May 29-30, 2026: Members of the Prison Policy Initiative Communications team will be attending and presenting at the Bridging the Gap: Amplifying Incarcerated Voices conference in Chicago, on May 29th and 30th. Please reach out if you’d like to set up a meeting during the conference.
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The health burdens of jail expansion are heaviest in places that already lock a lot of people up. Those places also would see the largest benefits from decarceration, including fewer deaths each year.
A new cohort study by a group of scholars at the U.S. Census Bureau, the Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute, and the medical school at Mount Sinai published in the medical research journal,JAMA Network Open adds to the evidence and has important local policy implications. This study, led by Dr. Utsha Khatri, found that people incarcerated on a given day in 2008 had a 39% higher risk of death compared to similar people who were not incarcerated, and their risk of overdose death was 208% higher. Additionally, the paper suggests that expanding the use or size of local jails is associated with more deaths county-wide. These nationally-representative findings build upon previous research linking incarceration and mortality.
What makes this paper particularly useful for policymakers and advocates is its effort to measure the impacts of both individual experiences of incarceration and county jail incarceration rates. County jail rates measure how much a given county relies on jailing as a response to issues of health and safety.1 How counties use their jails varies widely across the United States; the jail incarceration rate in Nashville is over five times the rate in Minneapolis, to cite just one example.2 This new study drew county-level jail rates from the Vera Institute’s Incarceration Trends Project dataset and leveraged local variation to better understand how jails impact death rates, breaking out overdose deaths for special attention. One caveat worth noting on the individual-level impacts: because millions of people flow through local jails each year, the findings in the study may understate the harms of incarceration.3
Methodology
The paper pulls from the Mortality Disparities in American Communities study. This dataset linkage effort connects restricted records from the Census with data from the National Death Registry. Khatri et al.’s sample is 3.2 million people who responded to the American Community Survey in 2008, including 45,000 people who were incarcerated at the time they were surveyed. Everyone was tracked through the end of 2019 to see if they survived.
The survival analysis research design compares people who were incarcerated with similar people who were not incarcerated, nesting everyone within similar counties. At the individual level, the authors adjusted for age, sex, race and ethnicity, employment, marital status, household income, and educational attainment. The county-level measures included jail incarceration rates, the percentage of the county who reported being Black or African American, average household size, population density, and poverty rate. Because this is not an experimental or quasi-experimental research design, the observed associations are not causal claims. In other words, the authors don’t attempt to show higher jail rates or the experience of incarceration as the cause of the increase in deaths they observed; they simply show the strength of the relationship between those variables.
Limitations
The United States does not track everyone who has been incarcerated in a centralized database that social or medical researchers can access. Lacking that, the single-day measurement of incarceration based on a single day in 2008 creates some issues: this leads to error that would likely cause the authors to under-estimate the harmful impact of incarceration on health. Some of the people that are in the “non-incarcerated” control group at the time of the survey would have been formerly incarcerated, and others would become incarcerated later, between the time of the survey and the end of the study period in 2019. Thus, these measures would probably underestimate the statistical association between incarceration and increased mortality. Because jail stays are typically quite short (often days or weeks, with an average stay of 32 days), we know a far larger number of people are impacted by incarceration each year than are counted on a single day. Nonetheless, this study provides evidence that is consistent with other research that more jailing causes health harms even to people who were not locked up.
Health harms of incarceration affect everyone, making jail expansion versus decarceration a matter of life and death
This study found that people incarcerated on a single day in 2008 had a 39% higher risk of death — and a 208% higher risk of death by overdose — compared to similar people who were not incarcerated. These results are from models that adjust for individual- and county-level factors, and it’s worth noting that having been incarcerated had a much stronger impact on risk of death than other measures linked to death rates like income, education, or indigeneity (that is, whether one identifies as American Indian or Alaska Native). Similarly, the estimated impact of incarceration on overdose mortality was higher than many other individual-level risk factors.
The elevated risk of death from overdose after incarceration is well documented: criminalization of addiction causes a lot of harm. But other research has shown that incarceration is associated with a wide range of health issues, which may help explain the increased risk of death from any cause. People are entering and exiting the toxic prison and jail environment all the time, either upon their arrest and release or as staff clock in and clock out. Other studies have found links between incarceration and health outcomes ranging from:
This study by Khatri et al. also found county-level jail incarceration was associated with an increase in deaths generally. The researchers estimate that a local jail incarceration rate 10% higher than the national county average leads to a 0.45% increased risk of death across the board. While this is much smaller than the 39% higher risk for people that were incarcerated, it applies to all people. The authors do the math and it works out to an additional 4.6 people dying for every 100,000 people in the population a year. This relationship is linear: for each 10% increment over the average, a county experiences another 4.6 additional deaths per 100,000 people, so a county with a jail rate 20% higher than average could expect 9.2 additional deaths per 100,000 and so on. Because large increases in jailing are common after new jail construction, and many counties have sustained lower jail rates after COVID-related changes in 2020, it’s worth applying this finding to larger numbers and the associated annual numbers of deaths.
Comparing two suburbs can illuminate the relationship between jail rates and county deaths: Contra Costa County, in the San Francisco Bay Area, reduced its jail population by 25% between 2019 and 2024. In contrast, Baldwin County, Ala. (between Mobile and Pensacola) is opening a new jail this summer that will expand capacity by 50%. The study from Khatri et al. suggests Contra Costa’s 25% jail population reduction (on top of an already relatively low incarceration rate) could translate to an average of 52 fewer county residents dying each year as a result of the harms from the jail. For perspective, Contra Costa averaged 47 homicides a year over the last decade, so this would be a meaningful change. Conversely, if the number of people in the Baldwin County jail increases by 50% to fill up the new facility, this study suggests an additional 57 deaths in the county each year. Given there were only 20 murders in the county in 2023, this would be quite a concerning increase.
For people who live in counties considering steps to reduce criminalization, pretrial detention, and overall jail capacity, this research provides clear evidence of the harms of incarceration. Jail construction is expensive and tends to crowd out public investment in other needs like community-based healthcare. Criminalization of addiction doesn’t address problematic substance use, and better community-based treatment options are needed. Moreover, some studies suggest jail construction leads to even more criminalization rather than deterring crime. Decarceration is one of the best tools to combat early deaths caused by this dynamic between criminalization, incarceration, and austerity — what geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore terms “organized state abandonment.” By comparing the number of deaths due to the harms of incarceration to the numbers of murders reported, we can get a sense of the scale of this abandonment. Communities across the United States don’t have to tolerate these burdens of incarceration. Instead, as this new paper suggests, working to reduce jailing could help improve community health.
Footnotes
In addition, some counties also use their local jails like private prisons, providing space to incarcerate people on contracts with the state prisons, federal agencies like ICE, or other counties in exchange for payments to cover their operating costs. ↩
Nashville, Tennessee’s surrounding county, Davidson, had 299 people in jail per 100,000 in spring 2024. Minneapolis, Minnesota’s county, Hennepin, had 58 people in jail per 100,000 residents in spring 2024. The 2024 data is sourced from Vera’s Incarceration Trends Project, an older version of which was used by Khatri et al. in their study. ↩
For more on this, see the discussion of limitations in the methodology below. ↩
The Trump Administration has made a lot of claims about how it will change the criminal legal system. We explain where the president and federal government have full control over the system, where they have some influence, and where their power ends.
There is little question that the President of the United States is the most powerful person on the planet. They can launch military strikes, shake the foundation of the economy, and dramatically alter our international alliances, all with a stroke of their pen. And if you have heard President Trump speak about the criminal legal system lately, you’d likely think the office also has the power to control who is arrested and incarcerated, and what the conditions are like when they get there. The truth, though, is much more complicated.
It is important to remember that the United States doesn’t really have a single, unified criminal legal system. It has thousands of smaller systems, and state and local governments have direct authority over the vast majority of them. However, while the president and the federal government don’t have direct control over most of these systems, they have many tools at their disposal to indirectly impact how they are operated.
In this briefing, we explain the federal government’s traditional role in the United States’ criminal legal system, highlighting where it has direct control, ways it can exert indirect influence, and the relative size and scope of its power. It is important to note that, in this piece, we rely on how our government normally works, when limits on federal power are honored and where the president obeys court orders. We don’t explore every nuance of federal law or possible tools that the federal government could hypothetically deploy.1 Instead, we aim to help you understand the avenues of influence it has traditionally exercised.
Actions and statements from the Trump administration raise serious doubts about whether these limits will be respected. Understanding the contours of power and authority outlined in this briefing can provide clues about what to expect in the future and serve as a helpful barometer of how far actions by the administration have deviated from the standards of recent decades.
The federal criminal legal system: By the numbers
While the president and members of Congress may talk a lot about crime, prisons, and incarceration, the truth is they directly control only a small sliver of the overall carceral system.
As we explain in the latest edition of our flagship report, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie, there are roughly 2 million people incarcerated in the U.S. on any given day.2 Of those, only a relatively small portion are under the direct control of the federal government:
Approximately 204,200 are in federal prisons or jails;
Roughly 48,000 are in immigration detention facilities.34
In total, about 13% of incarcerated people — approximately 252,200 people — are under the direct control of the federal government. For context, the federal incarcerated population is only a little larger than the number of people in prisons in jails in the single states of Texas, which has 11% of the national incarcerated population, and California, which has 10%. Those numbers show that, rather than being a massive monolith, the federal carceral system is roughly the same size as the criminal legal systems in some of the larger states in the country.
Make no mistake, 252,200 people under direct federal control is a lot, but it represents only a relatively small portion of the total number of people behind bars on any given day in this country.
So, who has direct authority over the other 87% of people incarcerated in this country? State and local governments.
Independence of state and local authorities
State prisons and local jails hold the vast majority of people who are incarcerated in this country. Those facilities and systems are operated and overseen by state and local governments and are largelyindependent of the federal government. You should think of state prisons and local jails as systems that operate in parallel (and occasionally overlap) with the federal system, rather than as subsidiaries of it.
State legislators write laws that dictate what actions are considered crimes and the possible punishments for those actions. Police and prosecutors — operated by both state and local governments — enforce those laws by carrying out arrests and prosecutions. County sheriffs operate local jails. And the state government runs the prison system that confines people sentenced to incarceration by state courts.5
Generally speaking, state and local governments hold the vast majority of the control in the criminal legal system, and the federal government plays a relatively small role.
Examining recent progress towards decriminalizing marijuana offers a helpful — albeit unique — example of how state and local governments operate in parallel with the federal government when it comes to law enforcement. Currently, 24 states have made the recreational use and possession of marijuana legal. That means that state and local law enforcement cannot arrest or prosecute someone for simply possessing or using marijuana.6
However, the possession of marijuana remains illegal under federal law. Even if you are in a state that has made recreational use of marijuana legal, the federal government could, in theory, still arrest and prosecute you for it. Usually, though not always, the federal government has respected states’ ability to write their own criminal laws, and in doing so, has avoided prosecutions that are contrary to state law.
Importantly, if someone is sentenced to incarceration, the entity that prosecuted them usually determines where they serve their sentence. If they’re prosecuted under state law, as most people are, they’ll usually serve their sentence in a state prison. If they’re prosecuted under federal law, they’ll likely serve their sentence in federal prison.7
Federal influence over state and local policy
While the federal government has direct control over a relatively small portion of the nation’s criminal legal systems, the president, Congress, and the federal courts have many ways to exert indirect influence over how states and local governments address public safety, prosecute crimes, operate their prisons, and more.
It is essential to recognize that the federal government’s influence and power to shape state and local criminal legal system policy is not inherently good or bad. This power has been used to both shrink and grow the carceral footprint in America. Understanding the contours of these powers can help you see how they’re being used.
The president and the executive branch of the federal government
The president and the executive branch of the federal government likely have the most tools at their disposal to influence how state and local governments operate their criminal legal systems. Some of these mechanisms are direct actions that essentially force the hands of state and local governments by using the promise of providing or eliminating funding or threatening legal action, while others rely on the prominence and prestige of the presidency to exert pressure and encourage specific actions.
Control over federal spending
While Congress controls the amount of money budgeted for various federal government programs,8 the president has immense discretion over how that money is spent and how laws are implemented. From the money allocated by Congress, presidents can often direct money to their own priority programs, while offering fewer resources to programs that are less important to them. These choices can dramatically impact state and local criminal legal systems.
A prime example of this is the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs. This office provides millions of dollars in grants to state and local governments, as well as other organizations that provide services related to the criminal legal system. How this money is spent and what programs receive money have huge impacts on state prison populations and local police activities.
Under President Biden, many of these grants were awarded to organizations and programs designed to keep people out of the criminal legal system, reduce violence, and support victims of crime. However, shortly after taking office, the Trump administration cancelled roughly $820 million in Biden-era grants, indicating that they didn’t align with the administration’s priorities. The administration has said this money will instead be allocated toward programs that align with its focus areas, which many people assume means it will result in more money for policing and prison construction.
Additionally, the Department of Justice provides funding to state and local law enforcement through a series of grants and other programs. Many of these programs require state and local officials to comply with federal policing standards and collaborate with federal authorities on certain criminal investigations and prosecutions. This funding allows federal authorities to expand their reach and exert new pressure on local elected and law enforcement officials.
Another example of how executive branch agencies use money to shape state criminal justice policy is the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, which is partially funded by the U.S. Department of Justice. This program connects state leaders with experts to help them develop strategies to reduce crime, improve services for people with substance use disorder and mental health issues, and reduce spending on prisons and jails. Through this model, the federal government helps to lay the groundwork for state policy reforms. This framework allows the federal government, despite not having a direct voice in the decision-making for states, to influence state policies.
While the president cannot directly instruct states on how to operate their criminal legal systems, making funds available for specific uses can push them to take actions that the president wants. The money can motivate officials to follow the federal government’s lead, and conversely, when money dries up, force them to abandon strategies that aren’t in line with the president’s priorities.
Federal policing and prosecutorial power
The president appoints the attorney general of the United States to head the Department of Justice. Over the last fifty years, presidents have generally respected the independence of their attorneys general, based on the recognition that law enforcement should not be influenced by politics or personal grievance. The Trump administration has made clear it will no longer respect that independence.
While the attorney general is generally considered the top law enforcement official in the nation, they only have direct policing and prosecutorial power over allegations that federal crimes have been committed. As we explained above, this has traditionally been a relatively small portion of the total criminal cases around the country, with state and local governments maintaining jurisdiction over the vast majority.
It is important to note that the attorney general has incredibly wide discretion over which cases the Department of Justice pursues. There are a lot of actions that are criminalized by both the state and federal governments. However, in the vast majority of these cases, state and local authorities take the lead on arrests and prosecutions.
In theory, however, an attorney general could direct federal law enforcement to take primary authority over far more cases than it has traditionally pursued. This would swell the federal prison population and the federal government’s role in the criminal legal system. The fear of federal intervention in the criminal legal system can be used to coerce states to more aggressively pursue prosecutions that the president and federal government have prioritized.
Enforcement of civil rights laws
One of the most powerful ways that the federal government has positively impacted state and local law enforcement and prisons is through the enforcement of civil rights laws.
Even when state or local officials are responsible for policing or incarceration, they must still abide by civil rights protections in the U.S. Constitution. If they don’t, the U.S. Department of Justice can bring a federal lawsuit against the prison, police department, or other government body. These lawsuits often focus on things like racist policing practices, inhumane prison or jail conditions, and police brutality.
Often, these cases are resolved by consent decrees, in which the state or local government entity agrees to take specific actions to resolve the practices that violated federal law. In a break with the past, the Trump administration has announced that it is abandoning many of these efforts to rein in abuse in prisons and jails and by law enforcement.
Pardons and commutations
Presidents have the power to pardon or commute the sentences of people convicted of federal offenses. A pardon absolves a person of their criminal conviction, ending any remaining time in prison or on probation and wiping the conviction from their record, like it never happened. A commutation, on the other hand, reduces a person’s sentence, but doesn’t remove the conviction from their criminal record.
It is important to note that a president can only grant pardons and commutations to people convicted of federal crimes. They have no power to change the criminal sentences of people convicted of state crimes, which means most criminal convictions in the country are outside of their reach.
Appointments to courts, agencies, commissions, and more
The people who run the day-to-day operations of the federal government matter, and the president appoints a significant number of judges, agency heads, and members of regulatory boards that shape criminal legal system policy in this country.
The president nominates people to fill vacancies in federal courts,9 including the United States Supreme Court. By nominating people who share their worldview on public safety, prison conditions, crime, and other issues, the president indirectly shapes how federal courts rule on these issues for decades to come. Importantly, these courts will also regularly be asked to weigh in on whether state or local policies violate the U.S. Constitution, giving them considerable influence on what and how criminal legal system policies are implemented.
Presidents also appoint the heads of most federal departments and most agencies in the executive branch. The people appointed to these positions are the ones managing the day-to-day operations of the federal government, making the specific choices about how money is spent, where staffing resources are focused, and how the administration implements federal laws.
Finally, the most overlooked appointments that presidents make are to the various rule- and regulation-making boards and commissions scattered throughout the government. These bodies are tasked with filling in the details of how specific legislation is implemented, giving them immense power to shape both the federal and state criminal legal systems. Recent examples include:
The Federal Communications Commission: In 2022, Congress passed the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, which tasked the Federal Communications Commission with issuing new regulations reducing the cost of phone calls from prisons and jails. The Commissioners took sweeping action to do just that. This impacted nearly every prison or jail in the country, regardless of whether it was run by the federal, state, or local government.
The Federal Trade Commission: Under President Biden, the commission took action to address junk fees that private companies charge to incarcerated people — even those not in federal custody. While the final proposed rules didn’t go nearly far enough to protect people in prison and jail, they demonstrate the far-reaching impacts of actions by this body.
The Postal Regulatory Commission: Postal mail remains a critical way that incarcerated people stay in touch with their loved ones on the outside. This commission sets the cost of postage and other rules around this service.
The bully pulpit
When all else fails, the president can also use their prominence in government, ability to garner media coverage, and public platform to influence how the public views and thinks about issues, even if they have no direct power over those issues. This is sometimes referred to as “the bully pulpit.”
There are few people more famous than the person sitting in the Oval Office. They have hundreds of media outlets clamoring for interviews. They can give speeches and statements that directly reach the public. And they usually have social media followings that reach hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. and worldwide.
While they don’t directly dictate policy, these are powerful tools, and when the president wants to, they can use them to raise awareness of issues they care about, pressure officials to take specific actions, or shift public sentiment and thinking broadly.
President Obama and President Trump have both used their bully pulpits — in far different ways — to discuss policing and influence the actions of local law enforcement:
In a 2014 speech, after a grand jury failed to indict a police officer who killed Michael Brown, President Obama gave a speech encouraging calm in the wake of that decision, giving voice to the frustration that communities of color feel with police, and encouraging local law enforcement to work to build public trust by improving their practices. President Obama had no direct say over the practices of local police departments, but by using the bully pulpit, he helped to draw public attention to the need for improvement in policing.
Meanwhile, during his first term, President Trump was speaking before a group of police officers in New York when he appeared to encourage more violence by law enforcement and urged them not to “be too nice” to people who are arrested. Again, President Trump had no authority over the specific policing practices of local departments, but his words provided a permission slip to officers to be more violent towards people in their custody.
Presidents have little direct authority over how local police officers do their jobs, but by using their bully pulpits in drastically different ways, one called on police to be part of a solution that improves trust in law enforcement, and the other encouraged more police violence. Both remarks helped to sway public opinion and police actions.
Congress
The president isn’t the only one with the power to influence the broader criminal legal system. Congress, through its control of federal spending, can pressure state and local governments to adopt its preferred policies on crime, policing, and incarceration. While it generally doesn’t have the power to tell state and local governments exactly what to do, it regularly uses federal funding to both incentivize actions it wants and punish actions it doesn’t.
The most infamous example of this is the 1994 Crime Bill.10 While this measure took many steps to expand the federal criminal legal system, arguably its most notorious impact was how it incentivized states to lock up more people for longer periods of time. The bill included financial payments for states that adopted so-called “tough-on-crime” policies. States that adopted these misguided policies were given billions of dollars to fund the construction of new prisons.
This is far from the only time Congress has flexed its financial power to get state governments to make their criminal legal systems harsher. Other examples include:
A 1991 law that threatened to withhold billions of dollars of federal highway funding for states that didn’t automatically revoke the drivers’ licenses of people convicted of drug offenses.11
A 1996 law that permitted the federal government to enter into agreements with local law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration law, with a pot of money available to entice government officials to join this effort.
Congress has also used this power for good by incentivizing or otherwise encouraging state and local governments to take meaningful steps to promote alternatives to incarceration, improve their criminal legal systems, and make their prisons and jails safer and less deadly:
The Prison Rape Elimination Act is a bipartisan law that sought to end sexual assaults against incarcerated people. It not only established standards for the elimination of sexual assault behind bars, but it also offered financial incentives for prisons and jails to comply with those standards and to report data on their progress to the federal government. Finally, and unrelated to money, the law mandates that it be publicly announced which states are complying with the law and which are not, which serves as an additional motivation for states.
The Deaths in Custody Reporting Act sought to bring transparency to the deaths of incarcerated people by threatening to reduce federal funding to states that did not report certain information to the federal government when someone dies in one of their facilities.
The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act offered financial incentives to stop states from incarcerating young people for “status offenses” such as curfew violations, stop states from incarcerating young people with adults, and address racial disparities in the incarceration of young people. States that comply with the law receive additional federal funding.
While Congress’s power to directly change state and local policy is limited, it understands that many cities, states, and counties rely on federal money to function. This provides Congress with a powerful tool to exert its influence far beyond Capitol Hill.
Federal courts
Federal courts — including the U.S. Supreme Court — have jurisdiction over a relatively small number of criminal cases, and they only directly adjudicate the guilt or innocence of people accused of federal crimes. Despite this, their rulings can have reverberations throughout state and local criminal legal systems.
That’s because federal courts have the authority to rule on whether state laws violate the U.S. Constitution or other federal laws.
During the latter half of the 20th century, federal courts regularly used their authority to make the criminal legal system fairer and less harsh, telling states they cannot:
These rulings have been particularly impactful because federal court decisions are binding on all levels of government, including presidents, governors, and all lower courts. Presidents and other government officials are constitutionally bound to follow these orders.
In recent years, however, the Supreme Court in particular has become increasingly reluctant to exercise this authority and has become more likely to defer to the executive branch to answer questions in this realm, rather than acting as a true check on its power.
These are not normal times
It is important to remember that everything written in this piece reflects how things normally operate. Anyone who has been paying attention since the start of the second Trump administration knows that we are living in decidedly not-normal times.
For example:
It is normal for the president to appoint an attorney general, but for that attorney general to essentially act as the president’s personal lawyer is not normal.
It is normal for the president to have a preference about what governors and state legislators do in their states and what individual mayors and city councils do in their cities, but threatening governors and mayors with prosecution over these policy disagreements is not normal.
These unprecedented times make it hard to predict what is going to happen in the criminal legal system and in the numerous gray areas where the authority of different parts of the government overlaps. In normal times, it’s possible to guess how some of these conflicts would play out, but at a time when one branch of government is seeking to the trample the powers of the other branches and of the individual states — and those other branches and the states are largely letting it happen — all the normal bets are off.
What does this mean for the criminal legal system at the state and local level?
While the federal government has many tools at its disposal to influence policies related to crime, policing, and incarceration, the truth is that most of the power over these issues is in the hands of state and local officials.
As the Trump administration works to expand its reach in the criminal legal system, it is easy to feel that we’re helpless. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
By recognizing that state and local leaders make most of the decisions in this area, advocates can push them to stand up to the pressures of the federal government. They can urge them not to cooperate with unconstitutional and immoral actions by federal law enforcement. They can ask them to forgo funding that federal officials might use as leverage to coerce them into implementing harsh and misguided policies. And they can take action to work to make the criminal legal system fairer, smaller, and less punitive, even if the federal government has abandoned that cause.
State and local leaders are not powerless in these situations. It may be up to us to remind them of this fact.
Footnotes
One area we do not cover that is of particular concern to many is the use of the Insurrection Act of 1807. This is an intentional choice because of rare use of this law, and its complexities and vagueness. To learn more about this measure, we encourage you to review this explainer from the Brennan Center for Justice. ↩
For consistency, in this explainer, we’re referencing numbers from the most recent edition of our report, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2025. This is important because, since that report was released there has likely been significant changes in the number of people in custody of the federal government for immigration-related reasons. Because of this, the numbers in this report related to immigration are almost certainly an under-count. ↩
In this briefing, we don’t discuss the immigration system in detail. This is intentional. We at the Prison Policy Initiative are quite familiar with the criminal legal system, but are not experts on immigration policy. If you want to understand how the immigration system has changed under the Trump administration, we have put together a guide of organizations and resources to jumpstart your research. ↩
It is worth noting that some of these people, while under the jurisdictional control of the federal government, are physically held in local jails that have rented space to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or other federal law enforcement agencies. ↩
Some people sentenced to incarceration for shorter times are held in local jails, instead of prisons. ↩
It is worth noting that most states have rules around the possession and use of marijuana, and violating those rules could still get a person in trouble with the law. Most commonly, these rules ban the use of marijuana in public places. For example, in most states, smoking pot in a public park could still result in criminal arrest or citation. ↩
If you’re not sure whether a prison is run by the state or federal government, it can be helpful to look at the facility’s name. If the name contains the letters FCI (Federal Correctional Institution) or USP (United States Penitentiary) it is a federal prison. While the vast majority of federal facilities start with these acronyms, there are some federal facilities whose names don’t include these letters. ↩
We discuss the role and influence of federal courts in the criminal legal system later in this piece. ↩
It is worth noting there is considerable debate about the impact this law had on state prison construction. The subsidies for prison expansion weren’t massive, and academics dispute whether states would have made their sentencing laws harsher anyway (and some states claim that the subsidies had no effect). And the 1991 highway bill, which is mentioned below, both threatened to withhold a significant amount of money from states and made it incredibly simple for them to opt out of the requirement without losing their funds. But in both cases, Congress clearly expressed an opinion as an attempt to exert some influence on state governments. ↩
Moving people between prisons can improve their access to treatment, programs, and visitation — but transfers can also be deeply traumatizing, disruptive, and destabilizing. In this briefing, we use transfer records and interviews with dozens of formerly incarcerated New Yorkers to examine how often people are moved, why they’re moved, and how this little-discussed aspect of prison life impacts them.
Most people imagine incarceration as confinement in one place. Yet few incarcerated people serve their sentence in just one facility. Many are transferred repeatedly — sometimes dozens of times — before release.
Transfers require incarcerated people to pack their belongings, undergo invasive strip searches, and take long trips while restrictively shackled — what one person described as “the worst experience of my life.” When a transfer bus arrives, its passengers might find themselves closer to loved ones or at a prison hundreds of miles from them. Each move upends nearly every aspect of an incarcerated person’s life, including peer networks, familiarity with officers, institutional culture, rules, housing configurations (e.g., cells vs. dorms), and program and job opportunities.
In some cases, transfers are beneficial. They can move someone to a prison with a lower security classification, more programs, or a safer culture, as well as one closer to home. Such transfers can boost program access and visitation, both of which research has shown to contribute to well-being and reentry preparedness. In other cases, transfers can have the opposite effect, severing program participation and introducing a person to a stressful new environment. Regardless, transfers always bring changes. As one person told me, “Once you become acclimated to a prison… you know how to exist in that prison… But once you transfer, that no longer holds any thread to your daily living. You’ve got to start from scratch all over again. People hate that — it’s nerve-wracking.”
Over the course of a sentence, many incarcerated people are made to zig-zag between prisons across their state due to prison transfer practices. The above animation shows all transfers in New York State between 2021 and 2022, animated by week.
Despite their importance, transfers are a fact of prison life that few non-incarcerated people think about and that have received limited attention from policymakers and researchers. How often do transfers happen? Why do prisons transfer people? Most importantly, what impacts do transfers have for incarcerated people?
To answer these questions, I interviewed 52 New Yorkers who left prison in the last few years1 and created a novel quantitative dataset, generated by linking together administrative transfer records obtained by public records requests. Although I focus on New York, reporting suggests that transfers are similarly common and consequential in otherstateprisonsystems and in the Federal Bureau of Prisons.2
Recent legislative efforts in New York and a handful of other states encourage transfers closer to home for parents with young children. These policy reforms show how prison transfer systems could be reoriented to support success upon release. However, my research reveals that, for most people, transfers remain a harmful and all-too-frequent disruption.
Transfers are common, even during public health emergencies
The chart below shows New York’s total monthly transfers from 2020 to 2022. Before the pandemic, the New York state prison system made over 3,000 transfers a month. At the onset of COVID-19, transfer rates dropped precipitously amid concerns — later actualized in New York and other states — that transfers would spread the virus. By June 2020, however, transfers had resumed at close to pre-pandemic levels.3 After a year of starts and stops, an internal staff email in July 2021 reported that transfers had returned to full capacity, despite ongoing COVID-19 surges.4
By 2022, New York was making an average of 3,167 transfers a month, with a total of just under 38,000 transfers in 2022. As I explore more below, only a small number of these transfers were to move incarcerated parents to prisons closer to their children under the new law implemented in late 2021.
Public records obtained from the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision show the ebb and flow of transfers between December 2019 and December 2022, as the department responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and new proximity laws.5
While some incarcerated people move often, others spend decades in a single prison
Over the course of their sentence, an incarcerated person can move multiple — even dozens — of times. In 2022 alone, two New Yorkers were transferred ten times each. Of everyone transferred that year, about half moved more than once.
Of course, not everyone transfers this often. Interviews with formerly incarcerated New Yorkers showed varied transfer histories. As Felix summarized, “People’s incarcerations take different trajectories… You can land in a spot [and] stay there for a long time.” Or, as he experienced, you can get “transferred all over the place.”
Felix’s 22 transfers were largely for disciplinary reasons, especially early in the two decades he spent incarcerated. He described seeing the same people transferred from one maximum security prison to another. “Every time I’d go to the box, it’s all of us going to the box… It was like, ‘oh, you back? Oh, you here?’… Like, 10 years of just sitting on buses… Not staying in any one place — unless it’s solitary confinement — for any longer than a year.”
The above graphic illustrates Felix’s 22 transfers over the 21 years he spent incarcerated. After criss-crossing the state, Felix was eventually released and returned to his family in the Hudson Valley.
Meanwhile, Alexander found himself stuck in one maximum security prison for over 15 years. In his words, “You get used to people leaving — being transferred… and you sitting there. It was troubling, because some of the people that’s leaving helped you get through your stress, and y’all was there for each other… Now, I’m alone… like, damn, everybody who was here with me before is gone. [And] the officers don’t know me now, so I’m being mistreated.”
Alexander was transferred just 5 times in 28 years, eventually returning home to Brooklyn, NY.
Felix and Alexander represent two trajectories through a prison sentence, marked by different levels of movement.
On the one hand, Alexander felt stuck in place. Even without moving, his relationships with other incarcerated people and staff were uprooted as others transferred around him and staff moved on to new jobs or different prisons. People who spent long stretches in a prison like Alexander often wished they could access programs and opportunities elsewhere, move closer to loved ones, or follow mentors who had transferred out. Yet many reported being reluctant to submit transfer requests, since they could not control where the prison system would choose to move them, including to a worse, less safe, or more distant facility.6 Others were grateful to stay put, having no interest in transferring.
On the other hand, Felix moved constantly and chaotically — what one person called “ping-ponging” from prison to prison, and another called the “I Love New York State tour.” Moving frequently meant he could rarely complete programs or build long-lasting relationships. As incarcerated writers often report, friendships not only afford a sense of safety and stability in a prison’s unpredictable environment but can also provide transformative mentorship and deep emotional support. Constant transfers stymied Felix’s access to such relationships, while exacerbating the turbulence and stress of incarceration.
Transfer requests account for only a small portion of movement between prisons
Even though people incarcerated in New York can request transfers, the data show that transfers are not predominantly driven by requests from incarcerated people. For the most part, moves are involuntary.
In New York, incarcerated people can request a transfer provided they have been in their facility for a sufficient amount of time and do not have recent disciplinary tickets.7 In December 2021, the state joined several others in passing legislation mandating the department to allow parents of children under 18 years old the opportunity to transfer closer to home. Between June 2021 and May 2022, almost 6,000 people submitted requests under this program alone.
Although the data show an increase in transfers by request in 2021-2022, these moves were overshadowed by transfers for other causes. Indeed, 92% of transfers in 2022 were for reasons other than incarcerated people’s requests. Mainly, transfers were recorded as happening for programming, “general confinement,” and disciplinary reasons. For instance, individuals might be moved to a facility that offers a certain treatment program — or they might be transferred to solitary confinement or restricted (disciplinary) housing units for breaking prison rules, or even as a retaliatory punishment for speaking out about conditions.
The percentage of transfers recorded as happening by the request of the incarcerated individual increased between 2020 and 2022, but was greatly overshadowed by the percentage of transfers for all other reasons.
Research shows that visitation — especially with one’s children — reduces misconduct, bolsters mental health, and is an important part of successful reentry. When transfers are done to achieve these ends, they play an important role in reducing the harm of incarceration. Conversely, when done for punitive or arbitrary reasons, transfers can exacerbate those problems. Recent legislative efforts to allow parents to transfer closer to their children are important first steps toward expanding incarcerated people’s voice in housing determinations. The data show, however, that more work is needed to shift the balance of coercion and agency in prison placement.
Transfers to different security levels are relatively rare
Another reason prisons might transfer people is to respond to security classification changes. Prisons are typically assigned a security level, while incarcerated people’s classifications shift over time. As a result, transfer rates could be driven by changes in security classification. Transfer records from 2021 and 2022, however, show that only one-third of transfers moved people to different security levels. Most transfers shuffle people laterally between prisons of the same security level. Of transfers between security levels, the majority moved people from maximum security prisons down to medium ones.
Most prison transfers happen within security classification levels (for example, between medium-security facilities) or to step down from the maximum security level. Otherwise, transfers to different security levels are relatively rare.
Overall, these findings suggest that prison administrators use transfers for a variety of reasons other than changes to security classifications.
Transfer-driven population turnover creates mass instability
Transfers substantially affect prison populations. Some facilities transfer people in and out more often, but — as my recent article shows – all are implicated in prison-to-prison moves and the turnover it brings. Over the course of 2022, over 70% of New York’s prisons transferred the equivalent of 50% or more of their January populations to other facilities. Of those, nine prisons (18%) had turnover of over 100% of their start-of-year population size.
Half of New York’s prisons transferred the equivalent of 59% or more of their January populations to other facilities. While the other half transferred smaller proportions of people, most still had turnover rates between roughly 20-60% of their January populations.
Constant population turnover from transfers combines with that of prison releases and new entries, making everyday life in prisons unstable and uncertain. Interview participants, for example, described realizing a friend had transferred when they didn’t show up to breakfast or a standing basketball game. Meanwhile, they recounted fearing who might arrive on daily transfer buses.8 As one person put it, “You never knew, that bus coming in could be from hell.”
Transfers do not do enough to bring incarcerated New Yorkers closer to home
When a person is incarcerated far from home, they are less likely to receive visits, which have been linked to everything from mental health benefits to reduced recidivism. On average, transfers in 2021 and 2022 originated about 175 miles from the transferee’s county of conviction, which I use as a proxy of their home area.9
While requested transfers brought incarcerated New Yorkers an average of 147 miles closer to home, most transfers have little impact on distance from home. People transferred by request started farther from home than for other transfers, an average distance of 225 miles compared to 169 miles. Their transfers brought them much closer to home — 78 miles away on average, compared to 199 miles for all other transfers. Aside from transfers by request, all other transfers brought incarcerated people an average of 29 miles farther away from their conviction county, an increase of 17% from their average starting distance.
Transfers and Distance from Home
All transfers
Transfers by request
Transfers not by request
Sending prison’s average distance from conviction county (median)
175 miles (159 miles)
225 miles (229 miles)
169 miles (147 miles)
Receiving prison’s average distance from conviction county (median)
187 miles (191 miles)
78 miles (65 miles)
199 miles (207 miles)
Average change in distance from conviction county (median). Positive values indicate moving farther from conviction county, and negative values indicate moving closer.
12 miles (9 miles)
-147 miles (-162 miles)
29 miles (20 miles)
People transferred by request started farther from home than those transferred for other reasons, and typically ended up closer to home. All other transfers brought incarcerated people an average of 29 miles farther away from their conviction county.
Harrowing journeys, with long-term impacts
For incarcerated people, transfers can be harrowing. As documented by journalists and academics alike,10 they often involve long trips with circuitous routes, including stops at multiple prisons and breaks for corrections staff. During transfer trips, incarcerated people have little access to food or bathrooms, and recount uncomfortable seats and painfully restrictive shackling. As Hugo put it, “By the time you get off the bus, you either got a cut or your leg is swollen [with] black and blues.”
For Linda, who is in her mid-sixties, transferring was “the worst experience of my life,” adding that, “You’re on this bus, you’re shackled to somebody else.” To avoid needing to use the bus bathroom while shackled to a stranger, Linda decided not to drink anything and to skip eating the bagged bologna sandwich she was given for lunch. Her bus left “early in the morning” but didn’t arrive at the next prison “until late evening,” despite it being about a six-hour drive away. Overall, she felt that “[the officers] don’t care about you. They don’t care if you use the bathroom. They don’t care if you’re going to eat. They just want to make sure they get you from one location to another.”
Because transfers upend nearly every aspect of incarcerated life, the first few weeks in a new prison can be especially difficult — and even dangerous. Recently transferred people need to restock possessions lost during transfers, requiring them to spend their often limited funds on exorbitantly expensive commissary goods. They also have to learn the rules of their new facility, including formal policy differences and informal “politics.” Without this know-how, recently transferred individuals are prone to disciplinary tickets and victimization.11
Overall, the destabilization of a transfer often proves challenging. As two participants commented:
It was hard. Don’t get me wrong, I was furious because my whole life was planned out and everything was just taken away. And that’s kind of what these transfers do: they disrupt your life. What little life that we had in there, they just broke it up. So, when you have a plan, and you want to get these programs… they take it all away and you got to start all over.
— David, incarcerated 25 years and transferred 6 times.
It’s designed to break you…They move you from plantation to plantation. You lose people, you lose property. You lose so much through a transfer… In prison because of all the violence, who’d want to get moved? You want to be in the hell you already know, the hell that you already got comfortable in. Now they’re sending you to another man-made hell that you got to start all over [in]… No one wants that.
— Wyatt, incarcerated 29 years and transferred 9 times.
In the long term, transfers disrupt relationships that are essential to prison safety and stability. These relationships can not only provide mentorship and care but also a helping hand during reentry, and are the crucial building blocks of incarcerated organizing.
While transfers create disruption and loss, they can also have enormous positive potential. They can bring incarcerated people closer to their loved ones, move them to prisons with the specific programs they are interested in, remove them from dangerous situations, and add variety to the monotony of a long sentence. Policymakers have the opportunity to balance the positive potential of transfers against their negative impacts.
Expanding incarcerated people’s agency in transfer decisions
Transfers are a common part of prison life with dramatic effects on incarcerated people’s well-being. From suddenly-severed friendships and arduous bus rides to the constant turnover they produce, transfers are often stressful and destabilizing experiences. As they upend incarcerated people’s lives, they have the opportunity — and risk — of bettering or worsening their access to loved ones, programs, jobs, and safety.
Rather than continuously shuffling incarcerated people, transfers should be used to prioritize stability and autonomy. Policymakers can mitigate the punishing aspects of transfers without undermining their positive potential, following in the footsteps of recent legislative reforms.12 For instance, existing legislation is tailored to parents of minor children but could be expanded to people with aging family members, adult children, or indigent loved ones who cannot afford long journeys to visit. Likewise, giving incarcerated New Yorkers the opportunity to “veto” the prison that the state determines for them following a request might diminish fearfulness around submitting them. Above all, incarcerated people should have the opportunity to stay in place if they prefer, particularly if they have no disciplinary issues and are succeeding in their programs, jobs, and relationships.
Methodology
Data Sources
This research uses two quantitative data sources, both shared by the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) through Freedom of Information Law requests. The first is a summary of every transfer record in 2020-2022, with the sending and receiving facilities and its cause. I used text parsing tools to digitize these records into a spreadsheet. Using this data, I calculated detailed statistics about transfers, including how many happened, their causes, and per-person transfer counts by year. Reflecting this data source, I operationalize “a transfer” based on how DOCCS defines them; for example, the data does not include transfers between prisons and jails, temporary transfers for court visits, or temporary medical transfers to outside hospitals.
The second data source is 24 files, one for each month of 2021-2022. Each file provides the population under custody for the first of that month, with information including each person’s unique identification number and county of conviction. I linked these records by unique ID to generate a list of the conviction counties of every person incarcerated in the 2021-2022 period. Finally, I merged this conviction county information into the transfer records described above, so that each transfer record included the conviction county of the person transferred. With this information, I was able to calculate distance changes from home.
Data Cleaning
Working with the above administrative datasets required significant data cleaning. I constructed several variables, including:
Transfer cause: I consolidated two of the codes for transfer cause into the category of “transfers by request”: “Area Of Preference” and “Area Of Children.”
Distance variables: I used United States Census data to geocode the centroid of New York’s counties and Google Maps’ coordinates to geocode each of New York’s prisons. Then, I used ArcGIS Pro to calculate the highway mileage of the quickest route for 1) the distance between the sending prison and the conviction county centroid and 2) the distance between the receiving prison and the conviction county centroid. I use an individual’s conviction county as an imperfect proxy of their “home” region. In doing so, I join other researchers who use the same proxy.
Facility security levels: The security level of each prison is based on the DOCCS website.
Facility population size: Each facility’s starting population size is based on DOCCS’s publicly reported data for the facility population on December 31, 2021 (see page 10 in the linked report). I calculated the proportion of the population transferred by dividing the total number of transfers “out” (i.e., where the given prison was the “sending” facility) by the starting population size.
Qualitative Data
The quotes included here come from interviews with 52 formerly incarcerated New Yorkers about their transfer experiences. Interviews were conducted in June 2023-August 2024 and participants were recruited through reentry nonprofits based in New York City. As part of the interview, participants recalled their transfer histories; Felix’s and Alexander’s transfer history maps are based on this self-reported data. All names used in the above are pseudonyms. This study was approved by the Northwestern University Institutional Review Board.
Interviews were conducted between June 2023 and August 2024, and participants were recruited through reentry nonprofits. As part of the interview, participants recalled their transfer histories; the transfer history maps included here are based on this self-reported data. All participant names are pseudonyms. This study was approved by the Northwestern University Institutional Review Board. ↩
The limited multi-state research that does exist, summarized on pages 3-5 of this 2016 Comment letter from the Prison Policy Initiative to the Census Bureau, finds that (1) “Nearly 75% of incarcerated people are moved between facilities before they go back home,” (2) “30% of people in federal and state prisons have been at the current facility for less than six months,” and (3) median length of stay at a given facility ranges from less than 6 months to just under a year across Georgia, New York, and Massachusetts, with similar findings in Washington, Oregon, and Nebraska. Elsewhere, the Prison Policy Initiative reports that “12% of people serve time in at least five facilities before returning home.” ↩
These included transfers of at-risk elderly New Yorkers to a prison in far-upstate New York, in an effort by the state to protect them from the virus. A class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of the men transferred argues that the moves instead exposed them to COVID-19. ↩
June-August 2021 was the height of the surge of the Delta variant of COVID-19. ↩
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in late March 2020, the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision briefly paused transfers (per an internal email, obtained by public records request). In June 2020, they announced that transfers will “slowly resume.” Later, an internal email obtained by public records request shows that in early/mid-July 2021, the department informed superintendents that transfers had resumed at 100% capacity and that everyone transferred was being screened for COVID-19 symptoms and must wear a mask. Beginning in December 2021, the department implemented a law requiring them to allow parents of children under 18 to request a transfer closer to home. ↩
In New York, incarcerated people can submit a transfer request for a specific “hub” and list the facility they would like to transfer to, but they are not guaranteed placement there. Interview participants described fearing transfers farther from home (concerns a “hub” request can mitigate) and to more dangerous prisons. ↩
Based on their understanding of prison rules, interview participants reported varied lengths of time they had to be in a prison prior to submitting a request. In an email in April 2025, New York corrections department staff confirmed that, as of April 2025, in order for an incarcerated person to request a transfer, “a maximum-security incarcerated individual must be in the Department for at least one year and in their current facility for six months with an acceptable disciplinary record. Medium security incarcerated individuals must be within a hub and positively programming for a period of two years and must demonstrate favorable disciplinary adjustment. Cases are reviewed semiannually to determine transfer eligibility. Should they meet transfer eligibility requirements, their assigned Offender Rehabilitation Coordinator will advise them at their first semiannual review.” ↩
Participants explained that New York aims to account for this, transferring people only to prisons where they do not have a “no contact” or listed “enemy.” ↩
In an extreme example, Robert Brooks, a Black man, was beaten to death by Marcy Correctional Facility officers in December 2024, just 30 minutes after a transfer from nearby Mohawk Correctional Facility. The New York Times, summarizing the Onondaga County district attorney, described the attack as appearing “to have been a sort of violent initiation into life at Marcy Correctional Facility. He called the attack a ‘welcome to Marcy,’ and said it was ‘emblematic of the problems here and throughout the system.’” While recounting much less severe stories, participants in my research described guards making bombastic and threatening speeches to new arrivals, “letting you know,” as Elijah put it, “that this is not your house, this is our house, and we [correctional officers] do what we want to do,” including “roughing up” incarcerated people. ↩
Emma Kaufman makes a similar argument about the need for oversight and consent in her writing about interstate transfers, advocating for “[trying] to build prisoners’ views into the assessment of whether or not a transfer is going to be legal” and to “bring prisoners’ experiences and their family members’ preferences into this legal regime.” ↩
May 29-30, 2026: Members of the Prison Policy Initiative Communications team will be attending and presenting at the Bridging the Gap: Amplifying Incarcerated Voices conference in Chicago, on May 29th and 30th. Please reach out if you’d like to set up a meeting during the conference.
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