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.

A new toolkit for journalists covering the criminal legal system

We put all of our most helpful resources and guides for journalists in one place.

by Wanda Bertram, November 25, 2025

We at the Prison Policy Initiative write our reports with journalists in mind, since journalists play a critical role in bringing harmful aspects of the criminal legal system to light. We also sometimes produce resources geared toward journalists covering the system, highlighting issues worth covering and offering tips for investigations.

To put a bow on this work, this morning, we released our Journalist Toolkit, a living webpage aggregating the resources on our website that we think reporters would find most helpful. Journalists new to our work may find this annotated list a useful first stop on our website. We’ll add to this page in the coming months and years as we publish resources and guides on different topics. For now, we include guides about reporting on:

• Deaths in custody
• Parole release
• Disciplinary systems behind bars
• The bail industry
• Prison and jail “inmate welfare funds”
• “Gag rules” silencing prison staff

If you’re a journalist with a specific story or question you’re looking for help with, you’re also welcome to reach out to us directly through our contact page.

Prison Policy Initiative opposes mail scanning in Illinois

Proposed rule change would make devastating mail restrictions permanent for thousands in Illinois’ prisons

by Emmett Sanders, November 21, 2025

This month, the Prison Policy Initiative submitted public comment on a proposed rule change by the Illinois Department of Corrections to begin scanning all incoming mail, giving incarcerated people only electronic or print copies instead of the original, physical mail. This rule change would permanently deny incarcerated people an essential lifeline connecting them to their communities.

In September, the Department of Corrections appeared before the Illinois Joint Committee on Administrative Rules (JCAR) to request an emergency rule change to start scanning mail, arguing it would reduce the flow of drugs and other contraband into prisons. Committee members were rightly unconvinced, but despite their objections, the department is now trying to make mail scanning permanent.

Although it’s becoming more common, mail scanning is not a reasonable or effective response to drug contraband in prison. There is no evidence that physical mail is a main avenue for drugs entering prisons; to the contrary, there is ample evidence that drugs and other contraband are often smuggled into facilities by staff. Notably, mail scanning has not decreased overdoses in states that have implemented it; for example:

• 30 people died from drugs the year after mail scanning was implemented in Missouri prisons. Meanwhile, overdoses have not only continued but they have increased.
• Positive tests for drugs in Pennsylvania’s prisons nearly tripled in the five years following the move to mail scanning.

It’s well understood that contact between incarcerated people and their families is essential for the well-being of people in prison, their children, and their communities. Letters in particular have been found to have important mental health benefits, especially for those in crisis. Stripping access to physical mail further imperils thousands of people incarcerated in Illinois, in no small part because the state prison system has repeatedly failed to fix its broken mental health care services.

Instead of cutting people off from a valuable lifeline, Illinois should join states like Nevada in recognizing the importance of physical mail in prisons. Ultimately, protecting the right of incarcerated people to receive letters from their loved ones is humane and makes Illinois safer in the long run.

People in Illinois may submit written comments on the proposed rulemaking during the 45-day First Notice Period, which ends on November 24, 2025. Submit written comments to DOC.ProposedRulemaking@illinois.gov. You can also share your written comments directly with JCAR staff at jcar@ilga.gov. For more details, read our full public comment here.

34 criminal legal system reforms that can win in 2026

We offer our yearly list of impactful reforms that can - and have - succeeded in state legislatures, including links to research and model bills.

November 19, 2025

With the federal government abandoning proven public safety strategies and doubling down on punishment, the work of state policymakers and advocates to shrink the criminal legal system and make it fairer is even more important. This morning, the Prison Policy Initiative released its 2026 edition of Winnable Criminal Justice Reforms, a report designed to give state and local change-makers the background they need to emulate existing and effective reforms.

For each of the reforms in the report, we provide critical context about the existing problem, explain why change would be impactful, and highlight research, model solutions, and legislation to help advocates and lawmakers get started.

This year’s report includes 34 vital reform strategies, in eight categories:

• Expanding alternatives to criminal legal system responses to social problems
• Protecting the presumption of innocence so people receive a fair shot at justice
• Decreasing the length of prison sentences and providing pathways for all people to exit prison
• Treating people humanely during incarceration
• Treating people on community supervision fairly, and keeping them thriving in the community
• Setting people up to succeed when they exit prisons and jails
• Giving incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people political representation and voice
• Reducing spending on the criminal legal system and increasing investment in communities

The list is not intended to be a comprehensive platform. Instead, we’ve curated it to offer straightforward solutions that do not require further investments in the carceral system. We particularly focused on reforms that would reduce the number of people needlessly confined in prisons and jails. Additionally, we selected reforms that have gained momentum in recent years, passing in multiple states.

We recognize that as we publish this guide, many advocates are working tirelessly not just to pass much-needed reforms, but to beat back coordinated attacks against prior victories. For that reason, we’ve also included some talking points to use to fight against these regressive policies that threaten to undo decades of work by advocates.

We sent our report to roughly 650 lawmakers, in all 50 states, from all political parties, who have shown a commitment to reducing the number of people behind bars in their state and making the criminal legal system more just and equitable. As they craft legislation for the upcoming legislative sessions, this list will provide them with actionable solutions to some of the most pressing challenges their states’ criminal legal systems face.

The full report is available at: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/winnable2026.html.

Menstruation as misconduct: How prisons punish people for having their periods

Our analysis of prison rules and sanctions across all fifty states and the federal system — as well as accounts of incarcerated people — reveal troubling trends in how the carceral system punishes people for a physiological process they have no control over.

by Miriam Vishniac and Emily Widra, November 12, 2025

Prisons are primarily designed to confine and control men, which makes managing menstruation extraordinarily difficult, uncomfortable, and often downright dangerous for people inside. Incarcerated people are routinely denied the basic dignity of having the sanitary products and practices they need to care for themselves. When they band together and try to cope by engaging in survival strategies such as sharing supplies, they often fall prey to prison disciplinary systems used to target them for cruel punishment. To make matters worse, those punishments erect even greater barriers to menstrual health and hygiene.

Prison disciplinary systems lay out the wide-ranging rules that govern nearly every aspect of prison life, as well as the power of corrections officers to identify rulebreaking, enforce arbitrary rules, and determine the consequences. While corrections departments justify these far-reaching disciplinary systems as necessary to ensure safety, security, and order by deterring and punishing “misconduct,” in practice, they grant corrections officers wide and virtually unchallenged discretion to turn everyday behaviors into “rule violations” that jeopardize access to important programming and services.

Source: Prison Policy Initiative analysis of data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2016 Survey of Prisoners, The state prison experience: Too much drudgery, not enough opportunity.

In recent years, more attention has been paid to how people in prison and jail are denied access to menstrual products and are made to suffer for menstruating behind bars. Prisons punish people with periods in a number of ways, including by restricting access to necessary products either by legislation, policy, or by price at the commissary. A 2014 federal investigation of Alabama’s only women’s prison, for example, found that period products, laundry, and clean uniforms were “severely limited” and that staff used supplies to coerce, exploit, and punish incarcerated people. Other reports from carceral facilities across the country highlight how incarcerated people are subjected to assault, withholding of supplies, and humiliation while menstruating, in addition to being forced to live in unsanitary and unsafe conditions. While accounts from people in prison sometimes touch on disciplinary sanctions related to menstruation, prison systems themselves do not collect data on how often people are subject to punishments for period-related infractions. Our analysis is one of the first to systematically explore how prisons operationalize their disciplinary processes to punish people menstruating behind bars.

In this briefing, we analyze prison rules and sanctions from every state, the District of Columbia, and the federal Bureau of Prisons to explain how many of them allow corrections departments to unjustly punish people for the normal bodily process of menstruation. We are making these findings available in two appendix tables at the end of this briefing. While the rules in question are not explicitly about punishing menstruation, they are so broad and vague as to leave open the possibility that they can be used toward those ends. Importantly, the issue is not just that such rules are in place, but that correctional officers are allowed to practically unilaterally interpret and enforce them. In her extensive research into menstruation in prisons, lead author Miriam Vishniac (of the Prison Flow Project) collected invaluable reports from directly impacted people on their experiences of menstruating in prison. These are crucial data points because there is very little data available on this subject, and analyzing policy alone cannot explain how these discipline systems are weaponized against menstruating people. To better understand the reality facing people who menstruate, we include some firsthand reports from Vishniac’s research and other sources. Throughout this briefing, these accounts from incarcerated and formerly-incarcerated people are shared in blockquotes formatted like this:

“They were not getting what they needed and then often being ridiculed or punished for not having adequate equipment to take care of their periods…” – A.K. (Vishniac, 2025)

In Vishniac’s analysis of prison disciplinary policies, we found that at least six types of rules that can be used against people for menstruating:¹

• Damaging property: Rules designed to prevent damage to prison property result in punishing people for bleeding on prison-issued property, using more menstrual products than allotted, and supplementing their limited menstrual products with other materials like toilet paper, paper towels, or rags. ⤵
• Maintaining personal hygiene: Rules that mandate tidiness and personal cleanliness can be used against people who are menstruating when they have inadequate menstrual products and limited changes of clothing. ⤵
• Contraband: Rules restricting the type of property people can have in their cell, as well as the amount of allowed property that people can have in their cell and how that property is used, can turn basic or makeshift hygiene products into prohibited items. ⤵
• Movement: Rules that govern the physical movement of people throughout prisons inevitably impact people who are menstruating by limiting access to bathroom, shower, and laundry facilities. ⤵
• Work assignments: Rules requiring participation in work assignments — or impose sanctions for unauthorized absences — unfairly punish people who are menstruating and cannot maintain their usual job performance or tolerate being at work. ⤵
• “Feigning” illness: Rules supposedly designed to reduce the unnecessary and expensive use of healthcare resources undoubtedly results in the dismissal of real, severe symptoms experienced in menstruation. ⤵

In addition to rules that put people who menstruate in the crosshairs of the disciplinary system, many of the sanctions for breaking them further restrict access to menstrual products,² including:

• Confiscation: A common sanction for being found in possession of “contraband” is confiscation — and it is easy to see how prisons can classify menstrual products as contraband if people have more than the allotted number of products, have traded for menstrual products, or use products acquired in an unauthorized manner. ⤵
• Work assignments: Sanctions that result in the loss of work assignment or lowered pay can make it even more challenging for people to afford menstrual products, and requiring additional labor as a punishment can be impossible for people who do not have access to menstrual products or who are experiencing menstruation-related symptoms and medical conditions, including pain and heavy bleeding. ⤵
• Fines, fees, restitution and assessed costs: Sanctions requiring monetary payment disproportionately impact women, trans, and nonbinary people, who tend to enter prison with fewer financial resources than men, and who need to spend what little they have on menstrual products from the commissary. ⤵
• Loss of privileges: Revoking access to the commissary prohibits people from accessing menstrual products (when it is the sole provider of them) and disallows people from safely supplementing the menstrual products they have when needed. Other privileges are often revoked as well, including visitation, recreation, and programming, all of which are tied to lower rates of prison misconduct and recidivism. ⤵
• Restrictive housing: Sanctions that confine people to their cells or restrict access to personal property inevitably limit access to necessary menstrual products when they are otherwise unavailable in restrictive housing or disciplinary segregation. ⤵

Basic menstrual care runs afoul of several common prison rules

Prisons typically have many rules, many of which may seem mundane — or even reasonable — that can cause serious issues for people menstruating behind bars.³ Combined with officer discretion, the general lack of oversight in prisons means even the most basic rules can be weaponized. As it stands, research shows that women are more likely to be written up and disciplined for breaking prison rules, and receive disproportionate punishment for minor, subjective infractions like “disrespect.”⁴

While in prison, having a record of rule violations of any kind can exclude people from placement in less-restrictive housing units, program participation, and other services that could benefit them. In addition, pathways to release like parole and clemency proceedings take disciplinary records into consideration, so even the most minor infractions can influence how long someone spends in prison.⁵

Rules governing possession, damage, and misuse of property

Carceral settings often limit access to any and all items for people behind bars. Prison administrators argue that having “too much” property could pose safety risks in small cells (fires, clutter, sanitation), make people targets for theft, or create opportunities for incarcerated people to accrue money or leverage among others.⁶ While there may be some merit to these concerns, the tight restrictions of people’s property offers an additional tool of control and prevents people from having the things they need in the necessary quantities, inflicting real pain on people in response to imagined scenarios.

Damaging state property. Almost every single prison system has a rule about damaging property belonging to the state or the prison system.⁷ However, an inevitable consequence of restricted access to menstrual products like tampons and pads (as well as necessary hygiene products like toilet paper) is inevitably the “damage” (i.e., staining) of property, whether that be prison-issued clothing, bed linens, or upholstered chairs.

“I remember a time when I bled through the pad and I was working at my job. So now the chair has blood all over it. And I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, what am I gonna do?!’” – A.K. (Vishniac, 2025)

“If you bleed all over state property they can charge you for destruction of state property. You know?’” – Ann (Vishniac, 2025)

Crucially, many rules about property explicitly disregard intent, stating that even “negligently” damaging property is a rule violation.⁸ In some prison systems, there are also rules about damaging “personal property” belonging to the individual or another incarcerated person, meaning that even if menstrual blood “damages” or stains property that is not state-owned, people are still at risk of disciplinary action.⁹

Wasting state property. Poor quality menstrual products are typical in prisons and result in people needing to use more pads and tampons. People menstruating in prison must request additional products and take the risk that they will be punished for “wasting” them by running through their allotted tampons and pads too quickly.¹⁰ Even when prisons do provide free menstrual products, people report that the free pads need to be changed more frequently than every 30 minutes on days of heavy flow.¹¹ In a 2023 survey of women involved in the criminal legal system, almost half of respondents reported using menstrual products for longer than they wanted (presumably because of quality issues) while incarcerated, and nearly a quarter of respondents reported negative health outcomes associated with prolonged use and limited supplies.

Misusing or altering state property. Prisons are places of extreme neglect. Incarcerated people often cope by finding ways to meet their own needs however they can — including using makeshift materials as menstrual products. People report using mattress stuffing,¹² dirty rags, socks, pillowcases, toilet paper, and shirts as menstrual products. Using these materials as makeshift menstrual products is an example of “unauthorized” use or using an item for something other than its “original intent or purpose.”¹³ In the same 2023 survey of women, more than one-third of respondents reported using materials other than pads and tampons to stanch menstrual bleeding. Even toilet paper has its limits as a supplement to menstrual products: most facilities only give women as much as they give men, meaning they have about one-third to half as much as they need once menstruation is taken into account (due to changes in bowel movements that often accompany menstruation), even if they don’t need to use toilet paper in lieu of pads or tampons.

“If you are using toilet paper, and you don’t have a sanitary napkin, that is also considered an infraction.’” – Jane (Vishniac, 2025)

Of course, using toilet paper or any other piece of property as a makeshift menstrual pad or tampon is a “misuse” of property and subject to disciplinary write-up and sanction,¹⁴ in addition to the punishment of physical discomfort, humiliation, and the cost of purchasing more toilet paper from the commissary.

Rules about personal hygiene and sanitation

Over thirty prison systems in the country have rules about personal hygiene and sanitation. The most generous interpretation of these rules may be to incentivize keeping shared spaces clean and encouraging sanitary practices like showering and hand-washing. However, the broad subjectivity of these rules allows them to be weaponized against people menstruating in prison, who already lack many of the resources they need to maintain basic hygiene while menstruating.¹⁵

“You see women being forced to free bleed because they don’t have access to anything else, but then they get told that they’re not being hygienic and they get put on lock [disciplinary housing] because they’re free bleeding.” – L.B. (Vishniac, 2025)

The exact time when menstruation begins is not predictable, and not having access to products leads to a situation in which people who bleed on themselves are disciplined, even though it is — inside and outside of prison — unavoidable. People in prison do not have sufficient access to menstrual products at baseline, let alone sufficient access to proactively wear pads and tampons before their menses begin.¹⁶

In addition to rules mandating personal hygiene, most prison systems have a rule violation associated with exposure to “bodily fluids.” Such rules are occasionally accompanied by a definition that restricts the violation to instances of “spitting” or “throwing,” which would obviously exclude unintentional bleeding on furniture or clothing during menstruation. At the same time, such vague rules coupled with practically unchecked officer discretion could — especially in cases where it is not explicitly limited by intentionality — be used to punish people who menstruate. For example, in New York, corrections unions cited concerns around “splashings” if menstrual cups were provided, essentially arguing that access to menstrual products should be limited.

Rules about possessing “contraband”

While most people think of drugs and weapons as “contraband” in prisons, the reality is that the definition is far more expansive. Behind bars, “contraband” also includes permitted items that a person may use for an unintended purpose, give to another person, or have in excess of what’s allowed.¹⁷ In other words, practically anything can become “contraband” if an officer says so, and therefore opens a person to the possibility of punishment.

Excess property. People report serious punishments in prison for trying to be prepared with more than the allowed number of menstrual products, including losing the ability to call their children. In one case, the excess property in question was 30 tampons, which is fewer than are in most boxes of tampons available outside prison.¹⁸

Unauthorized acquisition or exchange of property. As we previously noted, prisons frequently prohibit people from sharing items under the justification that it may create power disparities. Unfortunately, this also means that incarcerated people are not allowed to help each other deal with the facility’s failure or refusal to provide enough menstrual products.¹⁹ Even those few people who can afford additional products from the commissary are not allowed to share those items.

“You could ask somebody [for menstrual products], but if you got caught giving that to one another, even though it was a state-issued product, uh, you’re, you’re gonna get disciplinary ‘cause you’re not allowed to give each other stuff.” – J.T. (Vishniac, 2025)

Incarcerated people are forced to watch others be humiliated and punished just for menstruating, negatively impacting their mental health and emotional well-being — especially the large proportion of incarcerated women, trans people, and nonbinary people who are survivors of abuse.

In addition, because prisons are largely staffed by people who do not menstruate, there is no institutional understanding that people need access to these products at all times and in all locations. People in programming, in treatment for mental and physical conditions, at work, and in disciplinary housing may have restricted access because menstrual products are not included in the list of acceptable items for those locations, making them “contraband” in that specific context.

Rules regulating movement

Nearly all state prison systems and the federal prison system have rules that prohibit people from being “out of place” or in an “unauthorized area.” The physical movement of people in prison is highly regulated and scrutinized, and in the context of menstruation, these rules can seriously restrict the health and hygiene of people menstruating. People who are menstruating require more trips to the bathroom, either to change products²⁰ or due to changes in bowel movements, yet many prisons strictly limit bathroom, laundry, and shower access.²¹

“I had a fibroid on my uterus, so I had a lot of bleeding. But, the pads are so cheap and they don’t absorb well. I would go through three of them a night and still bleed through my clothes onto my sheets. It was so embarrassing and shameful, I would get up early and wash myself, my clothes, and my sheets, even though this was against the rules. I would get in trouble, but I couldn’t just stay with my clothes and sheets like that. It made me feel less than a human being, let alone a woman. Even though we are in prison, we are still women.” – Evelyn (Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, 2018)

People who are menstruating — and particularly those who experience irregular or heavy flows — not only have to worry about being punished for bleeding on themselves and their bedding, but must also face potential rule violations if they try to clean themselves up in the bathroom or access the laundry facilities without prior authorization.

Rules about work assignments

The majority of prison systems have rules about failing to meet expectations in work assignments²² or about absences from work or programming assignments.²³ Without prior authorization, people in prison cannot miss work assignments without risking a write-up. People can also be disciplined for not meeting job performance and productivity expectations. Outside of prison, almost half of women have taken time off work in the last 12 months due to menstrual symptoms. But in prison, people with work assignments do not get any sick leave. In fact, they are often required to work while sick, unless a healthcare provider officially excuses them.²⁴

“We are not allowed to take days off from work to rest, and we must adhere to a strict daily schedule in which virtually all of our movement is controlled.” – Kelsey Dodson (2025)

“I used to get terrible menstruation cramps! Bad! There was a long time, especially when I first came into the system, that they did not sell ibuprofen. They did not sell it. You could ask the officers for one Tylenol tablet that came in this little mini little envelope, right? And you couldn’t have more than six in your possession. So I would dread when I started my period because the pain would go almost all the way down to my knees. And I would have to work out in the heat.” – J.T. (Vishniac, 2025)

It’s unclear how people can access menstrual products while at work or required programming because incarcerated people are not able to carry property with them from their housing unit. Incarcerated people may be forced into a disciplinary catch-22: attend mandatory programming and face possible sanction for bleeding on themselves, or refuse to attend and be sanctioned for being absent or “out of place.”

Rules against “feigning” illness

More than one-third of all prison systems have rules condemning “faking” or “feigning” illness or injury.²⁵ These rules reflect a disturbing assumption by prison systems, correctional healthcare providers, and correctional staff that people in prison routinely lie about their healthcare needs in an effort to better their circumstances by, for example, avoiding work assignments, transfers to a different facility or new cell, etc. This presumption of ‘malingering’ can have dire consequences for incarcerated people in general, but more specifically among menstruating people:

“The nurses are just like, ‘You’re trying to get something out of us. We don’t wanna do the paperwork.’ And they make it challenging for people to get what they need and they never look at the source of the problem.” – S.B. (Vishniac, 2025)

Even though it is widely understood that menstruating people experience serious and painful cramps, it’s often dismissed or overlooked inside and outside of the carceral context.²⁶

Sanctions for rulebreaking further restrict access to menstrual products

In prison disciplinary systems, rule violations are punished based on the severity classification of the offense. Lower-level infractions may result in warnings, reprimands, probation, “agreements” or informal resolutions, and other more lenient responses.²⁷ The rules discussed above are considered lower-level infractions in most prison systems, but even this involves equating different types of rulebreaking that are in no way comparable.²⁸

In addition, most prison systems will consider repeated rule violations as a higher level of violation (and therefore subject to more severe sanctions).²⁹ Given that menstruation occurs approximately every month, menstruation-related rule violations are likely to occur repeatedly, especially for people who experience particularly heavy flow, painful cramps, or irregular menstruation. While correctional leaders often frame repeatedly breaking certain rules as evidence of antisocial behavior, it can also be interpreted as a sign of rules that are impossible to follow in a system where constant punishment and humiliation is the point.

As we previously mentioned, women, trans, and nonbinary people are more likely than men to be written up and disciplined for breaking prison rules: eight in ten women who reported being written up for a violation in the past year also reported receiving some form of disciplinary action.³⁰ These harsh, punitive sanctions, which include solitary confinement and restrictive housing,³¹ loss of good time credits,³² fines and fees,³³ forced labor,³⁴ and lost access to programming³⁵ and visitation,³⁶ are destabilizing and traumatizing. But what’s important to understand here is that many sanctions actually further restrict access to menstrual products, leading to a dangerous cycle of violations and punishments that inhibit access to hygiene products.

Confiscation of property

At least 20 state prison systems and the federal Bureau of Prisons have sanctions on the books that include “confiscation,” “loss of authorized property,” “dispose of property,” or “loss of personal property.”³⁷ These sanctions are primarily associated with contraband-related rule violations, but when the “contraband” in question are menstrual products, incarcerated people are left without enough supplies as their period approaches.

“If you had more than [the allotted number of pads] you got a disciplinary case for it. So the women that, that bled heavily, you know […] they would hoard those things. And they would get them confiscated.’” – J.T. (Vishniac, 2025)

Carla, a formerly incarcerated woman, described cell searches and arguing with prison staff: “‘Wait a minute. I’m just getting ready to bleed. Why are you taking it?’ ‘Why do you have excess?’ ‘Well, I’m a heavy bleeder.’ You know? And, they just, they would take it.” (Vishniac, 2025)

In many places, personal property — including authorized property — can be confiscated in response to a rule violation (even rule violations not related to that personal property).³⁸ And while some states prohibit the confiscation of “personal hygiene items,”³⁹ menstrual products are frequently left out of the definition of those items.

Work-related sanctions

More than three-quarters of prison systems have sanctions that include “extra duty” or “extra work assignment,”⁴⁰ and at least twenty prison systems — including the federal Bureau of Prisons — have sanctions that result in “change or loss of work assignment” or “work without pay.”⁴¹ Losing a job or being punished with unpaid labor can also mean incarcerated menstruators are left unable to purchase the items they need from the commissary. Additional labor can be a problem for the same people who struggle to perform heavy labor without access to tampons or who struggle with pain and other menstruation-related conditions. On top of the physical discomfort and exhaustion, jobs used as punishment may require significant movement, meaning the need for additional menstrual products could be even greater due to the impact of exercise on menstrual flow.

Fines, fees, restitution, and assessed costs

Almost every prison system imposes financial sanctions like fines, fees, restitution, or assessed costs.⁴² In at least 16 prison systems, we found policies specifically referencing fines and/or fees as punishment when someone is found or pleads guilty to a disciplinary violation. In many cases, the severity classification determines the amount of the fine, but in other cases there is a “flat” charge. In either case, charging fines means that some of the most innocuous behaviors — like making “loud or disturbing noises” in Kansas prisons — have a price tag. Even fines that may seem small to people on the outside — like the $15 maximum fine for a low-level rule violation in Oregon — can be devastating in a situation where people have extremely limited access to money and, when they are paid for their labor, make mere pennies per hour. Sanctions can also include “restitution,”⁴³ “repayment for damages,”⁴⁴ and “forfeiture of cash monies.”⁴⁵ And because women, transgender, and nonbinary people tend to enter prison with fewer resources than their cisgendered men counterparts, financial sanctions are likely far more significant for them.⁴⁶ Ultimately, punishing people with fines, restitution, and assessed costs leaves them with less money for the basic essentials, including menstrual products at the commissary:

“To put in perspective now, to think that a box of pads or tampons could cost my income for how many days? Like, there’s no way. You know, it’s like buying tampon boxes for hundreds of dollars a box.” – A.K. (Vishniac, 2025)

Loss of privileges

Almost all prison systems limit privileges as a punishment for rulebreaking, and at least 32 prison systems have sanctions that explicitly restrict access to the commissary (including loss of commissary while in disciplinary restriction).⁴⁷ Some of these sanctions include caveats for “personal hygiene items,” but again, they often do not define what is considered a “personal hygiene item.”⁴⁸ We found only three state prison systems that specify that the loss of commissary privileges must not restrict access to menstrual products in their sanctions,⁴⁹ while an additional eleven state prisons systems prohibit restrictions on the more general category of “hygiene” or “essential” items, without defining those terms to include menstrual products. When all basic necessities are dispensed through the commissary, lost access can easily lead to a cycle of rule violations as people subsequently barter for menstrual products, damage state property, or are seen as “unhygienic.” The loss of other privileges (visitation, phone calls, exercise and recreation, programming)⁵⁰ can also have a serious impact on people’s lives and wellbeing in prison, as visitation can reduce prison misconduct and recidivism, exercise and recreation can improve physical health, and educational programming is associated with reduced recidivism.

Restrictive housing, solitary confinement, and movement restrictions

Every prison system — except Arizona — has some sort of restrictive housing available as a punishment for rulebreaking. This includes disciplinary detention, confinement to cell, or other types of restrictive housing.⁵¹ In some cases, even low-level rule violations can lead to such placements: in Iowa, for example, a “minor” rule violation like “unsatisfactory work performance” or “minor insolence (abusive language, cursing, obscene language)” can result in restriction to the cell.

“When I was in SHU [special housing unit], every day, you’re not allowed to keep anything in your cell. So every morning they have something called ‘go-around’ and if you need pads that day they will give you two in the morning go-round. That’s it. That’s all you have for the whole day. And if you miss the go-round, you can’t ask them for pads later in the day.” – S.B. (Vishniac, 2025)

When someone is confined to disciplinary housing or their quarters, they tend to also lose access to the commissary and the normal distribution of items like menstrual products. Only six state prison systems have language on the books explicitly requiring access to menstrual products while in restrictive housing.⁵²

Conclusion

There is no “safety and security” interest in denying people the basic sanitary products they need to manage normal bodily functions. In all of our research — combing through state statutes, department policies, and facility handbooks — we found no documentation explaining how exactly menstrual products could threaten safety. When pressed on this issue, corrections officials have been unable to provide any further clarity.

Punishing people for menstruating is cruel, dehumanizing, and unnecessary. This practice damages their self-esteem and mental well-being, triggering serious consequences both in prison and once released. As we have said, survival practices like sharing hygiene products is prohibited, in-part, due to a supposed fear of creating power imbalances inside. But this overlooks the simple fact that these practices create other devastating power imbalances: from 2011 to 2021, there were at least five substantiated incidents of correctional staff using their power over access to menstrual products to abuse people in their custody.⁵³ It is not enough just to enact laws that make pads and tampons free in prison or change the rules being used to discipline incarcerated menstruators:

“Because, if you have these laws, the people that work at the prisons always get the last say and can just overpower them.” – L.B. (Vishniac, 2025)

Effectively ending the mistreatment of those who menstruate in correctional facilities also requires oversight and accountability of prisons, and an end to mass criminalization of women and other menstruating people.