Alcohol. More than one in five (21%) recently jailed people in Minnesota have a documented alcohol use disorder. And while the prevalence is lower among recently imprisoned people (14%) than recently jailed people, it is still almost four times the statewide rate (4%). Across almost all racial and ethnic groups, the prevalence of alcohol use disorder is higher among those recently incarcerated. Statewide, Native people have the highest rate of alcohol use disorder (12%), which nearly doubles for those recently incarcerated: 23% of recently jailed and 19% of recently imprisoned Native people have a documented alcohol use disorder.⁵ Similarly, while only 3% of Minnesota’s Hispanic population has an alcohol use disorder, that rate jumps dramatically to 18% among recently jailed Hispanic people and 11% among those recently imprisoned. These results indicate a clear need for alcohol use treatment for people leaving jails and prisons across all racial and ethnic groups.⁶

Opioids. The criminal legal system is frequently the default response to the opioid epidemic: people who use opioids are disproportionately arrested, jailed, and imprisoned, but behind bars, they rarely receive necessary treatment. In the Minnesota study, opioid use disorder is ten times as prevalent among recently imprisoned people than the total population (among recently jailed people, it is seven times the statewide rate). Across all racial and ethnic categories, opioid use disorder is far more prevalent among people recently released from jail and prison – and this has lethal consequences. Previous research out of Minnesota found that the rate of overdose death for people released from jail was nearly 16 times that of the Minnesota general population, and the rate for people released from prison was a shocking 28 times the general population rate.⁷

Methamphetamine. Rates of methamphetamine (meth) use disorder are much higher among recently jailed (12%) and recently imprisoned people (17%) compared to the statewide population (0.8%). This is consistent with national trends in meth use and criminalization: nationally, there has been a surge in methamphetamine use, arrests, and overdose deaths in recent years. From 2015 to 2019, methamphetamine use disorder prevalence increased 37%, while overdose deaths climbed 170%. Among more than 32,000 people arrested for the first time in 2023 that tested positive for drugs, more than a quarter (26%) tested positive for methamphetamine alone. In the Minnesota study, methamphetamine use disorder is most prevalent among Native people, both statewide (6%) and among those recently jailed (18%) and recently imprisoned (22%).⁸ However, the largest within-race disparities between the statewide population and the recently incarcerated population are among white, Hispanic, and Asian or Pacific Islander people:

Despite the deep unpopularity of the War on Drugs, the U.S. still responds to substance use (and related crime) as an individual failure requiring punishment, rather than as a public health problem — and it’s not working. Nationally, around 8% of people met the criteria for substance use disorders in 2019, but such disorders are far more common among people who are arrested and jailed (41%) and people incarcerated in federal (32%) or state prisons (49%). Establishing healthcare support for people during reentry – and ensuring seamless access to medications for opioid use disorder during incarceration and reentry – is a crucial part of reversing these trends.

Serious health conditions are more common among recently incarcerated people

The Minnesota study also shows that recently incarcerated people are more likely than the statewide population to suffer from most of the physical health conditions measured, including respiratory conditions like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and cardiovascular conditions like high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke.

While health issues may begin before arrest, incarceration often exacerbates problems or creates new ones: being locked up in and of itself causes lasting damage, and mortality (death) rates inside prisons and jails are disturbingly high.⁹ Of course, we know that people often do not get adequate medical care while behind bars: more than 20% of incarcerated people in state prisons and 68% in local jails with a persistent medical condition go without treatment. This has serious consequences: the number of people who died annually in jails and prisons increased by about 33% from 2001 to 2019,¹⁰ and prior research shows that each year in prison corresponds to a two-year decline in life expectancy. In the Minnesota study, the elevated rates of respiratory and heart conditions among recently incarcerated people, relative to statewide rates, are especially concerning.

Respiratory conditions. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is almost twice as common among recently imprisoned people than it is across the total Minnesota population. Rates of COPD for white people who were recently jailed (6%) or imprisoned (7%) are more than double that of the statewide white population (3%). Similarly, 6% of recently jailed Black people have COPD, compared to just 4% of Black people statewide.¹¹ In general, Black and Native people in Minnesota have the highest rates of asthma (10%). But for Black people who were recently incarcerated, the rates climb even higher: 13% of recently jailed and 17% of recently imprisoned Black people have asthma. The high rates of asthma and COPD among recently incarcerated people indicate an urgent problem, especially since over the past two decades, more people have died in state prisons from respiratory disease than from drug/alcohol overdose, accidents, and homicides combined.

Heart conditions. Compared to the total Minnesota population, recently incarcerated people generally face higher rates of most cardiovascular conditions, including high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, heart failure, stroke, and heart attacks. High blood pressure (hypertension) is more prevalent among recently jailed people (38%) than the statewide population (33%) or recently imprisoned people (26%), but this appears to be primarily driven by the increase among jailed Hispanic people (38%, compared to 31% statewide). For all other racial and ethnic categories, hypertension rates were actually lower among those recently incarcerated.

Among recently incarcerated people, the Minnesota study shows racial disparities in the prevalence of various cardiac conditions. For example, recently jailed Black people are more likely than recently jailed white, Native, Hispanic, or Asian or Pacific Islander people to have coronary artery disease, heart failure, or a heart attack. Recently jailed Native people have the highest rates of stroke and peripheral vascular disease among all recently jailed groups. Among people who were recently in prison, Black people are the most likely to have heart failure or stroke and white people are most likely to have had a heart attack.

Nationally, data show that heart conditions are deadly behind bars: more than one in four deaths in jails and prisons is attributed to heart disease nationally.¹² For Black people, heart disease is the leading cause of death in prison, with an average annual mortality rate between 2000-2019 (71 per 100,000), almost double the rate for Black people in local jails (39 per 100,000). Access to lifesaving cardiac treatment is limited behind bars: 30% of people who died in state prisons from cardiovascular disease in 2019 did not receive any diagnostic testing and more than 25% did not receive medications for their heart condition; Black people were even less likely to have received any treatment or evaluation.¹³

Criminalization of homelessness puts disproportionately ill unhoused people in the crosshairs

Across the more than twenty mental health, physical health, and substance use conditions measured in the Minnesota study, the prevalence rates were highest among recently unhoused people for all but three conditions (hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and methamphetamine use disorder) – higher than the statewide population and even the recently-incarcerated populations.

Among recently unhoused people, the researchers found that rates of health problems varied by race similarly to the statewide population, only at much higher levels. For example, the prevalence of asthma, hypertension, and stroke are highest among Black people in the statewide population and among Black people in the recently unhoused population. But while 10% of all Black people in Minnesota have asthma, that rate goes up to 18% for unhoused Black people. Similarly, Native people in Minnesota have the highest rates of opioid and alcohol use disorders both statewide and among the recently unhoused population, but the prevalence of both disorders among unhoused Native people is more than double that of the statewide Native population.¹⁴

The inclusion of those experiencing homelessness is relevant to people focused on criminal legal system reform because, of course, this is an increasingly criminalized population. Even before the current legislative and legal efforts to criminalize homelessness, almost 5% of people in state prisons in 2016 experienced homelessness in the days prior to their arrest, compared to just 0.2% of the total U.S. population experiencing homelessness on a given night in 2016. In a recent analysis, we estimated that at least 205,000 unhoused people are booked into jails each year. Further, research shows that the unhoused population is aging and that, like incarceration, homelessness contributes to “accelerated aging” with early onset of many chronic medical conditions, functional and cognitive impairments, and high rates of age-adjusted mortality.

The large-scale Minnesota study’s analysis of the recently unhoused population is an important contribution: the findings largely confirm problems that advocates have consistently raised alarms about. Unhoused people are particularly vulnerable to poor health outcomes (inevitably tied to limited healthcare access and poverty) and to criminal legal system involvement. While we chose to focus on the comparisons between the recently incarcerated population and the statewide population in this briefing, the data on the health conditions faced by recently unhoused people represents a new, invaluable source of information about just how vulnerable unhoused people are.

Conclusion

There’s a significant existing body of evidence pointing to the exceptional healthcare needs of unhoused and recently incarcerated people. This recent study out of Minnesota is potentially useful for researchers and advocates because it draws from a large novel dataset to contribute recent data on two populations that often face multiple barriers to accessing adequate healthcare. It drives home the longstanding arguments that these populations are in desperate need of additional support during reentry around accessing medical care. Ultimately, the publicly available dataset from the Minnesota study is a valuable resource for those seeking to better understand and meet the health needs of people returning home from prison and jail, including comprehensive reentry services, substance use disorder treatment, Medicaid and Medicare coverage, housing support, and access to healthcare providers.

New ICE arrest data show the power of state and local governments to curtail mass deportations

Using fresh data on ICE arrests through mid-October from the Deportation Data Project, we examine how jails continue to facilitate mass deportation, spotlighting important opportunities for resistance at the state and local levels.

by Jacob Kang-Brown and Brian Nam-Sonenstein, December 11, 2025

Local jails and police departments are key to the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda because they facilitate ICE arrests of people who are already in police custody. In the first year of Trump’s second term, the administration has intensified the criminalization of asylum seekers and immigrants, pushed immigrant detention to all-time highs, and indiscriminately raided city after city. Despite all of this, the Trump administration remains well behind their mass deportation goals, in large part due to state and local efforts to protect immigrant communities and limit cooperation with ICE, Border Patrol, and other federal agencies.

Hiding in Plain SightJails role in Trump’s deportation plan

In this briefing, we provide an update to our July 2025 report, Hiding in Plain Sight, which explored how local jails obscure and facilitate mass deportation under Trump. Using new government data provided by ICE and processed by the Deportation Data Project, we found high levels of ICE arrests — over 1,000 a day — concentrated in states that fully collaborate with the Trump administration.¹ Nearly half (48%) of these arrests happen out of local jails and other lock-ups.² We also provide updated data tables showing both the numbers and rates of ICE arrests by state.

A whirlwind of developments in the past year have changed how the immigration system works. The Trump administration has made it harder for people to make claims in immigration court, and deployed plain-clothes federal agents to arrest people that show up for hearings. They have limited access to legal information and attorneys while people are detained, and tried to eliminate regular types of release from detention like bail. Further, they fired immigration judges unaligned with their mass deportation agenda, and advertised their positions as those of “deportation judges.” Accordingly, immigration judges now frequently function as a rubber stamp on the regime’s actions; the case-by-case, inherently individualized decision of whether or not to detain and deport someone has shifted away from judges in courtrooms to the cops on the streets.

Meanwhile, ICE agents are given arrest quotas and required to detain nearly everyone they suspect lacks U.S. citizenship. They are heavily reliant on local police to arrest people and identify them for later pick up from the local jail by ICE agents, often before any criminal charges have been resolved (whether dismissed, acquitted, or convicted). To be clear, large numbers of ICE arrests at local jails are not an indication that immigrants and asylum seekers are more likely to be arrested for a crime; robust data from Texas, for example, showed that undocumented immigrants had much lower arrest rates than U.S.-born citizens. In too many cases, a traffic stop can mean deportation.

Nonetheless, these changes mean that local law enforcement across the U.S. have day-to-day operational discretion about who is detained and deported from communities. States like Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and Georgia have required local law enforcement to deputize staff to serve ICE, leading to high numbers of arrests.³ Others like Illinois, New York, and Oregon have managed to suppress arrests by limiting cooperation and blocking access to sensitive areas of public buildings. And states like New Jersey, which have prohibited formal deputization while allowing federal agents informal access to people in custody, have swept hundreds of people out of local jails and into the hands of ICE.

Local jails remain a key part of ICE’s arrest apparatus

Nationally, the recently-obtained ICE arrest data show indiscriminate levels of community arrests and detention. Using a 14-day rolling average number of arrests to smooth out the daily data,⁴ we found that major policy shifts led to higher levels of ICE arrests around the time of Trump’s inauguration in January, and again in late May as White House staff pressured ICE to escalate community raids to reach 3,000 arrests per day. Already-high rates of arrests out of local jails and other lock-ups seen earlier in 2025 have been amplified, although not as much as community raids and arrests elsewhere. As discussed below, the story becomes more complicated when looking at individual states, because the scale of arrests at least partially depends on state and local policies regarding cooperation with federal agents.

Throughout 2025, ICE made more and more arrests at local jails and other lock-ups, reaching an average of 350 per day in late January, and then continuing to rise to more than 500 a day on average in August. Arrests in other locations peaked in late May and early June at an average of almost 700 a day, and ICE averaged over 600 a day in September.⁵

State cooperation with ICE: As one might expect, states that mandate local collaboration with federal law enforcement often have higher levels of ICE arrests, with places like Tennessee, Florida, and Texas among the most extreme examples. To understand the impact of changes to immigration enforcement this year, our analysis⁶ compared arrests made between January 20 and May 20 to those made between May 21 and October 15. We found that Texas has the highest overall ICE arrests in this data, and their ICE arrest rate nearly doubled from the first to second period, from about 58 per 100,000 state residents to 110 per 100,000.

After Texas, Florida and Tennessee have the highest arrest rates out of local jails and other lock-ups specifically. Between the January to May and May to October to periods of our analysis, the overall ICE arrest rate in Tennessee rose by 40%, from 35 to 49 per 100,000 people. In Florida, 67% of ICE arrests were out of local jails or other lock-ups and the overall ICE arrest rate in the state rose by nearly 50%, from 39 to 58 per 100,000.

Impact of strategies to block ICE: Meanwhile, the impact of state and local strategies to block ICE access to jails is visible in data from Illinois, New York, and Oregon, where ICE arrests remain lower than other states. Between the January to May and May to October period in Illinois, the ICE arrest rate almost tripled, from nearly 8 per 100,000 people to 21 per 100,000. New York’s rate went from 9 to 26 per 100,000 (a 179% increase), and Oregon’s from 5 to 13 per 100,000 (a 160% increase). While these growing rates of arrest are troubling, the overall levels are much lower than in other states. In all three states, arrests out of local jails and other lock-ups composed a small share of ICE arrests, around 1 in 10 in Oregon and New York, and 1 in 6 in Illinois.⁷

Each state has approached the situation differently. Illinois, for example, has the strongest policy to prevent ICE from gaining access to people while they are in local jails. Guidance from the Illinois Attorney General states that local law enforcement:

• “May not transfer any person into an immigration agent’s custody;
• May not give any immigration agent access, including by telephone, to any individual who is in the law enforcement agency’s custody;
• May not permit immigration agents’ use of agency facilities or equipment, including the use of electronic databases not available to the public, for any investigative or immigration enforcement purpose; and
• May not otherwise render collateral assistance to federal immigration agents, including by coordinating an arrest in a courthouse or other public facility, transporting any individuals, establishing a security or traffic perimeter, or providing other on-site support.”

There are narrow exceptions to this prohibition, such as when ICE has a criminal arrest warrant, and gaps between the law on the books and what actually happens in practice. But Illinois requires local law enforcement to provide details on how they respond to every request made of them by immigration agents, and subsequently shares that information with the public.⁸

Informal access to jails facilitates collaboration and blunts efforts to block ICE

States like New Jersey have found themselves in a third position between mandatory deputization of local police and state-wide policy that prohibits collaboration. This waffling has led to a surge in ICE arrests from jails and other lockups. As recent ICE arrest data show, the rate of arrests in New Jersey almost doubled in the May to October period, from 21 to 40 per 100,000 people, and a large share took place out of local jails.

How did this happen? New Jersey prohibits local police and sheriffs from being deputized by ICE under the 287(g) program, terminating those agreements in 2019 via an executive order from the Attorney General.

Despite the prohibition on formal 287(g) agreements, some local sheriffs have collaborated with ICE in other ways, and traffic enforcement and other arrests still lead to ICE arrests out of lock-ups and jails at a very high rate.⁹ For example, news reports indicate that Morris County jail and other pretrial detention facilities across New Jersey allow ICE to enter and make arrests. Morris County Sheriff James Gannon, in November 2017 described it this way:

“We have a working relationship with those authorities at our jail. They come in, and they check, you know, every other day they’re in our jail, right now. So I don’t see a need as we sit there right now to do anything on the 287(g). But we are going to maintain cooperation with the authorities with regards to issues of immigration […] If the immigration authorities are coming in and they’re satisfied and we’re satisfied that they’re dealing with the people who are here illegally, then let’s leave it like that.”

This tension between independent sheriffs and state limits on collaboration with ICE recently rose to the surface during the governor’s race in 2025. The Republican candidate, Jack Ciattarelli, chose Sheriff Gannon as his running mate and campaigned on working more closely with ICE and even deputizing local police to serve as immigration agents. Ciattarelli and Gannon lost their election, but ICE arrests that involve collaboration with local law enforcement have continued at a high level in New Jersey compared to states like Illinois, Pennsylvania, or New York.

Conclusion

Despite overwhelming displays of power and intimidating rhetoric, the federal government nonetheless relies heavily on state and local collaboration to enact its mass deportation agenda. The Trump administration is therefore vulnerable to state and local policy action that goes beyond merely limiting sheriffs and police from deputizing officers to work as immigration agents. This weakness is evident in the data, which show significantly smaller jumps in arrest rates in states where advocates have most aggressively worked to reject collaboration, and much higher rates in states that have embraced it. In the case of New Jersey, it’s clear that moderation on ICE collaboration does little to stem rates of arrest. Advocates targeting ICE’s reliance on local jails could potentially save thousands of people from the horrors of torture and abuse in federal custody and deportation.

Methodology

ICE arrest data were obtained via FOIA request and processed by the Deportation Data Project, which were then analyzed by the Prison Policy Initiative.

Data corrections: ICE data contained a large number of cases with incomplete location information, and ICE’s coding and categorization practice has shifted over the course of 2025, obscuring important details. For data tables and visualizations in this briefing, we categorize ICE’s arrest locations data as “local jails or other lock-ups,” and a residual category of “all other locations,” including streets, workplaces, homes, and courts. As of the last week of July 2025, ICE stopped reporting arrests that occurred via the various local, state, and federal “Criminal Alien Programs” and instead reported all of those cases under the generic category “Custodial Arrests.” There are some ICE arrests directly from state or federal prisons, but many of the arrests coded as occurring via ICE’s federal or state so-called “Criminal Alien Program” actually happened at local jails after people were transferred there. The vast majority of custodial arrests occur at local jails, and thus in this briefing we use a combined category of “local jails or other lock-ups.”

The Deportation Data Project also identified that some records appear to be duplicated in the arrest table, so we removed extra rows that involve a person being booked into ICE custody more than once in a single day.

14 day rolling average arrest counts: This metric helps smooth out the daily data variation into trends, and is calculated using a sum of all arrests over two weeks divided by 14 to get the average daily arrest rate in the period. For example, October 14’s number is the average number of arrests for October 1-October 14.

Standardizing comparison across states: We carefully added the missing state for arrests based on the information ICE provided on apprehension location. Around 15% of the rows in the ICE arrest table do not include a state, but using the information in the table (such as the detailed apprehension location or the ICE office responsible) we deduced the location of the arrest for nearly nine out of ten of these cases. This approach does not work in Washington D.C., however, because so many arrests remain ambiguous or assigned to the ICE office responsible for both Washington D.C. and Virginia, so these two areas are combined for this analysis.

Data from some states may be incomplete due to ICE procedures for processing arrests. According to a declaration by the director of the Chicago field office in a federal civil rights lawsuit, in mid-September 2025, they sent an “entire plane” full of 131 people who had been arrested in the Chicago area but had not been processed by ICE yet to El Paso for processing there. Using the ICE arrest and detention data from the Deportation Data Project’s most recent release, it was not possible to clearly identify those people among the set of cases that were arrested in Illinois, nor those that were first detained in El Paso during that time, due to limitations in the datasets (missing identifiers in particular).

Standardizing comparison across time periods: In order to meaningfully compare changes during the first year of the second Trump administration, we broke ICE arrest data into two periods: a first period from January 20 to May 20, 2025 and a second period from May 21 to October 15, 2025. This approach provides a view into how conditions have changed since ICE arrests ramped up earlier this summer.

Because the data periods are not the same length, we standardized the data when calculating the ICE arrest rates to represent the number of arrests if the period was exactly four months long to make them comparable. This approach also avoids truncating arrest data unnecessarily at the start or end of time periods, which would discard useful data. For the latter 128 day period from May 21 to October 15, we reduced the counts within each state by 4.9% to account for what they would be in a shorter 121 and two-thirds days period. The earlier 121 day period (January 20 to May 20) is increased slightly to account for the missing two-thirds of a day.

We chose to divide the periods in this way due to the May 20th meeting called by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller with ICE senior officials demanding a million deportations in Trump’s first year and a tripling of arrest efforts to a target of 3,000 arrests per day.¹⁰ Subsequent to that meeting, ICE and Border Patrol began to occupy downtown Los Angeles and raid California more aggressively, followed by Washington, D.C.; Portland, Oregon; and Chicagoland. Data covering ICE and Customs and Border Protection’s more recent efforts in North Carolina, Louisiana, Minnesota, and elsewhere have not yet been made public.

In order to make comparisons between states, we calculate arrest rates per 100,000 residents (based on 2024 U.S. Census state-level population estimates), which we provide in Appendix Table 2.

Read the entire methodology

Appendix Tables

Our most important research and advocacy work in 2025

Highlights of our work include exposing the role jails are playing in Trump’s mass deportation agenda, a new report detailing the current state of youth confinement, and a deep dive into discretionary parole systems.

by Danielle Squillante, December 11, 2025

2025 was a challenging year. Not only were many states returning to the failed policies that created the nation’s mass incarceration crisis, but a new administration came to D.C., threatening to use the power of the federal government to make the criminal legal system even worse. The Prison Policy Initiative rose to these challenges, pushing back on and exposing these misguided policies, and continuing to produce cutting-edge research that shines a light on the dark corners of the criminal legal system in America.

Here’s just a taste of some of our most important work this year:

Updates to our bedrock Whole Pie reports

We released the 2025 edition of our flagship report, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie. The report offers the most comprehensive view of the nearly 2 million people incarcerated in the U.S., showing what types of facilities they are in and why. It also included, for the first time, a section that breaks down which states are driving the growth in incarceration. We also released an update to our Youth Confinement: The Whole Pie report, which provides the most up-to-date picture of how many youth are detained and committed in the U.S., highlighting the persistent overincarceration of Black and Indigenous youth in a system that, in recent decades, has made great strides in reducing youth confinement overall.

New resources highlighting how the federal government is impacting the criminal legal system

Since taking office, the Trump administration has issued numerous executive orders and used its bully pulpit and control over federal spending to coerce state and local governments into expanding the size and brutality of their criminal legal systems. To help people make sense of these rapid-fire actions, we released a new tool that tracks the administration’s efforts and connects the dots on its strategy to make the criminal legal system harsher, less effective, and even more unfair. We also released a primer on the traditional role of the federal government in shaping the criminal legal system, to help advocates know where state and local lawmakers can push back on the administration’s actions.

Hiding in Plain Sight: How local jails obscure and facilitate mass deportation under Trump

Local jails, even in some sanctuary cities and states, are playing an essential role in President Trump’s mass detention and deportation plan. This report breaks down the complicated overlap between local criminal and immigration systems, and reveals that the Trump administration is circumventing sanctuary policies by referring immigrants to the shadowy U.S. Marshals Service, whose contracts with jails to hold pretrial detainees have often gone overlooked.

Highlights from our advocacy work

While we’re best known for our research and reports, that’s not all we do. In 2025, our advocacy department partnered with dozens of organizations in over 25 states to provide custom research and strategy support to on-the-ground efforts that are transforming our criminal legal system. This year, we testified in legislatures in Massachusetts and Colorado on the importance of protecting in-person visitation in prisons and jails and presented to the Hawai’i Correctional Oversight Commission about the pitfalls of new jail construction. We also presented two webinars, each with hundreds of attendees, that covered how best to interpret recidivism data and how to fight unnecessary local jail construction.

Parole in Perspective: A deep dive into discretionary parole systems

This two-part report pulls back the curtain on parole release systems, providing the most accessible and comprehensive source to date for comparing how these essential — and often dysfunctional — release mechanisms are set up in 35 states. The first part explores the makeup of boards and how they conduct hearings. The second dives into new data on hearings and grants, and the factors that boards consider — including their discretion — in determining whether someone will be released.

Bad Behavior: How prison disciplinary policies manufacture misconduct

Every prison system has a lengthy disciplinary policy laying out the rules incarcerated people must follow, as well as the procedures and punishments they’ll face if they don’t. These policies are supposed to ensure safety, security, and order by deterring and punishing misconduct. In practice, however, prison discipline is a system of petty tyranny with devastating, long-term consequences. Our report, Bad Behavior is the broadest review of disciplinary policies to date, and draws on original research as well as testimony from 47 currently incarcerated people, providing an essential look at how prisons are run in the age of mass incarceration.

Cut-rate care: The systemic problems shaping ‘healthcare’ behind bars

In correctional healthcare systems, care is secondary to controlling costs and avoiding lawsuits. For this report, we pored over research, news investigations, government reports, and contractor documents to better understand the “big picture” relationship between healthcare providers, government agencies, and incarcerated people, and to identify system-level targets for improving care outcomes. Importantly, we combined testimonies from incarcerated people in state and federal prisons with this in-depth research and analysis to tell a fuller story of how deeply flawed health care systems are.

States of Women’s Incarceration: The Global Context 2025

This report offers a crucial lens through which to view the criminalization of women, who are a small minority of all incarcerated people in the U.S., but whose incarceration rates today are at near-historic highs. It provides a comprehensive women’s incarceration rate for every U.S. state — including prisons and jails, youth confinement facilities, tribal jails, immigrant detention centers, and other types of incarceration — comparing states to each other and to countries of the world.

New national data help fill 20-year data gap: Offense data for people in local jails

Millions of people are arrested and booked into jail every year, but existing national data offer very little information about the actual criminal charges for which they are detained. In this briefing, we worked with the Jail Data Initiative to fill that gap and provide a new “snapshot” of people in jail by offense type using the most up-to-date nationally representative sample available.

Fourteen states ripe for prison gerrymandering reform

Everyone is supposed to have an equal voice in their government’s decisions, but an outdated and misguided Census Bureau policy that counts incarcerated people in the wrong place gives a few residents of each state a megaphone. It is a problem known as prison gerrymandering, and state lawmakers can fix it. We recently released a series of reports focused on states ripe for ending prison gerrymandering — Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Not only do these states have significantly prison-gerrymandered districts, but this problem has a significant impact on their Black, Native American, or Latino residents.

This is only a small piece of the important and impactful work we published in 2025, and our work is far from over. We’ve got big things planned in 2026, when we’ll continue to expose the broader harms of mass criminalization and highlight solutions that keep our communities safe without expanding the footprint of the carceral system.

What Trump gets right and wrong about pardons

Pardons aren’t about helping political allies – they’re about bringing a measure of justice to an unjust system.

by Regan Huston, December 3, 2025

Pardons are one of the most important powers presidents have. With a swipe of their pen, they can erase a person’s federal criminal conviction, freeing them from prison if they’re locked up, and erasing the collateral consequences that often haunt people even after they’ve served their sentence. ¹

The pardon power can help fix injustices in the criminal legal system and be a meaningful tool to reduce prison populations, but, unfortunately, in recent decades, this power has been severely underused.

President Trump, though, has broken with most of his recent predecessors, issuing pardons at a blistering pace since returning to office. In this piece, we take a closer look at President Trump’s pardons to understand what he’s gotten right, what he’s gotten wrong, and what can be done to make the pardon process better.

What Trump gets right about pardons

So far this year, President Trump has issued over 1,500 pardons. This is a huge number compared to the most recent presidents.²

However, it is important to remember, while President Trump has used his pardon power far more frequently than most recent presidents, it is still not enough. There are more than 200,000 people in federal custody on any given day. Trump’s 1,500 pardons represent less than 1% of the people locked up by the federal government.³

President Trump is right to use his pardon powers so sweepingly; in fact, to truly impact the criminal legal system, he should use the power more often. However, where the President goes wrong is in who is on the receiving end of these pardons.

What Trump gets wrong about pardons

While some have expressed outrage at President Trump’s recent pardons, the real problem isn’t how many people he has pardoned, but rather that he appears to be reserving that power just for his friends.

Policy TrackerHow Trump is making the criminal legal system worse

The vast majority of people who have been pardoned by President Trump are political and business allies:

• On day one of his second term, Trump issued a blanket pardon for people with January 6-related convictions and charges, accounting for the vast majority of his pardons.
• In October, the president pardoned billionaire Changpeng Zhao, who has business connections with the Trump family.
• In November, Trump preemptively pardoned political allies Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, and Sidney Powell, among others, none of whom were currently facing federal criminal charges.

It should go without saying, but people should not need a connection to the president to have a shot at a pardon.

Meanwhile, roughly 10,000 people have filed petitions for pardons or commutations at the federal level just this year, and only 10 have been granted. The rest should not be ignored just because they do not have the political sway of Trump’s friends and allies.

Pardoning friends and allies, while ignoring nearly everyone else, isn’t just bad optics. It undermines public confidence in the process and can result in skepticism of future pardon decisions. Presidents are already hesitant to issue pardons; if the public is skeptical, it’ll make use of this power even more rare.

Making pardons fairer and more accessible

In the aftermath of Trump’s actions, some have called for misguided changes that would make pardons even more uncommon. “Reforms” that make a pardon more inaccessible to the average person behind bars are not the solution.

Instead, there are things the U.S. can do to actually improve clemency and the pardon process, making it more frequent, accessible, and fair. A good place to start would be passing the FIX Clemency Act, which would:

• Eliminate the Office of the Pardon Attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and replace it with an independent board of experts who would provide the President with recommendations on who should receive clemency.
• Create greater transparency in the clemency process by publicly disclosing Board activities and recommendations.
• Protect applicants for clemency from greater prosecution.

Importantly, presidents can only offer pardons for federal crimes — a relatively small portion of the overall number of people behind bars. However, governors can issue pardons for state criminal convictions. They should learn from the steps and missteps of President Trump and use their pardon powers more frequently.

Similarly, advocates should be calling for an expansion of pardons that directly benefits people entangled in the criminal legal system, regardless of their political or economic connections.