We asked staff of the Prison Policy Initiative to share the stories about the criminal legal system — other than ours — that stood out to them this year. In an eventful year, when there was a lot of essential journalism, here were some of our favorite pieces.
An incredible long read by Lauren Gill about residents of Franklin County coming together to protest a new mega-prison being forced through by Arkansas state government. The coalition’s fight to stop the prison — and to protect land that residents hoped to leave to their children — highlights consequences of prison-and jail-building that we often don’t think about. In the course of the story, the budget for the prison doubles from $470 million to $825 million, and state lawmakers realize (long after locals had pointed it out) that the cost of upgrading water infrastructure for the prison could be astronomical. The lack of transparency, rushed planning, and unpredictable costs associated with Arkansas’s new mega-prison are an important reminder that prisons are political projects.
One of a wave of recent “tough on crime” reforms to Louisiana’s prison system means that only incarcerated people deemed “low-risk” by an algorithm are eligible for parole release. As Richard Webster chronicles, in practice, that leads to tragedies like this story: A 70-year-old man who is nearly blind, who has been preparing for years for his chance to go home, is told he is no longer eligible because the algorithm deemed him a “moderate risk.” Parole has been at the front of our minds this year as many states have taken steps to curtail it (and because we published a two-part report about it), and this law represents the worst of the regressive changes: a state culling people from parole rosters based on factors totally outside of their control.
Reporting on cities’ and counties’ collaborations with ICE
From coast to coast, writers and reporters have helped to uncover the on-the-ground dynamics of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda, which often bely local and state “sanctuary” policies. Some of my favorites: Inadvertent documenting the Glendale City Jail contract with ICE, which the city canceled after their reporting; WTTW exposing 17 Illinois jails whose contracts with the U.S. Marshals allowed collaboration with ICE; Unraveled reporting on the Chicago Police Department providing crowd control at raids; and Judah Schept and Jack Norton, in n+1, explaining how rural jail expansion has created new infrastructure that ICE can take advantage of.
Danielle Squillante, Development and Communications Associate, says:
Imprisoned people are sold the idea that if they develop a deep insight into why they committed their crime, demonstrate remorse, engage in prison programming and education, and maintain a relatively clean disciplinary history — what prisons call rehabilitation — they will become good candidates for parole. But as Bobbi Cobaugh compellingly articulates, this is a fallacy — one that sows disillusionment in the minds of imprisoned people and their loved ones. As she writes, parole boards focus heavily on static factors that incarcerated people can’t change, like the crime itself, depriving incarcerated people of the second chances they earn.
Danielle Squillante, Development and Communications Associate, says:
As we argued in our article Addicted to punishment, prison administrations would rather invest in punitive responses to drug use than provide medication-assisted treatment, clinical treatment, and peer recovery groups — despite the fact that so many imprisoned people struggle with substance use disorders. As K.C. Johnson writes, prisons not only fail to provide treatment options for people so they can become more stable, but they also fail to curb the influx of drugs into the prisons, putting imprisoned people who use drugs at risk of overdosing. It’s a crisis of their own making, one that has serious consequences for people in prison.
Regan Huston, Digital Communications Strategist, says:
Everyone knows that summer heat can be intense, but not everyone has felt the sweltering conditions of prison cells – this immersive piece gives readers a glimpse at just how dire the situation can be. The scroll-through animations paired with thorough storytelling provide a unique approach to an often-overlooked issue.
Video explainers from MLK50’s Creator In Residence, Amber Sherman
Regan Huston, Digital Communications Strategist, says:
With more people getting their news from social media, MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, an outlet in Memphis, is meeting audiences where they are at by starting a “Creator In Residence” position in their newsroom. Their Creator in Residence, TikToker Amber Sherman, has an impressive following and an easy rapport with her audience, along with the support of a trustworthy outlet. Her explainers about Memphis’s courts and jails — such as this one about the city juvenile court concealing its proceedings — break down complex issues in the criminal legal system.
Kentucky Parole Board series, Northern Kentucky Tribune (parts one, two, three and four)
Leah Wang, Senior Research Analyst, says:
How do parole boards work and what principles guide their decisions? We set out to answer these questions this year in our report Parole in Perspective; meanwhile, journalist R.G. Dunlop tackled the same questions — and put a human face to them — in his four-part series on parole in Kentucky. The series is about a lot more than parole, though, diving into the difficulties of aging in prison and the costs — fiscal and moral — that Kentucky has taken on by handing out so many life sentences.
Beth is an independent journalist and co-produced the stunning HBO documentary The Alabama Solution. Her Substack, like most of her reporting, focuses on Alabama, which is good because there is a lot to say about Alabama’s broken and deadly prison system. She has touched on corruption and failures of accountability within ADOC, deaths in Alabama prisons and the families who grieve, and following the money behind ADOC contracts and lawsuits. But she’s also a human and that element comes through between her deep investigative stories.
High-priced lawyers for Alabama DOC using AI to file motions (parts one, two, and three), AL.com
This series by John Archibald ties together a lot of threads that show how deep the problems in the criminal legal system really are. First, it is based in Alabama, which consistently has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. Next, it highlights that the state is so used to being sued for the inhumane conditions of its prisons that it has enlisted the help of a high-priced law firm to handle the issue, costing taxpayers big time. It also shows the unreasonable hurdles that incarcerated people face when seeking protection from the courts, and the ways that the system defaults to siding with prison officials over the incarcerated. And finally, it highlights the truly insidious ways that artificial intelligence is quickly creeping into the criminal legal system, almost always in ways that will make the lives of incarcerated people and their loved ones even worse.
We’re seeing an expansion of the carceral state in 2025: ICE raids, counties forcing through massive new jails (and states building new prisons), expansions of electronic monitoring. So it’s important to remember that amid all this, crime is actually at a historic low. Jeff Asher’s levelheaded Substack is a great source of perspective on crime-related issues and trends. In this piece he explains that crime across several categories fell at historic rates in 2025. With everyone from big-box retail stores to the Trump administration claiming that crime is on the rise, and that this merits even more investment in incarceration, this kind of historic view is critical.
In Michigan, revenue from incarcerated people’s purchases on commissary and phone calls goes into a “Prisoner Benefit Fund.” But the money has largely sat idle,reporter Paul Egan found. The fund held $19 million at the end of 2024, and has sometimes gone toward maintenance costs, like an $86,500 roofing project. Meanwhile, incarcerated people — who have little say in how the money is spent — have gone without basic needs like toothbrushes, deodorant, and envelopes. This is a great piece highlighting how prisons squeeze incarcerated people and their families to fund operations, laundered through the notion of a charitable fund. (For more on these “welfare funds” in prisons, see our 2024 report Shadow Budgets.)
Phillip Vance Smith, writing from Neuse Correctional Center in North Carolina, compellingly lays out the consequences of the FCC abruptly suspending its 2024 caps on prison phone and video calling rates. Just after these caps went into effect in the spring, the agency suspended them, yanking an economic justice victory away from millions of families who would have benefited. (After publication, the FCC doubled down, with an October order gutting its 2024 rules.) Smith explains the seriousness of this defeat: People he knows will go on paying hundreds of dollars every month to communicate with a single incarcerated loved one, and those on the inside, who often cannot shoulder the cost of calls, will lose family connections over time.
In a study of more than 4.3 million people in Minnesota, researchers found widespread disparities in health conditions between the general population and people who were recently unhoused, jailed, or imprisoned.
The U.S. disproportionately locks up people who are unhoused and in poor health despite the fact that these populations are often better served by social and public health supports outside of jail and prison. A new study from researchers at the Minnesota Electronic Health Record Consortium underscores the desperate need for these additional supports and better, targeted interventions for accessing medical care and housing during reentry.
The Minnesota researchers use data compiled directly from a statewide electronic health record system to analyze the prevalence of various health conditions across more than 4.3 million adults in Minnesota who were seen by healthcare providers between 2021 and 2023.1 In their comparison of recently incarcerated people, recently unhoused people, and the total statewide population, the researchers find significant disparities: recently incarcerated people face higher rates of many health conditions than the statewide population, and unhoused people face the highest rates of nearly every condition included in the study. By including race and ethnicity in their analysis, the researchers also show how existing racial disparities in health are magnified among these populations. Ultimately, their findings add to mounting evidence that unhoused and recently incarcerated people are overwhelmingly sicker than the general population.2
In this briefing, we unpack some of the most important findings from this new research, focusing primarily on recently incarcerated populations, though we look at the unhoused population at the end as well. We also note that the dataset the researchers used – the Minnesota Electronic Health Record Consortium (MNEHRC) – is a unique collaboration between healthcare systems and public health agencies in Minnesota, offering publicly available and regularly updated population-level health data for millions of people. By linking the health records with data about homelessness and incarceration (as well as other factors, like Medicaid enrollment), this dataset not only serves as a public health monitoring tool, but also allows researchers to conduct large-scale studies like this one.
Rates of all common mental health conditions are higher among recently incarcerated people
Across the board, the researchers find that compared to the total Minnesota population, mental health conditions – depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), bipolar disorder, psychotic disorders, and suicide attempts – are far more prevalent among people who have been recently jailed or imprisoned. Some mental health diagnoses among formerly incarcerated people may have been brought on or exacerbated by incarceration, which is itself a traumatizing experience. Other data tell us that, even well before entering a prison, people who are arrested have much greater odds of serious mental illness or psychological distress than those who are not arrested, reflecting the practice of sweeping people experiencing mental health crises into the criminal legal system instead of redirecting them to community-based services.
Anxiety and mood disorders. In Minnesota, depression and anxiety are more prevalent among recently jailed and imprisoned populations, across almost all racial and ethnic groups, than in the statewide population. This is consistent with other data indicating a vast overrepresentation of people with mood disorders behind bars. Rates of bipolar disorder, too, are higher among recently incarcerated people – at five times the statewide rate.
Table 1. Prevalence rates of major mental health conditions across race/ethnicity and recent jail or prison incarceration in Minnesota
PTSD. Recently incarcerated people in Minnesota are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at more than four times the statewide rate. Within racial and ethnic categories, the most dramatic disparities in PTSD are concentrated in two groups: recently jailed white people, whose rate is more thanfour times that of the white population statewide, and recently imprisoned Hispanic people, for whom PTSD is more than five times as prevalent as the statewide Hispanic population.
Suicide. For decades, the rate of suicide deaths has been far higher in prisons and jails than in the national population. In the Minnesota study, recently incarcerated people were also far more likely to have a suicide attempt documented in their medical record than the statewide population. Nearly 9% of recently jailed people and 7% of recently imprisoned people had considered or attempted suicide, compared to less than 2% of the total population. And while Asian and Pacific Islander people generally report some of the lowest rates of diagnosed mental illnesses in the state, the prevalence of serious mental health concerns skyrockets for those recently incarcerated. A history of suicide attempts is almost twelve times as common among Asian and Pacific Islander people who were recently imprisoned, indicated in 12% of their medical records, compared to Asian and Pacific Islander Minnesotans as a whole.
These numbers reflect the nation’s shameful practice of responding to mental illness and mental health crises with criminalization: 40% of people in state and federal prisons in 2016 and more than 44% of people in local jails in 2012 had been diagnosed with a mental illness at some point.3 A number of behaviors associated with mental illness – including loitering, disorderly conduct, and trespassing – can result in arrest, conviction, and incarceration, even while posing little-to-no threat to public safety.4 However, access to any sort of mental health treatment is extremely limited for incarcerated people: in state prisons, more than half of people had an indication of a mental health problem in 2016, but only a quarter (26%) received professional help since entering prison. In local jails, suicide is the leading cause of death: someone in jail is more than three times as likely to die from suicide as someone in the general U.S. population.
While we cannot say from the data presented whether these mental health concerns were a contributing factor to – or result of – their contact with the criminal legal system, it’s clear that some of the state’s most vulnerable people are disproportionately incarcerated and returning to their communities with mental health needs. These findings underscore the urgent need to bolster mental health treatment in the community.
One in ten recently incarcerated Minnesotans has a diagnosed substance use disorder
In the Minnesota study, people with a recent experience with incarceration are more likely to have a diagnosed substance use disorder than the statewide population: more than one in ten have an opioid use disorder or an alcohol use disorder. Among recently incarcerated people, the rates of all substance use disorders measured – for alcohol, opioids, hallucinogens, methamphetamine, cocaine, and cannabis – are between 4 and 22 times the rates of those disorders among the total state population.
Alcohol. More than one in five (21%) recently jailed people in Minnesota have a documented alcohol use disorder. And while the prevalence is lower among recently imprisoned people (14%) than recently jailed people, it is still almost four times the statewide rate (4%). Across almost all racial and ethnic groups, the prevalence of alcohol use disorder is higher among those recently incarcerated. Statewide, Native people have the highest rate of alcohol use disorder (12%), which nearly doubles for those recently incarcerated: 23% of recently jailed and 19% of recently imprisoned Native people have a documented alcohol use disorder.5 Similarly, while only 3% of Minnesota’s Hispanic population has an alcohol use disorder, that rate jumps dramatically to 18% among recently jailed Hispanic people and 11% among those recently imprisoned. These results indicate a clear need for alcohol use treatment for people leaving jails and prisons across all racial and ethnic groups.6
Opioids. The criminal legal system is frequently the default response to the opioid epidemic: people who use opioids are disproportionately arrested, jailed, and imprisoned, but behind bars, they rarely receive necessary treatment. In the Minnesota study, opioid use disorder is ten times as prevalent among recently imprisoned people than the total population (among recently jailed people, it is seven times the statewide rate). Across all racial and ethnic categories, opioid use disorder is far more prevalent among people recently released from jail and prison – and this has lethal consequences. Previous research out of Minnesota found that the rate of overdose death for people released from jail was nearly 16 times that of the Minnesota general population, and the rate for people released from prison was a shocking 28 times the general population rate.7
Methamphetamine. Rates of methamphetamine (meth) use disorder are much higher among recently jailed (12%) and recently imprisoned people (17%) compared to the statewide population (0.8%). This is consistent with national trends in meth use and criminalization: nationally, there has been a surge in methamphetamine use, arrests, and overdose deaths in recent years. From 2015 to 2019, methamphetamine use disorder prevalence increased 37%, while overdose deaths climbed 170%. Among more than 32,000 people arrested for the first time in 2023 that tested positive for drugs, more than a quarter (26%) tested positive for methamphetamine alone. In the Minnesota study, methamphetamine use disorder is most prevalent among Native people, both statewide (6%) and among those recently jailed (18%) and recently imprisoned (22%).8 However, the largest within-race disparities between the statewide population and the recently incarcerated population are among white, Hispanic, and Asian or Pacific Islander people:
Table 2. Prevalence rates of substance use disorders, by substance type, across race/ethnicity and recent jail or prison incarceration, in Minnesota
Despite the deep unpopularity of the War on Drugs, the U.S. still responds to substance use (and related crime) as an individual failure requiring punishment, rather than as a public health problem — and it’s not working. Nationally, around 8% of people met the criteria for substance use disorders in 2019, but such disorders are far more common among people who are arrested and jailed (41%) and people incarcerated in federal (32%) or state prisons (49%). Establishing healthcare support for people during reentry – and ensuring seamless access to medications for opioid use disorder during incarceration and reentry – is a crucial part of reversing these trends.
Serious health conditions are more common among recently incarcerated people
The Minnesota study also shows that recently incarcerated people are more likely than the statewide population to suffer from most of the physical health conditions measured, including respiratory conditions like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and cardiovascular conditions like high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke.
While health issues may begin before arrest, incarceration often exacerbates problems or creates new ones: being locked up in and of itself causeslasting damage, and mortality (death) rates inside prisons and jails are disturbingly high.9 Of course, we know that people often do not get adequate medical care while behind bars: more than 20% of incarcerated people in state prisons and 68% in local jails with a persistent medical condition go without treatment. This has serious consequences: the number of people who died annually in jails and prisons increased by about 33% from 2001 to 2019,10 and prior research shows that each year in prison corresponds to a two-year decline in life expectancy. In the Minnesota study, the elevated rates of respiratory and heart conditions among recently incarcerated people, relative to statewide rates, are especially concerning.
Respiratory conditions. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is almost twice as common among recently imprisoned people than it is across the total Minnesota population. Rates of COPD for white people who were recently jailed (6%) or imprisoned (7%) are more than double that of the statewide white population (3%). Similarly, 6% of recently jailed Black people have COPD, compared to just 4% of Black people statewide.11 In general, Black and Native people in Minnesota have the highest rates of asthma (10%). But for Black people who were recently incarcerated, the rates climb even higher: 13% of recently jailed and 17% of recently imprisoned Black people have asthma. The high rates of asthma and COPD among recently incarcerated people indicate an urgent problem, especially since over the past two decades, more people have died in state prisons from respiratory disease than from drug/alcohol overdose, accidents, and homicides combined.
Table 3. Prevalence rates of physical health conditions across race/ethnicity and recent jail or prison incarceration, in Minnesota
Heart conditions. Compared to the total Minnesota population, recently incarcerated people generally face higher rates of most cardiovascular conditions, including high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, heart failure, stroke, and heart attacks. High blood pressure (hypertension) is more prevalent among recently jailed people (38%) than the statewide population (33%) or recently imprisoned people (26%), but this appears to be primarily driven by the increase among jailed Hispanic people (38%, compared to 31% statewide). For all other racial and ethnic categories, hypertension rates were actually lower among those recently incarcerated.
Among recently incarcerated people, the Minnesota study shows racial disparities in the prevalence of various cardiac conditions. For example, recently jailed Black people are more likely than recently jailed white, Native, Hispanic, or Asian or Pacific Islander people to have coronary artery disease, heart failure, or a heart attack. Recently jailed Native people have the highest rates of stroke and peripheral vascular disease among all recently jailed groups. Among people who were recently in prison, Black people are the most likely to have heart failure or stroke and white people are most likely to have had a heart attack.
Nationally, data show that heart conditions are deadly behind bars: more than one in four deaths in jails and prisons is attributed to heart disease nationally.12 For Black people, heart disease is the leading cause of death in prison, with an average annual mortality rate between 2000-2019 (71 per 100,000), almost double the rate for Black people in local jails (39 per 100,000). Access to lifesaving cardiac treatment is limited behind bars: 30% of people who died in state prisons from cardiovascular disease in 2019 did not receive any diagnostic testing and more than 25% did not receive medications for their heart condition; Black people were even less likely to have received any treatment or evaluation.13
Criminalization of homelessness puts disproportionately ill unhoused people in the crosshairs
Across the more than twenty mental health, physical health, and substance use conditions measured in the Minnesota study, the prevalence rates were highest among recently unhoused people for all but three conditions (hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and methamphetamine use disorder) – higher than the statewide population and eventhe recently-incarcerated populations.
Table 4. Prevalence rates of all health conditions in the statewide population, the recently unhoused population, and the recently incarcerated population, in Minnesota
Among recently unhoused people, the researchers found that rates of health problems varied by race similarly to the statewide population, only at much higher levels. For example, the prevalence of asthma, hypertension, and stroke are highest among Black people in the statewide population and among Black people in the recently unhoused population. But while 10% of all Black people in Minnesota have asthma, that rate goes up to 18% for unhoused Black people. Similarly, Native people in Minnesota have the highest rates of opioid and alcohol use disorders both statewide and among the recently unhoused population, but the prevalence of both disorders among unhoused Native people is more than double that of the statewide Native population.14
The inclusion of those experiencing homelessness is relevant to people focused on criminal legal system reform because, of course, this is anincreasinglycriminalizedpopulation. Even before the current legislative and legal efforts to criminalize homelessness, almost 5% of people in state prisons in 2016 experienced homelessness in the days prior to their arrest, compared to just 0.2% of the total U.S. population experiencing homelessness on a given night in 2016. In a recent analysis, we estimated that at least205,000 unhoused people are booked into jails each year. Further, research shows that the unhoused population is aging and that, like incarceration, homelessness contributes to “accelerated aging” with early onset of many chronic medical conditions, functional and cognitive impairments, and high rates of age-adjusted mortality.
The large-scale Minnesota study’s analysis of the recently unhoused population is an important contribution: the findings largely confirm problems that advocates have consistently raised alarms about. Unhoused people are particularly vulnerable to poor health outcomes (inevitably tied to limited healthcare access and poverty) and to criminal legal system involvement. While we chose to focus on the comparisons between the recently incarcerated population and the statewide population in this briefing, the data on the health conditions faced by recently unhoused people represents a new, invaluable source of information about just how vulnerable unhoused people are.
Conclusion
There’s a significant existing body of evidence pointing to the exceptional healthcare needs of unhoused and recently incarcerated people. This recent study out of Minnesota is potentially useful for researchers and advocates because it draws from a large novel dataset to contribute recent data on two populations that often face multiple barriers to accessing adequate healthcare. It drives home the longstanding arguments that these populations are in desperate need of additional support during reentry around accessing medical care. Ultimately, the publicly available dataset from the Minnesota study is a valuable resource for those seeking to better understand and meet the health needs of people returning home from prison and jail, including comprehensive reentry services, substance use disorder treatment, Medicaid and Medicare coverage, housing support, and access to healthcare providers.
Footnotes
The study, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, includes prevalence data on health conditions among recently incarcerated and recently unhoused people in Minnesota. In addition, the researchers have a publicly accessible data dashboard that includes the statewide prevalence data, which we used in our analysis. ↩
The dataset includes 51,470 people who were in jail, 4,889 people who were in prison, and 20,139 people who were unhoused during the past year. The data about unhoused people came from the Minnesota Homeless Management Information System, which captures information about the use of homeless services like shelters and street outreach. The data on recent incarceration came from Minnesota Department of Corrections records on all admissions and releases from Minnesota county jails and state prisons. Of course, there is inevitably some overlap between the recently incarcerated and recently unhoused populations, as unhoused peopleare disproportionatelycaught upin the criminal legal system in the United States. In addition, because the statewide prevalence rates include the recently incarcerated and recently unhoused populations, differences attributable to the experience of incarceration or homelessness are understated and would likely be more pronounced if we could disaggregate the recently incarcerated and unhoused populations from the rest of the statewide population. ↩
Contact with the criminal legal system – police, courts, and incarceration – is associated with increased stress and poor mental health. A growing body of research suggests that police exposure is particularly dangerous for Black youth and young adults and can negatively impact their health and well-being. ↩
Throughout this briefing, we use the term “Native” to refer to people who are identified as American Indian or Alaska Native in the Minnesota Electronic Health Record Consortium dataset. ↩
It is important to note that there are racial and ethnic biases at play in the diagnosis of substance use disorders – particularly alcohol use disorder – that inevitably contribute to the disproportionately high rates of substance use disorders among people of color. ↩
An individual’s tolerance for opioids diminishes while they are not using drugs or while they are receiving treatment, so doses that may have been non-fatal before they were incarcerated can kill them when they use again, as often happens shortly after release from jail or prison. ↩
This is consistent with research that has found that methamphetamine use is nearly four times higher in Native populations than among non-Native people in the U.S. In addition, Native people and Black people are more likely than white people to be booked into jail as opposed to cited and released for misdemeanor substance-related arrests. ↩
The number of health problems reported by incarcerated people may be partially explained by their difficulty accessing healthcare before incarceration: half (50%) of people in state prisons lacked health insurance at the time of their arrest. That’s a devastating rate of uninsured people compared to the overall population: between 2008 and 2016, the highest rate of uninsured people in the U.S. was just 15.5%. Uninsured people are less likely to seek medical care, and when they do, it’s often poor quality or too late. ↩
The most recent iteration of the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Mortality in Local Jails and State and Federal Prisons series covers deaths occurring in 2019. This is the most recent national data on the number of deaths in carceral facilities from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project has collected and published data on the number of deaths in state and federal prisons from 2019 to 2024 to fill this gap, but the database does not yet include data from all prison systems for 2022-2024. ↩
It is worth noting that rates of COPD among recently imprisoned Black people are actually much lower (1.5%) than the rates for Black Minnesotans statewide or recently jailed Black people. While this study cannot offer an explanation for this, it’s possible that there are differences in screening procedures, treatment availability, or demographics that contribute to the lower prevalence rate of COPD among recently imprisoned Black people. ↩
Deaths from “heart disease” include those attributed to coronary or heart disease, heart attacks, stroke, heart failure, hypertensive heart disease, and other cardiovascular diseases and conditions. In 2019, 24.5% of jail deaths and 26.9% of state prison deaths were caused by heart disease (comparably detailed cause of death data are not available for people who died in federal prison). ↩
Importantly, on a national scale, one quarter of people who died from cardiovascular causes in prison from 2001 to 2019 developed a heart condition after they were incarcerated, and a significant portion did not receive any diagnostic testing (31%) or any medications for their heart condition (27%) while in prison. ↩
For some conditions, the trends among unhoused populations differ from the statewide prevalence trends by race. For example, statewide, Native American/Alaska Native people face higher rates of all included mental health conditions (depression, anxiety, PTSD, bipolar disorder, psychotic disorders, and suicidality), but among the unhoused population, white unhoused people face the highest rates for all of these conditions except psychotic disorders (which is most prevalent among Black unhoused people). Statewide, diabetes and heart disease are most prevalent among Native American/Alaska Native people, but among recently unhoused people, Hispanic people face the highest rates of diabetes and Black people face the highest rates of heart disease. ↩
Using fresh data on ICE arrests through mid-October from the Deportation Data Project, we examine how jails continue to facilitate mass deportation, spotlighting important opportunities for resistance at the state and local levels.
Local jails and police departments are key to the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda because they facilitate ICE arrests of people who are already in police custody. In the first year of Trump’s second term, the administration has intensified the criminalization of asylum seekers and immigrants, pushed immigrant detention to all-time highs, and indiscriminately raided city after city. Despite all of this, the Trump administration remains well behind their mass deportation goals, in large part due to state and local efforts to protect immigrant communities and limit cooperation with ICE, Border Patrol, and other federal agencies.
In this briefing, we provide an update to our July 2025 report, Hiding in Plain Sight, which explored how local jails obscure and facilitate mass deportation under Trump. Using new government data provided by ICE and processed by the Deportation Data Project, we found high levels of ICE arrests — over 1,000 a day — concentrated in states that fully collaborate with the Trump administration.1 Nearly half (48%) of these arrests happen out of local jails and other lock-ups.2 We also provide updated data tables showing both the numbers and rates of ICE arrests by state.
A whirlwind of developments in the past year have changed how the immigration system works. The Trump administration has made it harder for people to make claims in immigration court, and deployed plain-clothes federal agents to arrest people that show up for hearings. They have limited access to legal information and attorneys while people are detained, and tried to eliminate regular types of release from detention like bail. Further, they fired immigration judges unaligned with their mass deportation agenda, and advertised their positions as those of “deportation judges.” Accordingly, immigration judges now frequently function as a rubber stamp on the regime’s actions; the case-by-case, inherently individualized decision of whether or not to detain and deport someone has shifted away from judges in courtrooms to the cops on the streets.
Meanwhile, ICE agents are given arrest quotas and required to detain nearly everyone they suspect lacks U.S. citizenship. They are heavily reliant on local police to arrest people and identify them for later pick up from the local jail by ICE agents, often before any criminal charges have been resolved (whether dismissed, acquitted, or convicted). To be clear, large numbers of ICE arrests at local jails are not an indication that immigrants and asylum seekers are more likely to be arrested for a crime; robust data from Texas, for example, showed that undocumented immigrants had much lower arrest rates than U.S.-born citizens. In too many cases, a traffic stop can mean deportation.
Nonetheless, these changes mean that local law enforcement across the U.S. have day-to-day operational discretion about who is detained and deported from communities. States like Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and Georgia have required local law enforcement to deputize staff to serve ICE, leading to high numbers of arrests.3 Others like Illinois, New York, and Oregon have managed to suppress arrests by limiting cooperation and blocking access to sensitive areas of public buildings. And states like New Jersey, which have prohibited formal deputization while allowing federal agents informal access to people in custody, have swept hundreds of people out of local jails and into the hands of ICE.
Local jails remain a key part of ICE’s arrest apparatus
Nationally, the recently-obtained ICE arrest data show indiscriminate levels of community arrests and detention. Using a 14-day rolling average number of arrests to smooth out the daily data,4 we found that major policy shifts led to higher levels of ICE arrests around the time of Trump’s inauguration in January, and again in late May as White House staff pressured ICE to escalate community raids to reach 3,000 arrests per day. Already-high rates of arrests out of local jails and other lock-ups seen earlier in 2025 have been amplified, although not as much as community raids and arrests elsewhere. As discussed below, the story becomes more complicated when looking at individual states, because the scale of arrests at least partially depends on state and local policies regarding cooperation with federal agents.
Throughout 2025, ICE made more and more arrests at local jails and other lock-ups, reaching an average of 350 per day in late January, and then continuing to rise to more than 500 a day on average in August. Arrests in other locations peaked in late May and early June at an average of almost 700 a day, and ICE averaged over 600 a day in September.5
State cooperation with ICE: As one might expect, states that mandate local collaboration with federal law enforcement often have higher levels of ICE arrests, with places like Tennessee, Florida, and Texas among the most extreme examples. To understand the impact of changes to immigration enforcement this year, our analysis6 compared arrests made between January 20 and May 20 to those made between May 21 and October 15. We found that Texas has the highest overall ICE arrests in this data, and their ICE arrest rate nearly doubled from the first to second period, from about 58 per 100,000 state residents to 110 per 100,000.
After Texas, Florida and Tennessee have the highest arrest rates out of local jails and other lock-ups specifically. Between the January to May and May to October to periods of our analysis, the overall ICE arrest rate in Tennessee rose by 40%, from 35 to 49 per 100,000 people. In Florida, 67% of ICE arrests were out of local jails or other lock-ups and the overall ICE arrest rate in the state rose by nearly 50%, from 39 to 58 per 100,000.
Impact of strategies to block ICE: Meanwhile, the impact of state and local strategies to block ICE access to jails is visible in data from Illinois, New York, and Oregon, where ICE arrests remain lower than other states. Between the January to May and May to October period in Illinois, the ICE arrest rate almost tripled, from nearly 8 per 100,000 people to 21 per 100,000. New York’s rate went from 9 to 26 per 100,000 (a 179% increase), and Oregon’s from 5 to 13 per 100,000 (a 160% increase). While these growing rates of arrest are troubling, the overall levels are much lower than in other states. In all three states, arrests out of local jails and other lock-ups composed a small share of ICE arrests, around 1 in 10 in Oregon and New York, and 1 in 6 in Illinois.7
Each state has approached the situation differently. Illinois, for example, has the strongest policy to prevent ICE from gaining access to people while they are in local jails. Guidance from the Illinois Attorney General states that local law enforcement:
“May not transfer any person into an immigration agent’s custody;
May not give any immigration agent access, including by telephone, to any individual who is in the law enforcement agency’s custody;
May not permit immigration agents’ use of agency facilities or equipment, including the use of electronic databases not available to the public, for any investigative or immigration enforcement purpose; and
May not otherwise render collateral assistance to federal immigration agents, including by coordinating an arrest in a courthouse or other public facility, transporting any individuals, establishing a security or traffic perimeter, or providing other on-site support.”
There are narrow exceptions to this prohibition, such as when ICE has a criminal arrest warrant, and gaps between the law on the books and what actually happens in practice. But Illinois requires local law enforcement to provide details on how they respond to every request made of them by immigration agents, and subsequently shares that information with the public.8
Informal access to jails facilitates collaboration and blunts efforts to block ICE
States like New Jersey have found themselves in a third position between mandatory deputization of local police and state-wide policy that prohibits collaboration. This waffling has led to a surge in ICE arrests from jails and other lockups. As recent ICE arrest data show, the rate of arrests in New Jersey almost doubled in the May to October period, from 21 to 40 per 100,000 people, and a large share took place out of local jails.
Despite the prohibition on formal 287(g) agreements, some local sheriffs have collaborated with ICE in other ways, and traffic enforcement and other arrests still lead to ICE arrests out of lock-ups and jails at a very high rate.9 For example, news reports indicate that Morris County jail and other pretrial detention facilities across New Jersey allow ICE to enter and make arrests. Morris County Sheriff James Gannon, in November 2017 described it this way:
“We have a working relationship with those authorities at our jail. They come in, and they check, you know, every other day they’re in our jail, right now. So I don’t see a need as we sit there right now to do anything on the 287(g). But we are going to maintain cooperation with the authorities with regards to issues of immigration […] If the immigration authorities are coming in and they’re satisfied and we’re satisfied that they’re dealing with the people who are here illegally, then let’s leave it like that.”
This tension between independent sheriffs and state limits on collaboration with ICE recently rose to the surface during the governor’s race in 2025. The Republican candidate, Jack Ciattarelli, chose Sheriff Gannon as his running mate and campaigned on working more closely with ICE and even deputizing local police to serve as immigration agents. Ciattarelli and Gannon lost their election, but ICE arrests that involve collaboration with local law enforcement have continued at a high level in New Jersey compared to states like Illinois, Pennsylvania, or New York.
Conclusion
Despite overwhelming displays of power and intimidating rhetoric, the federal government nonetheless relies heavily on state and local collaboration to enact its mass deportation agenda. The Trump administration is therefore vulnerable to state and local policy action that goes beyond merely limiting sheriffs and police from deputizing officers to work as immigration agents. This weakness is evident in the data, which show significantly smaller jumps in arrest rates in states where advocates have most aggressively worked to reject collaboration, and much higher rates in states that have embraced it. In the case of New Jersey, it’s clear that moderation on ICE collaboration does little to stem rates of arrest. Advocates targeting ICE’s reliance on local jails could potentially save thousands of people from the horrors of torture and abuse in federal custody and deportation.
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Methodology
ICE arrest data were obtained via FOIA request and processed by the Deportation Data Project, which were then analyzed by the Prison Policy Initiative.
Data corrections: ICE data contained a large number of cases with incomplete location information, and ICE’s coding and categorization practice has shifted over the course of 2025, obscuring important details. For data tables and visualizations in this briefing, we categorize ICE’s arrest locations data as “local jails or other lock-ups,” and a residual category of “all other locations,” including streets, workplaces, homes, and courts. As of the last week of July 2025, ICE stopped reporting arrests that occurred via the various local, state, and federal “Criminal Alien Programs” and instead reported all of those cases under the generic category “Custodial Arrests.” There are some ICE arrests directly from state or federal prisons, but many of the arrests coded as occurring via ICE’s federal or state so-called “Criminal Alien Program” actually happened at local jails after people were transferred there. The vast majority of custodial arrests occur at local jails, and thus in this briefing we use a combined category of “local jails or other lock-ups.”
The Deportation Data Project also identified that some records appear to be duplicated in the arrest table, so we removed extra rows that involve a person being booked into ICE custody more than once in a single day.
14 day rolling average arrest counts: This metric helps smooth out the daily data variation into trends, and is calculated using a sum of all arrests over two weeks divided by 14 to get the average daily arrest rate in the period. For example, October 14’s number is the average number of arrests for October 1-October 14.
Standardizing comparison across states: We carefully added the missing state for arrests based on the information ICE provided on apprehension location. Around 15% of the rows in the ICE arrest table do not include a state, but using the information in the table (such as the detailed apprehension location or the ICE office responsible) we deduced the location of the arrest for nearly nine out of ten of these cases. This approach does not work in Washington D.C., however, because so many arrests remain ambiguous or assigned to the ICE office responsible for both Washington D.C. and Virginia, so these two areas are combined for this analysis.
Data from some states may be incomplete due to ICE procedures for processing arrests. According to a declaration by the director of the Chicago field office in a federal civil rights lawsuit, in mid-September 2025, they sent an “entire plane” full of 131 people who had been arrested in the Chicago area but had not been processed by ICE yet to El Paso for processing there. Using the ICE arrest and detention data from the Deportation Data Project’s most recent release, it was not possible to clearly identify those people among the set of cases that were arrested in Illinois, nor those that were first detained in El Paso during that time, due to limitations in the datasets (missing identifiers in particular).
Standardizing comparison across time periods: In order to meaningfully compare changes during the first year of the second Trump administration, we broke ICE arrest data into two periods: a first period from January 20 to May 20, 2025 and a second period from May 21 to October 15, 2025. This approach provides a view into how conditions have changed since ICE arrests ramped up earlier this summer.
Because the data periods are not the same length, we standardized the data when calculating the ICE arrest rates to represent the number of arrests if the period was exactly four months long to make them comparable. This approach also avoids truncating arrest data unnecessarily at the start or end of time periods, which would discard useful data. For the latter 128 day period from May 21 to October 15, we reduced the counts within each state by 4.9% to account for what they would be in a shorter 121 and two-thirds days period. The earlier 121 day period (January 20 to May 20) is increased slightly to account for the missing two-thirds of a day.
We chose to divide the periods in this way due to the May 20th meeting called by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller with ICE senior officials demanding a million deportations in Trump’s first year and a tripling of arrest efforts to a target of 3,000 arrests per day.10 Subsequent to that meeting, ICE and Border Patrol began to occupy downtown Los Angeles and raid California more aggressively, followed by Washington, D.C.; Portland, Oregon; and Chicagoland. Data covering ICE and Customs and Border Protection’s more recent efforts in North Carolina, Louisiana, Minnesota, and elsewhere have not yet been made public.
In order to make comparisons between states, we calculate arrest rates per 100,000 residents (based on 2024 U.S. Census state-level population estimates), which we provide in Appendix Table 2.
Appendix Table 1: ICE arrests by apprehension location (Jan. 20 to Oct. 15, 2025)
The following table presents ICE arrests from the first year of the second Trump administration as a state-by-state count for two time periods: period 1 from Jan. 20 to May 20, 2025, and period 2 from May 21 to Oct. 15, 2025. Since this data does not include all immigration-related arrests, like those by Customs and Border Patrol, caution is required in making interpretations. State locations were filled in by the combination of the ICE office area responsible and the information provided about specific arrest locations. This was not sufficient to identify a clear estimate for Washington D.C., which was combined with Virginia. Arrest rates were calculated using 2024 state population estimates from the U.S. Census. For more about the data see the methodology. Additional data is available upon request.
Appendix Table 2: ICE arrest rate per 100,000 residents, by apprehension location (Jan. 20 to Oct. 15, 2025)
The following table presents ICE arrests from the first year of the second Trump administration as a state-by-state rate per capita for two time periods: period 1 from Jan. 20 to May 20, 2025, and period 2 from May 21 to Oct. 15, 2025. Rates are standardized to a four-months period. Since this data does not include all immigration-related arrests, like those by Customs and Border Patrol, caution is required in making interpretations. State locations were filled in by the combination of the ICE office area responsible and the information provided about specific arrest locations. This was not sufficient to identify a clear estimate for Washington D.C., which was combined with Virginia. Arrest rates were calculated using 2024 state population estimates from the U.S. Census. For more about the data see the methodology. Additional data is available upon request.
Data on the true scale of the criminalization of immigration have been limited and still do not include all Department of Homeland Security enforcement actions. They also do not include federal arrests that lead to federal criminal charges related to immigration. According to ICE detention statistics, Border Patrol agents made thousands of arrests nationally. Nonetheless, these ICE arrest data appear to shed some light on the matter. ↩
ICE makes arrests out of many incarceration and pretrial detention facilities, ranging from police department lock-ups, county jails, state prisons, and federal prisons, which we’re referring to as “other lockups.” Because more recent arrest data provided by ICE no longer distinguishes between arrests through the local, state and federal parts of their so-called “criminal alien program,” we combine for this analysis. See the methodology for more information. ↩
These deputization agreements are commonly called 287(g) agreements, and range from dispatching law enforcement to serve ICE administrative warrants to people in local custody, investigative and paperwork duties for ICE, transportation of people from local jails to ICE detention centers, and participation in inter-agency taskforces. These agreements are an entirely separate issue from local jails renting bedspace to ICE on a contract basis. ↩
In Illinois, of almost 500 arrests out of lock-ups in the latter period, at least 100 were from the Metropolitan Correctional Center operated by the Bureau of Prisons in the Loop or another federal facility. Due to ICE providing less detail about custodial arrests for late July to October, we cannot distinguish federal lock-up specific arrests for much of that time period. ↩
Compared to New York, New Jersey had a large share of people arrested that had “pending” criminal charges but no prior criminal convictions between May 21, 2025 and October 15, 2025. In New York, only 13% of people ICE arrested had pending charges but no prior convictions, compared to 34% in New Jersey. Of those ICE arrested in New Jersey that actually had convictions during this time, the most frequent “most serious criminal charge” was merely a traffic offense.
ICE has field offices that cover arrest and deportation operations in different parts of the country. Only New Jersey, Arizona, and Florida have state-specific, statewide ICE field offices. This institutional arrangement may have an impact in terms of partnerships with local law enforcement. Usually, ICE field offices serve more than one state (for example, Chicago’s field office covers six states). ↩
Miller reportedly threatened staff with demotions and termination if they did not ramp up arrests and raids. Immediately thereafter, the Department of Homeland Security began indiscriminate arrests in Washington D.C. and expanded raids on people that were presumed to be undocumented based on their appearance and line of work in large scale operations in Los Angeles. While initial litigation blocked these arrests for a time, this strategy of biased immigration policing was authorized in an order from the Supreme Court, with a notorious concurring opinion by Justice Kavanaugh, earning them the moniker, “Kavanaugh Stops.” ↩
Highlights of our work include exposing the role jails are playing in Trump’s mass deportation agenda, a new report detailing the current state of youth confinement, and a deep dive into discretionary parole systems.
2025 was a challenging year. Not only were many states returning to the failed policies that created the nation’s mass incarceration crisis, but a new administration came to D.C., threatening to use the power of the federal government to make the criminal legal system even worse. The Prison Policy Initiative rose to these challenges, pushing back on and exposing these misguided policies, and continuing to produce cutting-edge research that shines a light on the dark corners of the criminal legal system in America.
Here’s just a taste of some of our most important work this year:
Updates to our bedrock Whole Pie reports
We released the 2025 edition of our flagship report, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie. The report offers the most comprehensive view of the nearly 2 million people incarcerated in the U.S., showing what types of facilities they are in and why. It also included, for the first time, a section that breaks down which states are driving the growth in incarceration. We also released an update to our Youth Confinement: The Whole Pie report, which provides the most up-to-date picture of how many youth are detained and committed in the U.S., highlighting the persistent overincarceration of Black and Indigenous youth in a system that, in recent decades, has made great strides in reducing youth confinement overall.
New resources highlighting how the federal government is impacting the criminal legal system
Since taking office, the Trump administration has issued numerous executive orders and used its bully pulpit and control over federal spending to coerce state and local governments into expanding the size and brutality of their criminal legal systems. To help people make sense of these rapid-fire actions, we released a new tool that tracks the administration’s efforts and connects the dots on its strategy to make the criminal legal system harsher, less effective, and even more unfair. We also released a primer on the traditional role of the federal government in shaping the criminal legal system, to help advocates know where state and local lawmakers can push back on the administration’s actions.
Local jails, even in some sanctuary cities and states, are playing an essential role in President Trump’s mass detention and deportation plan. This report breaks down the complicated overlap between local criminal and immigration systems, and reveals that the Trump administration is circumventing sanctuary policies by referring immigrants to the shadowy U.S. Marshals Service, whose contracts with jails to hold pretrial detainees have often gone overlooked.
Highlights from our advocacy work
While we’re best known for our research and reports, that’s not all we do. In 2025, our advocacy department partnered with dozens of organizations in over 25 states to provide custom research and strategy support to on-the-ground efforts that are transforming our criminal legal system. This year, we testified in legislatures in Massachusetts and Colorado on the importance of protecting in-person visitation in prisons and jails and presented to the Hawai’i Correctional Oversight Commission about the pitfalls of new jail construction. We also presented two webinars, each with hundreds of attendees, that covered how best to interpret recidivism data and how to fight unnecessary local jail construction.
This two-part report pulls back the curtain on parole release systems, providing the most accessible and comprehensive source to date for comparing how these essential — and often dysfunctional — release mechanisms are set up in 35 states. The first part explores the makeup of boards and how they conduct hearings. The second dives into new data on hearings and grants, and the factors that boards consider — including their discretion — in determining whether someone will be released.
Every prison system has a lengthy disciplinary policy laying out the rules incarcerated people must follow, as well as the procedures and punishments they’ll face if they don’t. These policies are supposed to ensure safety, security, and order by deterring and punishing misconduct. In practice, however, prison discipline is a system of petty tyranny with devastating, long-term consequences. Our report, Bad Behavior is the broadest review of disciplinary policies to date, and draws on original research as well as testimony from 47 currently incarcerated people, providing an essential look at how prisons are run in the age of mass incarceration.
In correctional healthcare systems, care is secondary to controlling costs and avoiding lawsuits. For this report, we pored over research, news investigations, government reports, and contractor documents to better understand the “big picture” relationship between healthcare providers, government agencies, and incarcerated people, and to identify system-level targets for improving care outcomes. Importantly, we combined testimonies from incarcerated people in state and federal prisons with this in-depth research and analysis to tell a fuller story of how deeply flawed health care systems are.
This report offers a crucial lens through which to view the criminalization of women, who are a small minority of all incarcerated people in the U.S., but whose incarceration rates today are at near-historic highs. It provides a comprehensive women’s incarceration rate for every U.S. state — including prisons and jails, youth confinement facilities, tribal jails, immigrant detention centers, and other types of incarceration — comparing states to each other and to countries of the world.
Millions of people are arrested and booked into jail every year, but existing national data offer very little information about the actual criminal charges for which they are detained. In this briefing, we worked with the Jail Data Initiative to fill that gap and provide a new “snapshot” of people in jail by offense type using the most up-to-date nationally representative sample available.
Everyone is supposed to have an equal voice in their government’s decisions, but an outdated and misguided Census Bureau policy that counts incarcerated people in the wrong place gives a few residents of each state a megaphone. It is a problem known as prison gerrymandering, and state lawmakers can fix it. We recently released a series of reports focused on states ripe for ending prison gerrymandering — Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Not only do these states have significantly prison-gerrymandered districts, but this problem has a significant impact on their Black, Native American, or Latino residents.
This is only a small piece of the important and impactful work we published in 2025, and our work is far from over. We’ve got big things planned in 2026, when we’ll continue to expose the broader harms of mass criminalization and highlight solutions that keep our communities safe without expanding the footprint of the carceral system.
Pardons are one of the most important powers presidents have. With a swipe of their pen, they can erase a person’s federal criminal conviction, freeing them from prison if they’re locked up, and erasing the collateral consequences that often haunt people even after they’ve served their sentence. 1
The pardon power can help fix injustices in the criminal legal system and be a meaningful tool to reduce prison populations, but, unfortunately, in recent decades, this power has been severely underused.
President Trump, though, has broken with most of his recent predecessors, issuing pardons at a blistering pace since returning to office. In this piece, we take a closer look at President Trump’s pardons to understand what he’s gotten right, what he’s gotten wrong, and what can be done to make the pardon process better.
What Trump gets right about pardons
So far this year, President Trump has issued over 1,500pardons. This is a huge number compared to the most recent presidents.2
However, it is important to remember, while President Trump has used his pardon power far more frequently than most recent presidents, it is still not enough. There are more than 200,000 people in federal custody on any given day. Trump’s 1,500 pardons represent less than 1% of the people locked up by the federal government.3
President Trump is right to use his pardon powers so sweepingly; in fact, to truly impact the criminal legal system, he should use the power more often. However, where the President goes wrong is in who is on the receiving end of these pardons.
What Trump gets wrong about pardons
While some have expressed outrage at President Trump’s recent pardons, the real problem isn’t how many people he has pardoned, but rather that he appears to be reserving that power just for his friends.
The vast majority of people who have been pardoned by President Trump are political and business allies:
On day one of his second term, Trump issued a blanket pardon for people with January 6-related convictions and charges, accounting for the vast majority of his pardons.
In October, the president pardoned billionaire Changpeng Zhao, who has business connections with the Trump family.
It should go without saying, but people should not need a connection to the president to have a shot at a pardon.
Meanwhile, roughly 10,000 people have filed petitions for pardons or commutations at the federal level just this year, and only 10 have been granted. The rest should not be ignored just because they do not have the political sway of Trump’s friends and allies.
Pardoning friends and allies, while ignoring nearly everyone else, isn’t just bad optics. It undermines public confidence in the process and can result in skepticism of future pardon decisions. Presidents are already hesitant to issue pardons; if the public is skeptical, it’ll make use of this power even more rare.
Making pardons fairer and more accessible
In the aftermath of Trump’s actions, some have called for misguided changes that would make pardons even more uncommon. “Reforms” that make a pardon more inaccessible to the average person behind bars are not the solution.
Eliminate the Office of the Pardon Attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and replace it with an independent board of experts who would provide the President with recommendations on who should receive clemency.
Create greater transparency in the clemency process by publicly disclosing Board activities and recommendations.
Protect applicants for clemency from greater prosecution.
Importantly, presidents can only offer pardons for federal crimes — a relatively small portion of the overall number of people behind bars. However, governors can issue pardons for state criminal convictions. They should learn from the steps and missteps of President Trump and use their pardon powers more frequently.
Similarly, advocates should be calling for an expansion of pardons that directly benefits people entangled in the criminal legal system, regardless of their political or economic connections.
Footnotes
Pardons are one of two forms of clemency powers that presidents and governors have. The other, commutations, allows them to reduce a person’s sentence, without eliminating it altogether. To learn more about commutations, see our report, Executive Inaction. ↩
This is not a perfect comparison because some of the people who received pardons from President Trump were not incarcerated or convicted, but it does provide useful context in showing just how small a role these pardons played in reducing the number of people trapped in the carceral system. ↩
