With over 2,700 deaths behind bars and slow vaccine acceptance, prisons and jails must continue to decarcerate

Just because vaccines are increasingly available does not mean that the COVID-19 crisis in prisons and jails is over - far from it. Yet new data show more prisons and jails are returning to “business as usual.”

by Emily Widra, June 23, 2021

This article was updated on October 21st, 2021 with more recent jail and prison population data. That version should be used instead of this one.

At the start of the pandemic, public health and medical officials were already warning that incarcerated people would be uniquely vulnerable to the spread of the disease and its most serious medical consequences, due to their close quarters and high rates of preexisting health conditions. But after a year and a half of outbreak after outbreak in prisons and jails, correctional authorities have largely failed to reduce their populations enough to protect the health and lives of those who are incarcerated. The consequences of this failure are serious: According to the UCLA Law COVID-19 Behind Bars Project, more than 412,000 people incarcerated in prisons have had confirmed cases of COVID-19 and over 2,700 people have died from COVID-19 behind bars. And that’s to say nothing of the outbreaks in surrounding communities that have been linked to the crowded, unsanitary conditions of prisons and jails.

Despite the growing availability of vaccines, 17 state prison systems and the Bureau of Prisons had vaccinated less than half of their incarcerated populations by mid-May 2021, and 20 states and the Bureau of Prisons are reporting that less than half of their prison staff had received their first dose of a vaccine by the end of April. With slow uptake of vaccines, the advice from early in the pandemic continues to be the most important: prisons and jails need to keep working to reduce the number of people locked up, by both reducing admissions and ramping up early releases.

Prisons

Even in states where prison populations have dropped, there are still too many people behind bars to accommodate social distancing, effective isolation and quarantine, and increased health care requirements. For example, although California has reduced the state prison population by about 19% in the past 18 months, it has not been enough to prevent large COVID-19 outbreaks in the state’s prisons. In fact, as of June 16th, 2021, California’s prisons were still holding more people than they were designed for, at 107% of their design capacity (and up from 103% in January 2021).

Figure 1. Prison population data for 30 states where sufficient population data was readily available from January 2020 to May or June 2021, either directly from the state Departments of Correction, the Vera Institute of Justice, or the federal Bureau of Prisons. The lighter lines in our graph indicate prison systems where the population is actually increasing since early 2021. See our COVID-19 response tracker for more information on many of the most important policy changes that led to these slow reductions in some states. For the population data for these 30 states and the Bureau of Prisons, see Appendix A.
Sharp-eyed readers may wonder if Connecticut and Vermont are showing larger declines than most other states because those two states have “unified” prison and jail systems, which hold both pretrial defendants and people serving sentences, and pretrial populations typically respond to policy changes more quickly than prisons. However, data from both states show that the bulk of their population reduction is coming from within the “sentenced” portion of their populations. (For the Connecticut data, see the Correctional Facility Population Count Report, and for Vermont, see the daily population reports.)

Many states’ prison populations are the lowest they’ve been in decades, but this is not because more people are being released from prisons. The limited data available from six states shows that the number of prison releases did not change significantly between 2019 and 2020, suggesting that most of the population drops that we’ve seen over the past year are due to reduced prison admissions. In addition, we can see that the number of monthly prison releases in five of these states has been decreasing over the past three years. Only one state for which we found data–Alabama–has seen an increasing trend in the number of monthly releases since 2018. Reducing the number of people admitted to correctional facilities is critical to reducing the number of people behind bars, but to quickly decarcerate, states should be releasing far more people, too.

Figure 2. These six states publish monthly release and admission data for 2018, 2019, 2020, and the beginning of 2021. Although we cannot be certain that this analysis is representative of the other 44 state prison systems and the federal Bureau of Prisons, these data do show us a pattern of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic: reducing prison admissions, while maintaining the status quo of prison releases.

Figure 3. These ten states published monthly release data for 2019, 2020, and the beginning of 2021. While not nationally representative, these ten states show that fewer people have been released from these state prisons in response to COVID-19 in 2020 than in 2019. We’re also seeing that at the start of 2021, prison releases are even lower.

Despite evidence that large-scale releases do not inherently endanger public safety, states have elected to release people from prison on a mostly case-by-case basis, which an October 2020 report from the National Academies described as “procedurally slow and not well suited to crisis situations.”

Thankfully, some states have recognized the inefficiency of case-by-case releases and the necessity of larger-scale releases. For example, in New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy signed bill S2519 in October 2020, which allowed for the early release of people with less than a year left on their sentences.¹ A few weeks after the bill was signed, more than 2,000 people were released from New Jersey state prisons on November 4th.² In February 2021, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper announced plans to release 3,500 people in state custody (with 1,500 of those releases to take place within 90 days). The releases were the result of a NAACP lawsuit challenging prison conditions in North Carolina during COVID-19. The state said it would release people using discretionary sentence credits (similar to “good time credits”), home confinement, and post-release supervision. But these are the only two instances we are aware of where large-scale release efforts are actually taking place in state prison systems.

Jail populations, like prison populations, are lower now than they were pre-pandemic. Initially, many local officials — including sheriffs, prosecutors, and judges — responded quickly to COVID-19 and reduced their jail populations. In a national sample of 388 county jails of varying sizes, most (88%) decreased their populations from March to July of 2020, resulting in an average population reduction of 23% across all 388 jails.³ These population reductions came as the result of various policy changes, including police issuing citations in lieu of arrests, prosecutors declining to charge people for “low-level offenses,” courts reducing cash bail amounts, and jail administrators releasing people detained pretrial or those serving short sentences for “nonviolent” offenses.

But the data tell a different story about the latter part of the pandemic. Between July 2020 and January 2021, the populations of 66% of the jails in our sample increased, reversing course from the earlier months of the pandemic. Since this past January, populations increased again in 61% of the jails in our sample, with an average increase of 10%. Overall, the average population change across these 388 jails since March 2020 has diminished to only a 7% decrease, suggesting that the early reforms instituted to mitigate COVID-19 have largely been abandoned. For example, by mid-April 2020, the Philadelphia city jail population reportedly dropped by more than 17% after city police suspended low-level arrests and judges released “certain nonviolent detainees” jailed for “low-level charges.” But just two weeks later — as the pandemic raged on — the Philadelphia police force announced that they would resume arrests for property crimes, effectively reversing the earlier reduction efforts. Similarly, on July 10th, 2020, the sheriff of Jefferson County (Birmingham), Alabama, announced that the jail would limit admissions to only “violent felons that cannot make bond.”⁴ That effort was quickly abandoned when the jail resumed normal admission operations just one week later. The increasing jail populations across the country suggest that after the first wave of responses to COVID-19, many local officials have allowed jail admissions to return to business as usual.

Figure 4. Despite the rising national case rate of COVID-19, the number of people held in our sample of 388 county jails across the country has not continued to decrease over the past six months, following initial reductions. This graph contains aggregated data collected and provided by NYU’s Public Safety Lab and updates a graph in our February 3rd briefing. It includes all jails where the Lab was able to report data on March 10th and for at least 75% of the days in our research period, which ended June 17th, 2021. (Data are not available for all facilities for all days.) This graph presents the data as 7-day rolling averages, which smooths out most of the variations caused by individual facilities not reporting population data on particular days. The temporary population drops during the last weeks of May, August, and November 2020 and February 2021 are the result of more facilities than usual not being included in the dataset for various reasons, rather than any known policy changes. To see county level data for all 388 jails included in this analysis, see Appendix B.

Even before COVID-19, prisons and jails were a threat to public health and considered notoriously dangerous places during any sort of viral outbreak. And yet, correctional facilities continue to be a major source of a large number of infections in the U.S. The COVID-19 death rate in prisons is three times higher than among the general U.S. population, even when adjusted for age and sex (as the prison population is disproportionately young and male). Since the early days of the pandemic, public health professionals, corrections officials, and criminal justice reform advocates have agreed that decarceration is necessary to protect incarcerated people and the community at large from COVID-19. Decarceration efforts must include releasing more people from prisons and jails. Despite this knowledge, state, federal, and local authorities have failed to release people from prisons and jails on a scale sufficient to protect incarcerated people’s lives – and by extension, the lives of everyone in the communities where incarcerated people eventually return, and where correctional staff live and work.

Appendix A: State and federal prison populations during COVID‑19

Prison populations for the federal Bureau of Prisons and 30 states where monthly data was readily available for the period from January 2020 to June 2021. When available, we used point-in-time population counts from the last day of the month. If that data point was not available, we then used either the monthly average daily population (ADP) or the point-in-time population count for latest date available in each month.