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.