Marking twenty-five years of the Prison Policy Initiative

In our new annual report, we share highlights of our work from the past year while commemorating a milestone anniversary

by Danielle Squillante, September 25, 2026

This year marks a quarter-century since the Prison Policy Initiative was created. When the organization was founded in 2001, criminal legal reform was not a priority issue for most people, despite the nation’s ballooning prison populations. We launched this organization to change that. We wanted to help the public understand the true consequences of mass criminalization and incarceration and to win concrete policy changes that would finally end the era of mass incarceration.

As we celebrate twenty-five years since our founding, we are thrilled to share our 2025-2026 Annual Report with you. In it, we highlight how, over the last year, we continued our legacy of producing cutting-edge research that empowers advocates and lawmakers to secure policy victories. We released 8 major reports, 19 research briefings, 2 new resources in our Advocacy Toolkit, and several briefings related to our campaign to end prison gerrymandering. We also provided technical support to state and local advocates working to push back against local government collaboration with ICE, reform parole release systems, fight jail expansion, and more.

Here are a handful of accomplishments we’re particularly proud of:

• We published an in-depth report that showed, for the first time ever, how local jails are a key part of President Trump’s detention and deportation agenda, along with a guide on how people can push back on this in their local community.
• We updated our groundbreaking report, Following the Money of Mass Incarceration, with new data and graphics showing that, despite historic drops in crime, spending on the criminal legal system — especially the bloated budgets of militarized federal agencies — has grown dramatically.
• We released a two-part report on discretionary parole systems that show how these critical systems for decarceration all too often go underused and deny parole applications based on factors that are beyond a person’s control.
• We put out two publications that detail the growth of community supervision in the U.S. We published an update to our Punishment Beyond Prisons: Incarceration and Supervision by State report, which breaks down how many people are on probation and parole in each state. We also released a briefing that pieces together state-level community supervision data covering roughly the last 45 years to provide a clear view of supervision dynamics in each state, as well as how states compare to one another.
• Our Policy & Advocacy team added two new resources to our Advocacy Toolkit, and hosted webinars on protecting family communication with imprisoned loved ones and resisting carceral humanist narratives when pursuing criminal legal reforms.
• We launched our Creator-in-Residence program to empower and support creators producing videos that expose the harms of the carceral system. Our first resident, Alpha Jalloh, worked with our Communications team to produce a series of videos covering a wide range of issues across the criminal legal system, from the lasting legacy of the failed War on Drugs to the devastating impacts of maternal incarceration.

This is only a snapshot of what we produced this past year. We are proud of our accomplishments and look forward to sharing new projects with you in the year to come.

Note to President Trump: No, 2% of the population doesn’t account for all crime

Crime is more complex than the president claims. Pinning blame on a tiny subset of the population is rhetorically useful, but both crime and criminalization are widespread in the U.S.

by Wanda Bertram, September 15, 2026

President Trump has been claiming lately that 2 percent of the U.S. population accounts for all or almost all crime in the United States. When asked to back up these claims, the White House cites our research showing that 5.6 million people — about 2 percent of the population — are booked into local jails every year.

It will shock few people to hear that this claim is bogus.

Here, we explain why that is and the numerous problems with equating jail bookings with crime. We also discuss the complex social causes of crime that Trump fails to engage with, when he opts to pile blame on a small imaginary group that he says should be incarcerated or banished.

Jail bookings are not directly representative of crime

Trump seems to think that to find out who is committing crime, one can simply look at who is getting arrested. But arrests do not equate to crime. Instead, arrests reflect police decision-making around who to bring to jail. The vast majority of arrests are for low-level offenses, and many people booked in jail are never charged or have their cases dismissed days or weeks later.

Police may bring someone to jail without any intention of them facing criminal charges, like people jailed in order to “sober up,” those arrested for a suspected violation of supervision rules, or people held on material witness warrants. By the same token, many people enter the criminal legal system without ever going to jail. About 13 million people every year pass through the U.S.’s bloated, bureaucratic misdemeanor system, facing punishments like fines and fees even while many are never arrested.

It’s also true that many crimes never lead to someone spending time in jail. Many categories of crimes are underreported. Some major social harms, such as worker and tenant abuse, routinely go unresolved, and when they are addressed, it is usually outside of criminal court. Even among reported crimes, many are never solved or never even lead to an arrest, as indicated by low police clearance rates nationwide.

Crime and criminalization extend far beyond 5.6 million people

In a speech in July, Trump stated that “there’s a statistic that’s incredible. Two percent of the people create 91 percent of the crime.” He continued, “You can handle two percent of the people. We get them out. We get them out.”

It’s clear why Trump wants it to be true that a tiny slice of the population accounts for the vast majority of crime. It’s easy to “other-ize” an imagined handful of super-criminals, whom a general audience can assume have no connection to them or their families.

But the reality of mass incarceration shows us that this isn’t the case. 79 million people in this country (or almost a quarter of the national population) have a criminal record, and of those, 19 million have a felony record. Just as most people are likely to know someone who has been the victim of a crime, most people have some connection to someone who has gone to jail. In fact, as FWD.us has reported, nearly one in every two adults in the U.S. has an immediate family member who has been to prison or jail.

None of this has stopped the Trump administration, however, from acting as though crime is a simple matter that can be fixed by replacing social welfare programs and violence prevention with harsher policing.

Reductive views of crime make social problems worse

What is true about people booked in jails is that they are deeply disadvantaged. As our research from 2019 shows, people in jails are disproportionately poor, unemployed, struggling with physical and mental illness, and lacking health insurance. A smaller subset of this group, who are booked in jails multiple times a year (typically for nonviolent offenses), are even more likely to be low-income and unhoused.

Making living conditions worse for this segment of the population, and ripping away programs that gave them more stability, has unfortunately been a cornerstone of Trump’s second term. The president has axed federal grants for crime prevention programs totaling almost a billion dollars, canceled thousands of grants for mental health and substance use treatment, and decimated funding for permanent supportive housing. Meanwhile, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s sweeping cuts to Medicaid will likely reverse public safety gains and is already hurting reentry programs designed to prevent recidivism.

Under these circumstances, crime and social disorder are likely to get worse, not better. And as many states backslide into punitive “tough-on-crime” policies, like restricting good time credits and parole, it’s worth remembering that harsh punishments may in fact cause more crime. Despite Trump’s rhetoric, policies like mandatory minimums and habitual offender laws — locking people up and throwing away the key — have no demonstrable public safety benefit.

The system, not the people, is the problem

Trump may be hoping that pinning crime on a small, imaginary slice of the population will rationalize making the criminal legal system harsher and defunding sources of support. But crime is more complicated, and the policies he — and many other lawmakers — are pushing are a prescription for backsliding into the worst days of mass incarceration.

These data also highlight an inevitable conclusion: In a nation where nearly a quarter of the population has a criminal record, the problem isn’t its people. The problem is the system.

Inevitable yet ignored: Prison policies disregard the realities of menopause behind bars

Our survey of state and federal prison policies shows just how little institutional attention is paid to menopause-related healthcare and education behind bars, despite the growing population of aging incarcerated women.

by Emily Widra, September 1, 2026

With thousands of women over the age of 50 incarcerated in state and federal prisons, health changes related to menopause should be a significant part of the conversation around prison healthcare.¹ Unfortunately, while advocates and healthcare providers are discussing menopause education, advocacy, and healthcare access, incarcerated women are almost entirely left out of the picture. Their exclusion is particularly troubling because women’s incarceration has grown even more rapidly than men’s, and since 2008, the percentage of women in prison who were 50 or older has more than doubled.²

Given the serious need, what is the state of menopause care and education behind bars? To find out, we reviewed the existing research and, while we found a number of illuminating qualitative research studies about the experience of menopause during incarceration, there are almost no quantitative data regarding symptoms or medical management behind bars. So, we reviewed every state and federal prison system’s policies in search of clues regarding health or educational services that specifically address menopause. Ultimately, we found an alarming lack of institutional policies about a major and unavoidable life stage that a significant portion of incarcerated women will experience. It’s worth noting that just because we did not find any mention in a state’s publicly available policy or other materials does not necessarily mean that there are no menopause-related policies or practices in place in these facilities (and likewise, just because something is written into policy does not mean it is actually practiced in an institution). However, transparency about prison policies, healthcare, and education is crucial — especially for accountability purposes — so we take it as a bad sign that we couldn’t find much information about practices and resources for people experiencing menopause.³

Prison policies frequently ignore menopause

Because the U.S. prison system was primarily designed to incarcerate men, women’s particular healthcare needs are often ignored. Currently, there are no existing national or international standards of care for menopause in prison.⁴

Our analysis of prison policies in every state, Washington, D.C., and the federal Bureau of Prisons produced little information about menopause in department of corrections’ policies, including in policy handbooks specifically for women’s prisons. We found mentions of “menopause” in only ten states’ documentation, and of those, none spell out what medical care, education, or resources prison officials provide to people experiencing perimenopause or menopause.

Of these ten states, only five actually have information explicitly about menopause, while the remaining five states only mention it in the context of other health-related concerns.⁵ In four of these states (Alabama, Alaska, Mississippi, and Oklahoma), the language in these documents suggests that departments of corrections are simply slotting the word “menopause” into vague policy templates⁶ as though it is a preventable condition like pregnancy or a communicable disease like tuberculosis, rather than a distinct physiological inevitability⁷ for half of the global population. Ultimately, none of the documents we reviewed can serve as adequate examples of policies, practices, or recommendations to address menopause-related health concerns for incarcerated people.

Punished, delayed, and dismissed: how prisons neglect menopause

Globally, there are significant gaps in menopause care despite the direct impact this natural part of the aging process has on millions of people each year. Even outside of prison walls, women are frequently dismissed and unsupported by medical providers and face limited access to accurate information about menopause and treatment options, often exacerbated by racial, socioeconomic, and geographic disparities.

While there is little information available on the prevalence of menopausal symptoms in prison, and what menopausal care (if any) is available to the more than 15,000 women who are at least 50 years old in state and federal prisons, we can assume that they face these same — if not more insurmountable — barriers to care as women in the general public.⁸ The existing quantitative research on the subject shows that many women are experiencing serious perimenopausal and menopausal symptoms behind bars, often in combination with multiple chronic health conditions. Imprisoned older Black women — who are overrepresented in prison populations — report “menopause problems” at a higher rate than their incarcerated white peers. The most effective treatment (hormone therapy) has been historically underused, and it’s even more inaccessible for women in prison: in North Carolina prisons, for example, researchers analyzed prescribed medications and found that less than 5% of women in custody were receiving estrogen-containing medications.⁹ While limited, these quantitative studies betray an appalling lack of health and education services regarding menopause in prisons across the country.

Menstruation as misconductPrisons punish people for periods

Meanwhile, a robust body of qualitative research — that is, research focused on experiences, perceptions, and behavior rather than numbers — offers a detailed look at the experience of menopause in prison. The perimenopause and menopause symptoms incarcerated women experience¹⁰ may be the same as those experienced around the world, but the carceral context itself restricts access to common remedies like air conditioning and over-the-counter medications. The findings from these qualitative studies bring to light a number of troubling patterns:

• Lack of education and information. Women are almost entirely reliant on their peers for information about menopause¹¹ and, while peer support is important, it should not be the only avenue for information and care available to incarcerated women. In addition, without the support necessary to help people understand their symptoms, feelings of shame and stigma can and do arise, which can have serious adverse consequences for mental and physical health.
• Delayed identification and dismissal of symptoms. Incarcerated women also lack resources to determine if their symptoms (such as mood changes) are even related to menopause or, for example, a response to the trauma of incarceration. This ultimately impedes their ability to seek healthcare, which can be a long, complicated process in prison as-is. When incarcerated women do seek out medical care, they report that providers and staff dismiss their symptoms as not severe enough to require intervention, or as a ploy to get out of work or obtain medication.
• Prison context and loss of control. On a basic level, prisons restrict individual agency over one’s decisions, actions, and environment. Incarcerated people experiencing menopause describe this loss of control — as well as a lack of privacy — as an impediment to managing their symptoms because they are unable to use common remedies freely (like showers or menstrual products) and do not have full access to their usual support systems and coping skills.
• Discipline and punishment. Incarcerated women describe being punished for symptoms (or their efforts to manage those symptoms), including receiving disciplinary infractions for soiled clothing or bedding. In addition, some women shared a perception that experiencing menopause in prison is, in and of itself, part of their punishment.

Filling the gaps: Kwaneta Harris & the Menopause Project

The growing campaign for menopause research, education, advocacy, and medical care outside of prisons offers a unique opportunity to extend this work behind prison walls. Here, we highlight two significant efforts to do just that: Kwaneta Harris’ personal testimonies and the guide she created on menopause behind bars, and the Menopause Project at Impact Justice, which works to expand education and resources for both incarcerated people and correctional healthcare providers.

Kwaneta Harris, an incarcerated journalist, has shared her experience of perimenopause and menopause behind bars in mainstream media, which closely parallels the qualitative research findings on the subject. “The carceral system wasn’t built for people going through menopause,” Harris explains. “It was built to contain and control, not to care and nurture.” For example, she describes being unable to escape the heat during hot flashes in a prison without air conditioning, a lack of access to home remedies like ice packs or over-the-counter medications, and numerous accusations of being “medication-seeking” or pursuing “special treatment.” She also outlines how little treatment is available: after years without medication, prison medical workers provided her with hormone therapy for two months with no prescription refill, even though menopause symptoms persist for about seven years on average. Harris created a guide to navigating perimenopause and menopause in prison, which The Marshall Project published in July 2026. This guide provides detailed information about what menopause and perimenopause are, what symptoms to expect and when to expect them, how to advocate for medical care during incarceration, what non-medical options may be accessible for symptom relief in prison, and what kinds of medical interventions incarcerated people can pursue.

In California, the Menopause Project has created an extensive program to overcome the lack of information on menopause in prisons, producing physician guides and trainings, educational material for providers and incarcerated people, and “town halls” and workshops to empower incarcerated women to better understand and advocate for their own health. When the Project began this work with the California Correctional Health Care Services, they identified serious issues that likely exist across all U.S. prison systems, including:

• inadequate training for medical providers regarding identification, management, and treatment of menopause-related symptoms;
• an absence of tools for incarcerated people to advocate for their needs for symptom management; and
• outdated provider training opportunities and formulary guidance.

The early results from this program include a number of successes: training sessions for providers, well-attended educational sessions for incarcerated people, greater access to hormone therapy, and the creation of a formal peer support program. Preliminary data collected by the Project suggest that the program improved connections between individuals and necessary medical care, closed the knowledge gap among providers, and greater awareness of menopause and related symptoms among staff and incarcerated women. The Menopause Project is expanding beyond California — currently in Arizona and South Carolina — and other states can partner with them or follow their lead in working with incarcerated women.

Recommendations

Researchers and advocates have an opportunity to help incarcerated women better understand menopause and obtain the treatments they need. Based on the work from incarcerated advocates and the early results from the Menopause Project in California, there are a number of important steps that prisons should take, including:

• education and training for medical providers;
• specialized training for prison staff;
• education and advocacy tools for incarcerated people;
• peer support programs;
• expanding prescription formulary to include hormone therapy, antidepressants, and other updated, evidence-based treatments; and
• research and evaluation of implemented programs.

These changes need to be standardized and incorporated into correctional policies to promote equitable access to menstrual healthcare and resources, as well as promote transparency for incarcerated people, their loved ones, and the public about healthcare in carceral settings.