Between paying bills online and the convenience of “forever stamps,” it’s probably been a while since most readers have thought about the cost of mailing a letter. But for someone in prison, it could take six hours of work to pay for one postage stamp — and that cost is about to go up even higher.
In 2020, the US Postal Service obtained the legal authority to raise first-class postage rates faster than the rate of inflation (previously, rate increases had been capped at the consumer inflation rate). The following year Congress directed the Postal Regulatory Commission to study how this new rate structure impacts consumers. We submitted comments last month in conjunction with the Commission’s study, explaining how high mailing costs hurt incarcerated people and their families.
Not only are postal rates a substantial burden for someone earning 10 cents an hour, but incarcerated people depend on the mail much more than the average person does in today’s online world. As we explain in our comments:
Mail is the primary channel by which people in prison and jail can conduct personal business. Incarcerated people must still use paper for basic activities that have migrated online for many segments of society — activities like filing tax returns… submitting documents in judicial proceedings; monitoring credit reports for purposes of preventing identity theft; staying on top of personal finances; and laying the groundwork for post-release jobs or educational programs.
Mail is also crucial for incarcerated people to maintain family ties. Mail is the most common way that people in state prisons with minor children keep in touch with their kids, according to recently-released BJS data:
Disappointingly, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy recently announced his intent to seek yet another rate hike in the coming months. DeJoy cites inflation as the justification for another price increase. But while the average person who only mails a few letters or bill payments each month might be able to afford an extra 3-5 cents per stamp, this is a substantial burden on incarcerated mailers. While wages in general may inch up in an inflationary era, wages for incarcerated workers are stagnant:
In 2017, PPI surveyed prison wages in all 50 states and discovered that wage scales for people incarcerated in state prison systems average 14 cents to 60 cents per hour for standard prison-based jobs.
When researchers at the ACLU and the University of Chicago Law School conducted a similar survey in 2022, they reported virtually unchanged wages, with averages ranging from 13 cents to 52 cents per hour.
Raising postal service rates for incarcerated people will make it harder for families to stay in touch and for incarcerated people to prepare for their release, while sapping the little money they are able to save at their prison jobs.
Needless to say, the Commission should reconsider its order that allows the Postal Service to increase rates faster than inflation, but there’s another long-term step that would protect incarcerated people and their families from the disproportionate impacts of postal price hikes. Throughout American history Congress has created special reduced postage rates for special groups like periodical publishers, nonprofit organizations, agricultural groups, libraries, and blind people. Postal rates today may be less of a concern to the population-at-large than in years past, but it’s time for Congress to create a special rate classification for people who truly depend on postal communications — people in prison or jail and the family members who write to them.
The world of prison communications is already rife with burdensome restrictions and exploitative telecom charges that make it harder for families to stay connected. A special reduced rate for mail to or from incarcerated people is necessary now to protect the oldest, most reliable form of communication incarcerated people have.
We know that family contact can help incarcerated people cope with being locked up and reduce their chances of returning to prison. Yet self-reported data from people in state prisons show just how difficult it is to communicate with loved ones, provide financial support even when legally obligated, and make decisions with and about their families. Millions of families and minor children throughout the country are punished emotionally, economically, and otherwise by a loved one’s incarceration.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Survey of Prison Inmates data provide the deepest nationwide look yet at the challenges and impossibilities of parenting from prison. Conducted in 2016 but released as a limited public dataset in late 2020, the Survey asked people housed in state prisons about a wide range of topics, from their upbringing and childhood, to the offense that led to incarceration, to their life in prison.1 Here, we offer data and analysis revealing the ways in which prisons fail entire families — and society more broadly — by separating millions of children from their parents, and by enforcing harmful policies that perpetuate cycles of poverty and disadvantage.
Half of people in prison are parents to minors, leaving 1.25 million kids struggling to cope
Nearly half (47%) of the approximately 1.25 million people in state prison are parents of minor children, and about 1 in 5 (19%) of those children is age 4 or younger.2 Altogether, parents in state prison reported roughly 1.25 million minor children, meaning the number of people in state prison almost exactly mirrors the number of impacted minor children. Research indicates that children of incarcerated parents face formidable cognitive and health-related challenges throughout their development.
The challenges of parenting from prison are particularly likely to affect women. The Survey reveals that women in state prisons are more likely than men to be a parent of a minor child (58% of women, compared to 46% of men). Women were also more likely to have been living with their children prior to their imprisonment: About 52% of women with minor children report living with their child(ren) at the time of their arrest, compared to 40% of men. Finally, women were more likely to lead a single-parent household, as 39% of incarcerated mothers of minors lived with children but no spouse, compared to 21% of fathers.
Slideshow 1. Scroll to learn more about parents in prison and family cycles of incarceration.
And like the state prison population overall, incarcerated parents themselves grew up in struggling households:
17% spent time in foster care;
43% came from families that received public assistance (i.e., welfare) before they turned 18;
19% lived in public housing before they turned 18;
11% were homeless at some point before age 18; and
32% had (or currently have) an incarcerated parent of their own.3
Many children are uprooted by a parent’s arrest and incarceration
What happens to children when the parent they live with goes to state prison? Most go on to live with other family members: Incarcerated parents who lived with their minor children at the time of their arrest report that their child (or children) is now in the care of the other parent or step-parent (71%), a grandmother (13%) and/or grandfather (4%), or other relatives (5%). Still, other children have been moved into the homes of friends, an “agency or institution,” someone else, or they live on their own (about 4% in all).4
A small percentage of these parents (0.3%) reported that their child is currently incarcerated.5 While certainly not all children who experience parental incarceration are destined to become incarcerated themselves, the arrest and incarceration of a parent is a painful experience, and has been linked to a child’s own, eventual justice system involvement. The Survey result is too small to break down by gender or race, but researchsuggests that children of incarcerated mothers are more likely to become incarcerated compared to children of incarcerated fathers.
About 3,400 parents (1.8% of parents living with their minor children before arrest) report that theirminor children ended up in the foster care system (separate from the “agency or institution” outcome above). This outcome, in particular, can mean an end to parental rights altogether: 1 in 8 incarcerated parents with children in foster care have their parental rights terminated, according to a Marshall Project analysis of government data.6
Currently, federal policy regarding foster children fails to acknowledge the realities of mass incarceration and long prison sentences,7 and makes it likely for incarcerated people with children in foster care to lose them permanently. For children, placement in foster care can lead more easily to criminal legal involvement, particularly those in group homes or who experience multiple moves as a foster child. In one study, by the age of 17, more than one-half of all foster care youths (not just those with an incarcerated parent) had experienced an arrest, conviction, or overnight stay in a correctional facility.
The deep despair felt by both parent and child amounts to a colossal but largely invisible crisis: the mass punishment of over 1 million children. Short of the parent being released from prison and being offered needed supports, one of the best ways to mitigate these negative impacts is by limiting barriers to meaningful contact between children and incarcerated parents.
Most incarcerated parents and their children find ways to stay in touch, but prisons make family contact difficult
Many children want, and all children deserve, the opportunity to visit their incarcerated parents. Yet two-thirds of parents in prison with minor children have never received a visit from them. Not only are many prison visitation policies excessively strict, such as onerous pre-approval processes and rules about what visitors can wear,8 but many parents are simply incarcerated too far from home for visits to be logistically or economically feasible. A national survey in 2004 revealed that almost two-thirds of people in state prisons were located more than 100 miles from home, and more than 10% were over 500 miles away, and distance is a strong predictor of receiving visits.
Slideshow 2. Scroll to see more about family contact and barriers to visitation.
This most recent Survey did not ask about physical distance from home to prison, but it did ask parents about why they thought their children had not visited. Among parents in prison who had children under 18, but had not received a visit:
The most common reason for not receiving a visit, reported by 33% of parents who had not received a visit, was that their child lives too far away.
About one-fourth (23%) of parents responded that the child’s non-incarcerated parent or guardian did not want the child to visit. This reluctance could stem from a wish to protect the child — it can be painful to witness a parent in prison — but it could also have to do with distance, logistics, strained relationships between the adults, or cost.
A smaller share of parents (14%) said they did not want their child to visit, possibly for some of the same reasons. Even though research shows positive impacts of parent-child contact during incarceration, it’s understandable that an adult might want to keep a child away from the prison setting.
Just 3% of parents reported that it’s the child themselves who is reluctant to visit, signaling that most children do want to maintain a connection with their parent.
Despite these challenges, one-third (33%) of parents in prison with minor children have received at least one visit from their child. Prison policies or resources likely play a role in low levels of in-person visitation, such as a lack of visitation assistance (providing transportation to and from prisons), or eliminating visitation altogether — sometimes justifying these restrictions by exaggerating the volume of contraband items that come in through visitors.
Of course, parents in state prison and their children keep in touch in other ways: 60% of parents report phone calls with their kids, and 70% of parents send their children physical mail. (Some of this correspondence appears to be one-sided, however: only 57% report receivingmail from their children.) A smaller number of parents also report sending (10%) or receiving (13%) email from their children via computers or tablets available in prisons, indicating that more modern avenues for communication are available to some incarcerated people.
These remote (rather than in-person) connections happen more frequently than visits. Over two-thirds (72%) of phone calls, and more than one-third (35%) of incoming mail from children, are received daily or weekly, but only one-fifth (20%) of visits happen that often. Still, phone calls, mail, and email are subject to all manner of exploitation by the private companies that run prison communications. Further, prison administrations can change snail mail policies at the drop of a hat, increasingly toward “mail scanning” schemes that reduce sentimental letters and art into blurry scans — that is, if they’re delivered at all.
Child support debt follows parents into prison, despite the impossibility of paying it off
Parents also often enter prison with legal financial obligations to their children: More than one-fourth (27%) of parents in state prisons with minor children owe ongoing child support, and most of those (80%), unsurprisingly, owe back pay. Men are more than twice as likely to owe child support (29% of fathers, compared to 14% of mothers).
However, it’s extremely difficult for incarcerated people to fulfill this legal-financial obligation. People who enter prison are among the nation’s poorest, and even those who do work a prison job earn appallingly low wages. Knowing this, at least 13 states automatically modify child support payments when a noncustodial parent is incarcerated, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In other states, however, the parent must act within a narrow time window to submit payment modification paperwork, or else they may accumulate astronomical debt while incarcerated.9
If 500,000 people are released from state prisons every year — a conservative estimate10 — that means about 63,000 of them are parents saddled with this debt, reentering society with little to no savings and lower earning potential due to their criminal-legal involvement. If they manage to land a job upon release, their wages are usually garnished for child support; without employment and automatic payments, however, missing just one child support payment can thwart other reentry steps like obtaining a driver’s license, filing a tax return — and critically, even staying out of jail.
What can be done for families experiencing incarceration?
State policies fail to recognize what so many advocates, researchers, and directly impacted people already know: that state prison incarceration has devastating and far-reaching impacts on family members and entire communities. States and prisons should take steps to ease these burdens, such as making family contact easier through expanded family visitation, visitation assistance, low-cost or free phone calls, and policies that allow real, sentimental mail to be sent from child to parent. What’s more, prisons should ensure that parents are incarcerated as close as possible to their home communities, as in-person visitation may yield some of the most positive impacts on health and behavior. 11
Of course, intervention is possible much earlier than in prison: in some states, primary caregiver laws or family-based sentencing allow for diversion or other community-based alternatives to incarceration for parents or guardians. In Oregon, a family sentencing pilot program kept nearly 400 children out of the foster care system over five years, and led to lower rates of recidivism and revocation compared to similar non-program participants.
Meanwhile, incarcerated parents who maintain a role in their kids’ lives should not have their relationships permanently severed: At the federal level, Congress can repeal the Adoption and Safe Families Act, relieving states of inflexible timelines for terminating parental rights. Further, for noncustodial parents, all states should adopt automatic suspension or modification of child support payments. As we continue to tell the story of incarcerated people through findings from the Survey of Prison Inmates, these data serve as a reminder that the story also belongs to over 1 million children, countless loved ones, and whole communities left behind by harmful state policies.
69% of people in state prison report having one or more children of any age, and 69% of those have a child under 18, equating to 47% who were parents of minor children at the time of the 2016 Survey. ↩
These statistics refer to incarcerated parents of any-age children, not just those of minor children. ↩
The 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates asked “Who do the children [that they lived with at the time of arrest] live with now?” The children only needed to be under the age of 18 before someone’s arrest that led to incarceration. Therefore, these results likely describe the current living arrangements of both minor and grown children, who experienced parental incarceration while they were a minor child. Additionally, due to a technical survey error, some parents who were eligible for this question were skipped, so these results do not represent all surveyed parents who lived with their minor children at the time of arrest. ↩
According to this Bureau of Justice Statistics analysis of the Survey of Prison Inmates, about 5% of people in state prison reported that a child of theirs has ever been incarcerated, regardless of living situation at the time of the respondent’s arrest. ↩
The Marshall Project analyzed approximately 3 million child welfare case records, created between 2008 and 2016, from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. They found that incarcerated women (who, according to the Survey, were almost three times as likely as men to have their child move into the foster care system) saw their rights terminated more often. ↩
Here, we refer to the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1997, a bipartisan policy designed to minimize a child’s time in the foster care system. Under the Act, states must move (with a few exceptions) to terminate parental rights once a child has been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months. Given that the average state prison sentence of those currently incarcerated, according to the Survey of Prison Inmates, is just over 10 years — eight times as long as the ASFA deadline of 15 months — incarceration essentially guarantees that many of these impacted families will never be legally reunited. While some states have attempted to mitigate the ease with which incarcerated parents can have their parental rights terminated under ASFA, some advocates argue that these reforms are not enough. Currently, there is a movement being led by groups like the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls and the Movement for Family Power to repeal the ASFA. ↩
State policies vary, but in-person visitation in state prisons is highly regimented. Visitors must often be pre-approved, and visits are scheduled in advance, to be completed within a strict time window; attire, conduct, and activities are all tightly controlled and monitored by correctional staff. For a real-life example, see the 35-page visitation manual from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. ↩
Despite federal action on carceral child support, the burden is generally still on the incarcerated parent to navigate bureaucracies in order to have their payments modified. ↩
The most recent available data, from 2020, show that 502,000 people were released from state prisons in 2020 (see Table 9 in the Bureau of Justice Statistics report Prisoners in 2020); however, we know that state prisons regularly released many more people in the years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2016, for example, there were more than 570,000 releases from state prisons, not including deaths. ↩
In New York and New Jersey, state law requires the department of corrections to consider a parent or primary caregiver’s proximity to their children when they determine where to confine sentenced individuals. ↩
Report shows communities in all corners of the state are harmed by mass incarceration
August 9, 2022
Today Silver State Voices, the ACLU of Nevada, and the Prison Policy Initiative released a new report, Where people in prison come from: The geography of mass incarceration in Nevada, that provides an in-depth look at where people incarcerated in Nevada state prisons come from. The report also provides fourteen detailed data tables — including data for city council wards in Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, Sparks, Henderson, and Reno, as well Native lands — that serve as a foundation for advocates, organizers, policymakers, journalists, academics and others to analyze how incarceration relates to other factors of community well-being.
The data and report are made possible by the state’s landmark 2019 law that requires that people in prison be counted as residents of their hometown rather than in prison cells when state and local governments redistrict every ten years.
The report shows:
Mass incarceration is a problem harming all corners of the state, with 99.9% of the state’s residents living in a county that is missing a portion of its population to imprisonment. Only Esmeralda County, with a population of 729 people, did not have any residents in state prison at the time the data was collected.
While Clark County sends the most people to prison — 5,957 for an imprisonment rate of 263 per 100,000 residents — the smaller Nye and White Pine Counties have significantly higher imprisonment rates; both are at 365 per 100,000 residents.
There are dramatic differences in incarceration rates within communities, often along racial and economic lines. For example, in Las Vegas, city council wards 3 and 5 have the highest imprisonment rates in the city, (553 per 100,000 residents and 685 per 100,000 residents, respectively) and highest poverty rates.
Some Native communities are hit particularly hard by mass incarceration, with South Fork Reservation, Ely Reservation, Carson Colony, and Battle Mountain Reservation reporting imprisonment rates that are more than four times higher than the state average.
Data tables included in the report provide residence information for people in Nevada state prisons at the time of the 2020 Census, offering the clearest look ever at which communities are most impacted by mass incarceration. They break down the number of people locked up by county, city, town, zip code, legislative district, census tract, and other areas.
The data show the cities with the highest state prison incarceration rates are Ely (482 per 100,000 residents), Las Vegas (330 per 100,000 residents) and Reno (316 per 100,000 residents). For comparison, Lovelock has the lowest imprisonment rate at 55 residents per 100,000 residents. The state imprisonment rate is 252 residents per 100,000 residents.
“The nation’s 40-year failed experiment with mass incarceration harms each and every one of us. This analysis shows that while some communities are disproportionately impacted by this failed policy, nobody escapes the damage it causes,” said Emily Widra, Senior Research Analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative. “Our report is just the beginning. We’re making this data available so others can further examine how geographic incarceration trends correlate with other problems communities face.”
The report cites studies that show that incarceration rates correlate with a variety of negative outcomes, including higher rates of asthma, depression, lower standardized test scores, reduced life expectancy and more. The data included in this report gives researchers the tools they need to better understand how these correlations play out in Nevada.
“The work of our Nevadans Count coalition during the census and redistricting process was the precursor to this report,” said Emily Persaud-Zamora, Executive Director at Silver State Voices. “Our report provides a more precise picture of the nexus of systemic oppression and mass incarceration. Compounded with the other health disparities in the report, it shows our communities have never been voiceless; they have been muted. Through our rights restoration work, Silver State Voices is committed to amplifying and sustaining the message that BIPOC communities and those impacted by the criminal legal system can reclaim their political power.”
“Through the dissemination of this report, we hope to continue to bring light to the pervasiveness of inequity within the criminal legal system,” said ACLU of Nevada Policy Manager Lilith Baran. “Mass incarceration continues to undermine our democracy and the impact is far and wide.”
The report is part of a series of reports examining the geography of mass incarceration in America.
Nevada is one of more than a dozen states and 200 local governments that have addressed the practice of “prison gerrymandering,” which gives disproportional political clout to state and local districts that contain prisons at the expense of all of the other areas of the state. In total, roughly half the country now lives in a place that has taken action to address prison gerrymandering.
Report shows every community is harmed by mass incarceration
August 3, 2022
Today, More Equitable Democracy and the Prison Policy Initiative released a new report, Where people in prison come from: The geography of mass incarceration in Washington, that provides an in-depth look at where people incarcerated in Washington state prisons come from. The report also provides eleven detailed data tables — including neighborhood-specific data for Seattle, Vancouver, Tacoma and Spokane — that serve as a foundation for advocates, organizers, policymakers, data journalists, academics and others to analyze how incarceration relates to other factors of community well-being.
The data and report are made possible by the state’s landmark 2019 law that requires that people in prison be counted as residents of their hometown rather than in prison cells when state and local governments redistrict every ten years.
The report shows:
Every single county — and every state legislative district — is missing a portion of its population to incarceration in state prison.
Many of the state’s smaller and midsized counties, including Grays Harbor, Cowlitz, Lewis, Yakima, and Asotin have some of the highest incarceration rates in the state, making clear that the notion that mass incarceration is a problem just impacting large urban areas is a myth.
There are dramatic differences in incarceration rates within communities. For example, in Spokane, residents of the West Central neighborhood are more than forty times as likely to be imprisoned than residents of nearby Balboa-South Indian Trail.
Some Native communities are hit particularly hard by mass incarceration, with Skokomish, and Squaxin Island Reservations reporting imprisonment rates over 1,000 per 100,000 residents, more than five times the state average.
Data tables included in the report provide residence information for people in Washington state prisons at the time of the 2020 Census, offering the clearest look ever at which communities are most impacted by mass incarceration. They break down the number of people locked up by county, city, town, zip code, legislative district, census tract and other areas.
The data show that while King County has the most imprisoned residents (3,072), it has one of the lowest county imprisonment rates in the state, with 135 imprisoned people per 100,000 residents. On the other hand, Grays Harbor County has the highest county rate in the state, with 470 people imprisoned per 100,000 residents. For context, the statewide imprisonment rate for Washington is 197 per 100,000 residents.
“The nation’s 40-year failed experiment with mass incarceration harms each and every one of us. This analysis shows that while some communities are disproportionately impacted by this failed policy, nobody escapes the damage it causes,” said Emily Widra, Senior Research Analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative. “Our report is just the beginning. We’re making this data available so others can further examine how geographic incarceration trends correlate with other problems communities face.”
The report cites studies that show that incarceration rates correlate with a variety of negative outcomes, including higher rates of asthma, depression, lower standardized test scores, reduced life expectancy and more. The data included in this report gives researchers the tools they need to better understand how these correlations play out in Washington.
“Mass incarceration harms each of us, but it doesn’t harm each of us equally. We’ve known for too long that poorer communities and communities of color are over-policed, over-incarcerated, and under-resourced,” said Colin Cole of More Equitable Democracy. “This data is a tool to help policymakers, advocates, and service providers address the damage that has been done and build stronger, healthier, and more secure communities.”
The report is part of a series of reports examining the geography of mass incarceration in America.
Washington is one of more than a dozen states and 200 local governments that have addressed the practice of “prison gerrymandering,” which gives disproportional political clout to state and local districts that contain prisons at the expense of all of the other areas of the state. In total, roughly half the country now lives in a place that has taken action to address prison gerrymandering.
Report shows every community is harmed by mass incarceration
July 14, 2022
Today the New Virginia Majority and the Prison Policy Initiative released a new report, Where people in prison come from: The geography of mass incarceration in Virginia, that provides an in-depth look at where people incarcerated in Virginia state prisons and local jails come from. The report also provides ten detailed data tables — including neighborhood-specific data for Arlington, Norfolk and Richmond — that serve as a foundation for advocates, organizers, policymakers, data journalists, academics and others to analyze how incarceration relates to other factors of community well-being.
The data and report are made possible by the state’s landmark 2020 law that requires that people in prison and jail be counted as residents of their hometown rather than in prison cells when state and local governments redistrict every ten years.
The report shows:
Every single county — and every state legislative district — is missing a portion of its population to incarceration.
Many of the state’s least populous counties, including Buchanan, Brunswick, Lee, and Dickinson, have among the highest incarceration rates.
There are dramatic differences in incarceration rates within communities. For example, more than half of the people in prison or jail from Richmond come from just 22 of the city’s more than 140 neighborhoods. These neighborhoods have historically been victims of dramatic “redlining”.
Data tables included in the report provide residence information for people in Virginia state prisons and jails at the time of the 2020 Census, offering the clearest look ever at which communities are most impacted by mass incarceration. They break down the number of people locked up by county, city, town, zip code, legislative district, census tract and other areas.
The data show the counties with the highest state prison and local jail incarceration rates are Buchanan (1,246 per 100,000 residents), Brunswick (1,167 per 100,000 residents), Lee (1,155 per 100,000 residents), Dickenson (1,132 per 100,000 residents), and Tazewell (1,105 per 100,000 residents); more than 1% of the residents of each of these counties is behind bars. For comparison, Arlington County has the lowest prison incarceration rate, at 70 people in state prison per 100,000 residents.
“The nation’s 40-year failed experiment with mass incarceration harms each and every one of us. This analysis shows that while some communities are disproportionately impacted by this failed policy, nobody escapes the damage it causes,” said Emily Widra, Senior Research Analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative. “Our report is just the beginning. We’re making this data available so others can further examine how geographic incarceration trends correlate with other problems communities face.”
The report cites studies that show that incarceration rates correlate with a variety of negative outcomes, including higher rates of asthma, depression, lower standardized test scores, reduced life expectancy and more. The data included in this report gives researchers the tools they need to better understand how these correlations play out in Virginia.
“The damage caused by redlining in Richmond and throughout Virginia continues to reverberate to this very day,” said Kenneth Gilliam of the New Virginia Majority. “Considerable work remains to address the inequities that result in people of color disproportionately being locked behind bars. This report and data, though, offer a roadmap for where and how these investments should be made.”
The report is part of a series of reports examining the geography of mass incarceration in America.
Virginia is one of more than a dozen states and 200 local governments that have addressed the practice of “prison gerrymandering,” which gives disproportional political clout to state and local districts that contain prisons at the expense of all other districts. In total, roughly half the country now lives in a place that has taken action to address prison gerrymandering.
A new publication from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Violent Victimization by Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, 2017-2020, supports the vast evidence we already have that LGBT people — and particularly young adults, people of color, women, and bisexual people — are at heightened risk of violent victimization compared to their straight and cisgender1 counterparts.
The report is based on data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), an annual survey collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. The survey asks respondents about experiences of violent crimes, regardless of whether these crimes were reported to law enforcement. For the purposes of this data source, violent crime includes threatened, attempted, or completed occurrences of rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault.2 The NCVS collects data on people aged 12 and older, but the Violent Victimization by Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, 2017-2020 report from BJS only reports data for people aged 16 and older.
Violent victimization of transgender people
We already know that transgender people face a significant amount of discrimination and violence: according to the2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, nearly one in ten respondents were phsyically attacked because of their gender identity, and more than 54% experienced some form of intimate partner violence. This newest report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics supports what we already know about high rates of violence against trans people: the rate of violent victimization of transgender people is 2.5 times higher than the rate among cisgender people.It’s clear that trans people are disproportionately violently victimized: transgender people account for 0.11% of the population 16 and older, but are the victims of 0.27% of all violent victimizations reported from 2017 to 2020 in the NCVS.
Violent victimization of LGB people
Lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals experience violent victimization at rates far higher than their straight counterparts. Lesbian and gay people experienced 44 victimizations per 1,000 people, which was more than twice the victimization rate of straight people (19 per 1,000 people). Bisexual people experienced victimization at almost seven times the rate of straight people and almost three times the rate of lesbian and gay people.
Across all measured demographics – race, sex, and age – bisexual individuals have the highest rates of violent victimization:
Women of all sexual orientations experience higher rates of victimization
Women of all sexual orientations experience higher rates of violent victimization than their male counterparts. The violent victimization rate for lesbian women, for instance, is more than 1.3 times that of gay men (50 per 1,000 vs. 38 per 1,000). The victimization rate is highest among bisexual women, who are victimized at a rate 2.3 times that of bisexual men (151 per 1,000 vs. 65 per 1,000). Straight women experience violent victimization at a rate of 19.2 per 1,000, compared to 18.7 for straight men.
(Unfortunately, the data does not disaggregate trans people by gender, so it is not possible to make a similar comparison.)
More supports and protections are needed
This data reiterates what we already know: Society is failing to protect the safety of LGBT people, especially young adults, people of color, women, and bisexual people. Many trans people, for instance, face systemic disadvantages that work together to put them in danger, including anti-trans stigma (including hostile political policies), denial of opportunity (including exclusion from health care, social services, and education), and increased risk factors (such as engagement in survival sex work).
Survivors of violence advocate for interventions that:
Expand funding for affirming services for survivors of violence – including LGBTQ people and women – with a focus on accessible medical and mental health services.
Expand access to affordable housing, a living wage, and non-discrimination policies that transform survivors’ access to basic needs.
Encourage implementation of community-based solutions to violence designed by community-members who are most affected, such as those incorporating restorative and transformative justice practices.
Above all, survivors of violence emphasize rehabilitation over punishment, prevention over criminalization, and accountability through options beyond prisons and jails.
Footnotes
The National Crime Victimization Surveydefines cisgender as “an individual whose gender identity is the same as their sex assigned at birth.” ↩
The Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Crime Victimization Surveydefine aggravated assault as “An attack or attempted attack with a weapon, regardless of whether the victim is injured, or an attack without a weapon when serious injury results,” and simple assault as an “attack without a weapon resulting either in no injury, minor injury (e.g., bruises, black eyes, cuts, scratches, or swelling), or an undetermined injury requiring fewer than two days of hospitalization. Also includes attempted assault without a weapon.” ↩
Report shows mass incarceration impacts communities in all corners of the state but disproportionately impacts communities of color
July 7, 2022
Today the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition and the Prison Policy Initiative released a new report, Where people in prison come from: The geography of mass incarceration in Colorado, that provides an in-depth look at where people incarcerated in Colorado state prisons come from. The report also provides eleven detailed data tables — including local data for Denver, Aurora, and El Paso County — that serve as a foundation for advocates, organizers, policymakers, data journalists, academics and others to analyze the impact of mass incarceration on various communities and provide a roadmap where greater investment in community development is needed to improve community wellbeing.
The data and report were made possible by the state’s landmark 2020 law ending prison gerrymandering. It requires state and local governments to count incarcerated people as residents of their home communities rather than their prison locations when drawing legislative districts.
The report shows:
Every Colorado legislative district — and nearly every county — is impacted where a portion of its population is incarcerated in state prisons, however the degree of that impact varies wildly when you drill down into the neighborhood level.
Two communities with large Hispanic, Latino, or Native American populations — Alamosa and Bent — have some of the highest imprisonment rates in the state.
There are dramatic differences in incarceration rates within communities. For example, in Denver, residents of the Elyria-Swansea neighborhood are 20 times more likely to be imprisoned than residents of nearby Washington Park West.
Data tables included in the report provide residence information for people in Colorado state prisons at the time of the 2020 Census, offering the clearest look ever at which communities are most impacted by mass incarceration. They break down the number of people in state prison up by county, city, town, zip code, legislative district, census tract and other areas.
The counties with the most people in state prison at the time of the 2020 census are Denver (2,712), El Paso (2,378), and Adams (1,599).
Meanwhile, the data show the counties with the highest state prison incarceration rates are Alamosa (577 per 100,000 residents), Pueblo (472 per 100,000 residents) and Bent (465 per 100,000 residents). For comparison, San Juan and Mineral counties have the lowest prison incarceration rates, with no residents in prison.
“The nation’s 40-year failed experiment with mass incarceration harms each and every one of us. This analysis shows that while some communities are disproportionately impacted by this failed policy, nobody escapes the damage it causes,” said Emily Widra, Senior Research Analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative. “Our report is just the beginning. We’re making this data available so others can further examine how geographic incarceration trends correlate with other problems communities face.”
The report cites studies that show incarceration rates correlate with a variety of negative outcomes, including higher rates of asthma, depression, lower standardized test scores, reduced life expectancy and more. The data included in this report gives researchers the tools they need to better understand how these correlations play out in Colorado.
“This seminal report is both appalling and not surprising as over-policing and mass incarceration has targeted low-income communities and communities of color for generations,” said Christie Donner of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition. “We aren’t facing a crisis of crime, we are facing a crisis of neglect and lack of investment in communities of color and we hope this report will mobilize impacted residents and their elected officials to embrace community development as a public safety strategy.”
The report is part of a series of reports examining the geography of mass incarceration in America.
Colorado is one of more than a dozen states and 200 local governments that have addressed the practice of “prison gerrymandering,” which gives disproportional political clout to legislative districts in which prisons are located, at the expense of other districts. In total, roughly half the country now lives in a jurisdiction that has taken action to address prison gerrymandering.
Today, we launched the new Correctional Contracts Library, which contains documents that show how companies profit on the backs of incarcerated people and their families. Through our twenty years of work to expose and stop the abusive practices of private companies, we’ve amassed a collection of hundreds of documents, including contracts, bids, evaluations, and more. These documents provide a paper trail showing how for-profit companies work with jails and prisons to squeeze money out of people who can least afford it. Our collection is now publicly available through this new tool.
The Library includes documents related to phone service, tablets, electronic messaging, commissary, and more. We’ve organized them so you can search for records from a specific facility or filter documents by state, vendor, service, or type. And we’ve provided some notes and remarks about the documents to help users understand what they contain and where they came from.
Using this new resource:
Organizers can monitor when their local jail is scheduled to renegotiate its contracts for services and pressure it to secure the best deal for people that are behind bars;
Journalists can assess whether prisons and jails in their area are helping companies exploit incarcerated people and their families;
Researchers can track how the cottage industry of companies that profit off of incarceration is developing new ways to sap profits from people in prison and jail; and
Policymakers can examine contract terms and identify problematic practices that need to stop.
This new tool does not have every prison or jail contract document that exists. We’re sharing our records, but we know our collection isn’t exhaustive. If you don’t see the documents you’re looking for, we’ve put together a guide to help you submit your own public records request to get them.
This new database is the latest addition to our Advocacy Toolkit. Through the Toolkit, we’re giving advocates and organizations access to the data, lessons, and resources we’ve honed in our twenty years of working to end mass incarceration in America.
One of our primary goals here at the Prison Policy Initiative is to help others to make change in their communities. The Correctional Contracts Library is the latest way that we’re opening the doors on our research and advocacy to empower the movement to end mass incarceration.
With several states preparing to criminalize abortion now that Roe v. Wade is over, and some states talking about criminalizing traveling out of state to get an abortion, it’s worth remembering that for many people on probation and parole, traveling out of state for abortion care is already next to impossible. On any given day in the U.S., 666,413 women1 are on probation (a community-based alternative to incarceration) or parole (the part of a prison sentence that someone serves in the community). In many jurisdictions — for instance, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Idaho, Texas, and the federal system, as well as some juvenile probation systems — it’s common for people on probation and parole to face restrictions on where they can travel, whether they can move to another county or state, and with whom they can “associate” (including, potentially, people who assist in coordinating abortion access, where such help is criminalized). All of these restrictions will make it harder for people under supervision to get abortion care.
In the last few days, many news outlets have reported on how people in prison can be blocked from seeking an abortion, especially in states where abortion is already illegal. (Ironically, as we’ve discussed before, prisons deny people quality pregnancy care even as they deny abortion access.) The end of Roe v. Wade will create new barriers to abortion care for incarcerated people, since it will likely trigger the criminalization of abortion in thirteen states.
But an even greater number of people on probation and parole stand to be affected: About 231,000 women are in prison or jail on any given day, but several times as many women are on probation and parole, the result of gendered differences in offense types: women are more likely than men to be serving sentences for lower-level property and drug crimes
In the thirteen states with abortion ban “trigger laws” on the way, more than 200,000 women are under probation and parole supervision, which will make it difficult or impossible for many of them to travel out of state for an abortion, or potentially even talk to people coordinating abortion care, given the typical restrictions of probation and parole.
Number of women on probation and parole in states expected to outlaw abortion2
Probation
Parole
Total
Arkansas
9,835
3,742
13,577
Idaho
4,346
781
5,127
Kentucky
14,876
2,844
17,720
Louisiana
10,686
3,709
14,395
Mississippi
6,470
1,190
7,660
Missouri
12,284
2,883
15,167
North Dakota
1,558
202
1,760
Oklahoma
5,281
294
5,575
South Dakota
No data
552
552
Tennessee
16,701
1,482
18,183
Texas
98,808
11,896
110,704
Utah
3,253
463
3,716
Wyoming
1,385
125
1,510
Total
185,483
30,163
215,646
Nationwide, the average probation term is just under two years — far too long for the average individual to “wait it out” until they are no longer under supervision and can seek abortion care across state lines. Meanwhile, parole sentences can be several months to years — typically, up to the remaining time on an individual’s sentence after they are released from prison. Some people are even subject to lifetime supervision, depending on the state and the underlying offense.
A number of probation and parole “conditions” curtail the freedoms of people on supervision: Even though breaking these rules would not be a “crime” in any other context, parole or probation officers are empowered to — and often do — send people back to jail or prison for these noncriminal “technical” violations. (In 2020, at least 67,894 people on probation and 45,878 people on parole went to prison or jail because of a noncriminal violation.) Conditions of supervision can be extremely burdensome, and they fall on people who are already disadvantaged, struggling with unemployment, poverty, and housing insecurity. As we explored in a previous report, conditions of supervision can force people to accept a bad deal in the job market. In the same way, travel restrictions — which are “standard” conditions in many places — will soon force many of these individuals to accept the impossibility of getting an abortion.
People on probation and parole typically have some options for interstate travel, but they have to get formal approval from their supervision officer in order to make specific trips. With the sole authority to approve or deny a trip across state lines for abortion care, a probation or parole officer might choose to prioritize their own personal beliefs about abortion over the desires of the individual under their control. They might also choose to delay the decision until it’s no longer possible — or safe — for the individual they’re supervising to terminate a pregnancy.
These restrictions on travel aren’t the only barriers that might stop someone from getting, or seeking, an abortion. People on probation and parole have low average incomes, and they’re often under-insured: Going to prison usually results in losing one’s health insurance coverage, meaning that formerly incarcerated people face an uphill battle to regain health insurance after their release. They may also struggle to get the time off work necessary to have an abortion — especially since maintaining steady employment is often itself a condition of supervision.
For people on supervision considering moving out-of-state to avoid their own state’s abortion laws, transfer is possible, but not guaranteed, and it’s often very slow: getting the new state to approve the transfer can take six weeks, and that’s in addition to however long the “sending” state takes to review the application. Even then, applicants will need to show their family and/or employment connections to the new state; even if they have the funds, they can’t just move on a whim.
As many others have already noted over the last few days, the growing criminalization of abortion won’t impact everyone equally. The abortions that these new post-Roe laws prevent will disproportionately be among people who are poor and lack access to transportation across state lines. People on probation and parole are a key segment of this demographic. Far too many individuals, having been swept into the criminal legal system by laws that criminalize poverty, will now find themselves without recourse for accessing what should be basic healthcare.
Footnotes
Estimates based on 2020 data. The Bureau of Justice Statistics’s report Probation and Parole in the United States, 2020 mentions that there are 3,053,700 people on probation and 862,100 people on parole as of December 31, 2020, and notes that about 19% of people on probation and 10% of people on parole are women, so we estimate that there are 580,203 women on probation and 86,210 women on parole. ↩
These data are from 2016. While more recent (2020) state-level probation and parole data have been published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2016 is the most recent year for which BJS has published this data by state and sex. For those looking for more recent, detailed data about probation and parole populations in their states, this data may be available from individual state community supervision agencies. ↩
Now that we’ve started publishing a series of reports about where incarcerated people call home in each of the states that have ended prison gerrymandering, that raises the common question: Can you also do this for other populations under criminal justice system control, such as people on probation or parole? This comes up in a number of contexts, but to pick one example, someone might be running a campaign to change a state law that denies people on parole the right to vote, and they might want to make the numerical impact a little more clear for specific legislators who might support or oppose the legislation.
The short answer is: Because this data is about people in prison — not people on probation or parole — it can’t precisely answer this question, but it can illuminate the patterns and scale of correctional control in an area.
A simple strategy to apply our data to other populations — and one that might be enough for your purposes or a proof of concept for more in-depth research1 later — would be to make the relatively safe assumption that parolees (for example) are spatially distributed across the state in a way that is roughly similar to the distribution of incarcerated people. (If you have reasons to believe that the distribution is different, then this of course won’t work.)
In order to estimate the number of parolees in a particular geography, all you would need to know is the state-level ratio of parolees (or another relevant population) to incarcerated people and then apply that ratio to each geography in our report. For example, in New York State there were 44,917 people2 on parole in 2020 and our report says that 39,027 people were reallocated3 to their home addresses from state prisons that year, for a ratio of 115%. You simply need to multiply the number of incarcerated people in each legislative district, neighborhood, etc. by that ratio to get a fair estimate of the number of parolees in that area. A similar approach could be used for people on probation or any other population that you have good reason to believe is distributed similarly to people in prison.
If you find this general methodology helpful, here are two other suggestions and warnings as you proceed:
Multiplying whole numbers of people by a percentage will almost surely result in fractional people. You’ll need to decide whether to round the numbers to keep this simpler or to keep the fraction as a way to emphasize that it’s an estimate. Both choices are fine and just depend on your intended use.
As your geographies get smaller, the accuracy of a state-level ratio between parolees and the incarcerated people will become less accurate. How small is too small is a value judgement you’ll need to make based on your knowledge of your state and your own goals, but if you wanted a starting point, in our series of reports we generally didn’t rely on or highlight incarceration rate data where the total number of incarcerated people in that geography was less than 10.
Footnotes
The far more precise, although far more complicated way to answer this question would be to develop a relationship with a parole or probation agency, determine if they collect home address data, convince them to share that list of home addresses with other researchers under appropriate privacy protections, and then have the researchers map all of those addresses and then aggregate them up to the various geographies of interest to you. ↩
This number is not, as our report methodology explains, the total population of the New York State prison system. For this conversion to work you want to compare the total parole population to the number of people reallocated. ↩
