We at the Prison Policy Initiative write our reports with journalists in mind, since journalists play a critical role in bringing harmful aspects of the criminal legal system to light. We also sometimes produce resources geared toward journalists covering the system, highlighting issues worth covering and offering tips for investigations.
To put a bow on this work, this morning, we released our Journalist Toolkit, a living webpage aggregating the resources on our website that we think reporters would find most helpful. Journalists new to our work may find this annotated list a useful first stop on our website. We’ll add to this page in the coming months and years as we publish resources and guides on different topics. For now, we include guides about reporting on:
Deaths in custody
Parole release
Disciplinary systems behind bars
The bail industry
Prison and jail “inmate welfare funds”
“Gag rules” silencing prison staff
If you’re a journalist with a specific story or question you’re looking for help with, you’re also welcome to reach out to us directly through our contact page.
This month, the Prison Policy Initiative submitted public comment on a proposed rule change by the Illinois Department of Corrections to begin scanning all incoming mail, giving incarcerated people only electronic or print copies instead of the original, physical mail. This rule change would permanently deny incarcerated people an essential lifeline connecting them to their communities.
In September, the Department of Corrections appeared before the Illinois Joint Committee on Administrative Rules (JCAR) to request an emergency rule change to start scanning mail, arguing it would reduce the flow of drugs and other contraband into prisons. Committee members were rightly unconvinced, but despite their objections, the department is now trying to make mail scanning permanent.
Although it’s becoming more common, mail scanning is not a reasonable or effective response to drug contraband in prison. There is no evidence that physical mail is a main avenue for drugs entering prisons; to the contrary, there is ample evidence that drugs and other contraband are often smuggled into facilities by staff. Notably, mail scanning has not decreased overdoses in states that have implemented it; for example:
30 people died from drugs the year after mail scanning was implemented in Missouri prisons. Meanwhile, overdoses have not only continued but they have increased.
Positive tests for drugs in Pennsylvania’s prisons nearly tripled in the five years following the move to mail scanning.
It’s well understood that contact between incarcerated people and their families is essential for the well-being of people in prison, their children, and their communities. Letters in particular have been found to have important mental health benefits, especially for those in crisis. Stripping access to physical mail further imperils thousands of people incarcerated in Illinois, in no small part because the state prison system has repeatedly failed to fix its broken mental health care services.
Instead of cutting people off from a valuable lifeline, Illinois should join states like Nevada in recognizing the importance of physical mail in prisons. Ultimately, protecting the right of incarcerated people to receive letters from their loved ones is humane and makes Illinois safer in the long run.
People in Illinois may submit written comments on the proposed rulemaking during the 45-day First Notice Period, which ends on November 24, 2025. Submit written comments to DOC.ProposedRulemaking@illinois.gov. You can also share your written comments directly with JCAR staff at jcar@ilga.gov. For more details, read our full public comment here.
This post was updated on November 7, 2025 to include a link to the FCC’s order, and updating the table of rate caps, which changed slightly between the FCC’s proposed order and the final order.
On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission voted to increase phone and video calling rate caps for incarcerated people, changing the rules that it adopted last July and then suspended earlier this year. The new rate caps hike prices by as much as 83% compared to the rates announced last year.
Phone and audio calling rates
2024 Rate Cap
2025 Rate Cap
Percent Change
Rate Change
Prisons
$0.06
$0.11
83%
$0.05
Large Jails (1,000+)
$0.06
$0.10
67%
$0.04
Med. Jails (350-999)
$0.07
$0.12
71%
$0.05
Small Jails (100-349)
$0.09
$0.13
44%
$0.04
Very Small Jails (50-99)
$0.12
$0.15
12%
$0.03
Extremely Small Jails (0-49)
$0.12
$0.19
58%
$0.07
Video calling rates
These tables were originally compiled and the rate changes calculated by the UCC Media Justice Ministry in their fact sheet about the proposed FCC order. We updated the rates and calculations based on the final FCC order released November 7, 2025.
2024 Rate Cap
2025 Rate Cap
Percent Change
Rate Change
Prisons
$0.16
$0.25
56%
$0.09
Large Jails (1,000+)
$0.11
$0.19
72%
$0.08
Med. Jails (350-999)
$0.12
$0.19
58%
$0.07
Small Jails (100-349)
$0.14
$0.21
50%
$0.07
Very Small Jails (50-99)
$0.25
$0.25
0%
-$0.00
Extremely Small Jails (0-49)
$0.25
$0.44
76%
$0.19
The FCC issued rules last year — as required by the Martha Wright-Reed Fair and Just Communications Act — bringing unprecedented relief to families who, all too often, were forced to choose between the cost of communicating with their loved ones behind bars and meeting basic everyday needs. After issuing the rules, the FCC received complaints from phone companies, sheriffs, and state attorneys general. Bowing to this pressure, the agency suspended its 2024 ruling and calculated new rate caps, which inflate the rates and impose new costs on families.
Phone companies and sheriffs challenged the 2024 rules, claiming that they made it unprofitable for companies to serve certain very small jails, as well as to offer call monitoring technology — previously given to jails as a kickback. Neither the companies nor the FCC have ever published any data to back up these claims.1 Nevertheless, the FCC adjusted its calculations to:
Incorporate all “safety and security” costs (such as call monitoring and surveillance services) into rate caps;
Add a 2¢ “facility fee” to all rate caps;
Create a new tier of “extremely small jails” with fewer than 50 people, where rate caps will be higher.
The FCC also added, at the eleventh hour, a 6.7% “inflation factor,” which increased most of the rates in its proposed order from October by one or two cents per minute.
The final rate caps are much higher than those passed in 2024. However, in a rare piece of good news, the FCC will reinstate two parts of its 2024 ruling: the ban on site commissions (kickbacks that companies give to facilities) and on ancillary fees, both of which had had the effect of inflating the final costs families paid.
Ultimately, these higher rate caps further burden incarcerated people and their families, while lining the pockets of companies and facilities.
Facilities still have a choice
The new rate caps are set to go into effect as soon as the order is published in the Federal Register, although facilities will have 120 days to come into compliance.
It’s worth noting that the rate caps instituted by the FCC represent the legal maximum that prisons and jails can charge for phone service. The new rate caps are higher than what many facilities were charging even beforethe 2024 rules, and in the few months when those rules were in effect, thousands of facilities across the country implemented them successfully.
It is up to each individual jail and department of corrections to decide whether it will keep these lower rates — which guarantee more family contact and thus reduced recidivism — or choose to raise them, imposing the cost of call monitoring technology and other perks from companies onto families struggling to stay connected.
Footnotes
The FCC has only been able to cite one example — out of Baxter County, Arkansas — of a sheriff actually ending phone service because of the 2024 rules. Phone provider PayTel claims that the 2024 rules made it cost-prohibitive to serve a handful of small jails in New Mexico, but attorney Stephen Raher dug into these claims and found shaky evidence to support them, as described in an FCC filing. ↩
In our new annual report, we share examples of how we are building on the foundations of our research and visualizations to meet the challenges of this moment
We wrapped up another productive year at the Prison Policy Initiative, and are thrilled to share our 2024-2025 Annual Report with you. We released 5 major reports, 24 research briefings, 2 new resources as part of our Advocacy Toolkit, and several briefings related to our campaign to end prison gerrymandering. We also provided technical support to advocates at the state and local levels working on issues such as fighting jail expansion, making prison visitation a right, and water contamination in prisons.
Here are a handful of accomplishments we’re particularly proud of:
We published an update to our flagship Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie report detailing the scale of mass incarceration in the U.S.
We released reports tackling two of the most consequential issues for incarcerated people — prison disciplinary systems and prison health care. Using a combination of deep analysis and first-hand accounts of these systems, we peeled back the curtain to show how these systems traumatize incarcerated people both physically and mentally.
As part of our campaign to end prison gerrymandering, we produced 5 reports that highlight the scale and impact of prison gerrymandering in Oklahoma, North Carolina, Louisiana, West Virginia, and Kansas.
Through our partnership with the Jail Data Initiative, we published 3 briefings utilizing present-day data from roughly 900 jails to provide a better understanding of those who are criminalized and locked up. Our briefings focused on the criminalization of unhoused people, the demographics of people booked into jails multiple times, and offense data for people in local jails.
We expanded our focus on federal criminal legal system policy and launched our new federal tracker that connects the dots of the Trump administration’s actions to show its larger strategy of doubling down on the failed policies that created the nation’s mass incarceration crisis in the first place.
Our Policy & Advocacy team hosted 3 webinars on organizing legislative testimony from incarcerated people, pushing back against unproductive and inaccurate uses of recidivism stories and statistics, and fighting back against jail expansion.
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.
With every sheriff’s office, department of corrections, district attorney, and police department armed with its own media relations team, the news cycle is all too often stacked toward the status quo when it comes to criminal legal system issues. How can advocates for system reform have their voices amplified — and their priority issues covered — without overworking themselves to get the media’s attention? And how can advocates frame issues in ways that resonate with journalists?
On September 18th, the Prison Policy Initiative and the Center for Just Journalism hosted a webinar to help advocacy organizations home their media strategies and get attention on critical issues. Panelists Wanda Bertram of the Prison Policy Initiative and Hannah Riley of the Center for Just Journalism provided guidance on how small organizations can make the most of their limited resources and staff capacity. They covered:
The lay of the contemporary news media landscape and basic tips for interacting with journalists;
The strategic benefits of building relationships with reporters, and how advocates should select reporters to reach out to;
How to have informal conversations with the media that can influence the news cycle, as well as write formal pitches that can lead to news clippings.
Last month, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at forcibly locking unhoused people experiencing mental health crises or substance use disorder in involuntary commitment in state psychiatric hospitals.1 Here’s the issue with that measure: it is nothing more than an attempt to disguise criminalization as care.
The order directs the federal government to find ways to encourage and empower states to force unhoused people experiencing mental health or substance use issues into involuntary commitment facilities.
These state psychiatric hospitals aren’t typically run by departments of correction, but they are in reality much like prisons. At least 38 states also allow involuntary commitment for substance use disorder treatment, and evidence suggests that these supposed “treatment facilities” are not effective. Notably, it can be extremely difficult for these “forensic patients” to be released as they may remain hospitalized for decades or for life.
Involuntary commitment is not only legally and ethically dubious, but it also fails to deliver on the very objectives that justified its creation.
Contradicting cuts
Notably, in the first five months of his second term, Trump has gutted social programs that have been proven to reduce crime and keep people off the street.
First, the administration slashed $11 billion from addiction and mental health programs, a move that will lead to increasing prison and jail populations. Then, it targeted Housing First programs, a method that has been proven effective at getting and keeping people off the street, by giving them access to housing without conditions. And, last month, Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” came with an ugly reality: Steep cuts to Medicaid that will leave 10 million people uninsured, making it nearly impossible for them to access mental health care or substance abuse treatment.
With the safety net shredded, what will happen to the people who desperately need care? In many cases, they’ll be put straight into actual prisons and jails, which are never appropriate places for treatment.
Prisons and jails are often viewed as de facto mental health and substance abuse treatment providers, but the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Rates of mental illness are exceptionally high among incarcerated people, and these facilities fail to meet the demand for help. More than half of the people in state prison reported having a mental health problem, yet only 26% received professional help since entering prison.
Based on 2019 data from the National Survey of Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) from SAMHSA, approximately 8% of people over the age of 12 met the criteria for a substance use disorder, and 41% of people who had been arrested in the last year met the criteria for a substance use disorder. In 2016 (the most recent year for which the Bureau of Justice Statistics published national prison data), 47% of people in state and federal prisons met the criteria for a substance use disorder in the 12 months prior to their most recent prison admission.
Not only are prisons and jails unable to treat mental health problems, but they can also create them. Incarceration itself is traumatizing and can inflict serious mental damage on people. Violence behind bars is inescapable and can result in post-traumatic stress symptoms, like anxiety, depression, avoidance, hypersensitivity, hypervigilance, suicidality, flashbacks, and difficulty with emotional regulation.
Prisons and jails are not treatment centers for substance use disorders, either. In fact, these facilities punish drug use far more than they treat it. People who have been arrested or incarcerated have higher rates of substance use disorder than the general population. And, disturbingly, only 1 in 10 people in state prisons with substance use disorders received treatment.
Jails, which tend to have even fewer resources, are also not suited to offer care. The most effective treatment options are the least accessible for people with opioid use disorder: Just 19% of jails initiate medication-assisted treatment for people with opioid use disorder.
Behind bars, people don’t have access to the care they need – and upon release, they’re often left worse off than before incarceration. Formerly incarcerated people are almost 10 times more likely to be homeless than the general public. And, being homeless makes formerly incarcerated people more likely to be arrested and incarcerated again, creating a revolving door.
Attacks on people experiencing homelessness
The reality is that there is an inextricable link between housing, mental illness, drug use, and criminalization. Yes, people experiencing these vulnerable situations often need care — but forcibly hospitalizing them is not the solution.
Instead, the U.S. must embrace Housing First. This method offers housing with no strings attached. It recognizes housing as the first step in responding to homelessness, rather than something to work toward. It also does more than simply put a roof over people’s heads; it gives people the space and stability necessary to receive care, escape crises, and improve their quality of life. Research shows that this approach keeps people housed and improves attitudes and outlook on life.
Conclusion
In the last year, there have been rampant attacks on people experiencing homelessness – and this executive order is the latest example. It’s a bad move that will result in far more people locked up simply because they’re experiencing homelessness, mental health crises, or substance use issues. Gutting proven solutions that make communities safer — like community-based care, Housing First, and harm-reduction efforts — seems to be a pattern with the administration.
The good news is that state and local governments don’t have to help this misguided effort. The federal government will certainly dangle funding to entice them to implement these policies, but they have the ability to say no. If the money comes with these types of strings attached, it isn’t worth the cost.
Footnotes
Pres. Trump’s executive order uses the term “civil commitment.” However, for many the term “civil commitment” refers to the involuntary commitment of people convicted of sex-related crimes after completing their prison sentences. For clarity, in this piece we will be using the term “involuntary commitment” to refer to the President’s proposed actions. ↩
Parole systems in America are failing. They’re inaccessible, they’re hard to navigate, they grant parole for far too few people, and those who are paroled are often set up to fail.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Prison Policy Initiative has partnered with the MacArthur Justice Center’s National Parole Transformation Project to produce Principles for Parole Reform. This document features 16 guiding principles for advocates to consider when pushing for parole reform in their jurisdictions. Drawing from our own extensive research and advocacy experience, and created with guidance from advocacy organizations across the country, this document reflects dozens of conversations with those most impacted by unjust parole policies: currently and formerly incarcerated people and their families.
The principles cover key areas of parole such as access and eligibility, preparation and process, criteria considerations, parole board composition, revocation hearings, and more. Each principle includes an explanation of why these reforms are necessary, as well as concrete examples of common-sense policies that advocates can draw from when working to implement change.
The problems with parole
Discretionary parole allows states to periodically review incarcerated people’s circumstances with the goal of releasing people who can safely return to their communities. Parole is a vital tool for decarceration, but in its current form, it usually does not achieve its goals.
At its core, discretionary parole is a recognition of the fundamental humanity of those in prison: a promise that, in our society, people are more than their worst moments. However, the distance between the promise of parole and its reality is vast. Parole processes are a minefield of racial disparities, opaque processes, over-politicization, and little representation or assistance for those hoping to make it to the other side of decades of incarceration. Access to parole is limited in some states and nonexistent in others. Where it exists, the process is so complicated and restrictive that only a fraction of those who apply are granted release. Others apply over and over again only to be denied, often for subjective reasons or for things they cannot change. The result of this flawed system is the same throughout the country: Broken promises and prisons bursting at the seams with people who could be safely released.
To learn more about the need for parole reform in the US, please read:
These 16 principles aim to make parole fairer, more accessible, and more transparent for everyone.
We know that varied political realities mean different reforms are possible in different states. Nevertheless, we hope that the principles we offer in this document will serve as a useful guide for advocates across the country looking to close the distance between the promise of discretionary parole and the reality. The 16 principles are listed below, and are explained in more detail on MacArthur Justice Center’s website.
16 guiding principles for parole reform
Every incarcerated person should have access to parole release systems.
When someone is eligible for parole, there should be an enforceable presumption of release, and parole boards should be required to use forward-looking, objective criteria to justify why release is inappropriate, rather than requiring incarcerated people to justify their fitness for parole.
Parole boards should be required to adhere to consistent, clear guidelines about how to make parole release decisions. People denied parole should have the opportunity to challenge the basis on which their denial decision was made.
Parole should be granted or denied based on forward-looking, objective factors within the control of the incarcerated person, and should focus exclusively on how a person has grown, changed, or been productive since being incarcerated, rather than the underlying crime of conviction.
When a person is denied parole, they should be given specific, actionable changes that they can make to increase their chances of parole in a future hearing. Parole boards should then honor these efforts and grant parole when people have satisfied previously stated requirements.
When a person is denied parole, they should be able to appear before the board again for reconsideration within a reasonable amount of time.
People who are up for parole and their loved ones and supporters should have the ability to attend parole hearings and speak to the parole board on their behalf.
People should have access to counsel at parole hearings and be provided competent, effective, and free counsel that adheres to best practices for indigent defense if they cannot afford it. People should be provided with resources and support to prepare for their parole hearings.
Parole Boards should be diverse in their backgrounds, and should include community-based practitioners trained in psychology and rehabilitation, trauma experts, people who are formerly incarcerated, and other experts with the ability to fairly and objectively evaluate candidates for parole. People with backgrounds in law enforcement and corrections should not be the majority of parole board members.
Parole Boards should be required to release information publicly about their decisions, including grant rates, the reasons for denial of parole, length of setbacks, and demographic and charge information of people who appear before the parole board.
Imposition of conditions, including supervision fees, should be an individualized process that begins with the presumption of no conditions and allows for the removal of conditions that are no longer serving a purpose.
People on supervision should have a variety of options for how to check in that allow for minimal disruptions to the re-entry process.
Supervision should not be indefinite; no person should be on supervision for the rest of their life after parole release.
Parole boards must ensure the due process rights of people facing revocation are protected, including the right to counsel and other safeguards to ensure fair hearings.
People on supervision should not be returned to prison solely for non-criminal conduct.
The amount of time that can be revoked should be capped and proportionate to the seriousness of the violation.
Join the effort
If your organization works on parole reform and would like to sign on to these principles, you can do so through MacArthur Justice Center’s National Parole Transformation Project’s website.
In August of 2020, Demmerick Brown, a man incarcerated in Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison, went to the prison barbershop to get a haircut and a shave. This was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and naturally the barber asked Mr. Brown to remove his protective mask so he could shave his face. The next day, Mr. Brown received a disciplinary ticket fining him $15 for failing to wear a mask.
After a perfunctory disciplinary hearing, Mr. Brown had the money deducted from his trust account. Then, he sued, alleging that he had not been afforded appropriate due process before having his money taken. But the District Court found that he wasn’t entitled to due process. The court said that this was because $15 was too small an amount of money to trigger constitutional protections.
What the court failed to understand is that $15, while just being the cost of a sandwich outside prison walls, represents dozens or hundreds of hours of labor inside, and people rely on the money they make behind bars to fill their basic needs and contact their families.
In 2024, the Prison Policy Initiative filed an Amicus Curae brief in a suit filed by Rights Behind Bars, who represent Demmerick Brown. In our brief, we drew on our years of work studying the economics of life behind bars to help the Fourth Circuit understand that $15 inside doesn’t mean the same thing as $15 does on the outside.
On Tuesday, the Fourth Circuit rightfully reaffirmed that incarcerated people deserve due process rights when their money is taken away from them. The opinion cites our brief, concluding that, “Fifteen dollars may be a sum of small consequence outside prison walls, but it is of great significance within them: the amount is more than a week’s worth of wages at Red Onion State Prison where Brown is incarcerated.”
This is one important step in recognizing the lived experiences of people behind bars, and their constitutional rights.
From providing testimony to completing custom research projects, the Prison Policy Initiative is available to help work on projects across all stages of the criminal legal system. Learn more about the work our advocacy department does here, and drop us a line if we can help.
We’re excited to announce that Jacob Kang-Brown has joined our team as a Senior Researcher. In this role, he’ll research and write briefings and reports, help develop new projects, and provide additional support for the research team’s use of large datasets and quantitative analysis.
Before joining Prison Policy Initiative, Jacob was a Senior Researcher at the Vera Institute of Justice where he specialized in analyzing incarceration trends. His work has appeared in The Lancet Public Health, The New York Review of Books, Contexts, SSM-Population Health, The Atlantic, Dissent, USA Today, and American Jail Magazine, in addition to the Vera Institute of Justice. He holds a PhD in Criminology, Law & Society from the University of California, Irvine and bachelor’s degree from Wheaton College (Ill). Jacob has also worked for Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles and the L.A. County Commission on Human Relations.
For decades, calls for new jail construction were largely accompanied by “Tough on Crime” rhetoric that ignored the fact that jails often house the most precariously situated members of our society. While these dehumanizing narratives persist, in many places jail construction has taken a carceral humanist turn that depicts cages as places of care and compassion and the jail as a service provider for those with mental health or substance use support needs.
This is just one of the ways in which arguments for new jail construction have evolved over time, leading communities to spend millions and sometimes even billions of dollars on new jail construction, even as public safety initiatives are being viciously defunded. Fortunately, those on the frontlines who oppose new jail construction have evolved their own arguments and have developed new strategies to push back.
On June 11, 2025, Prison Policy Initiative brought together a panel of activists who have pushed back against jail expansion in communities from Atlanta, Georgia, to Sacramento, California, all the way to Oahu, Hawai’i. We discussed how arguments for new jail construction have shifted over time, went over some useful strategies and tools for responding to these arguments, and talked about how our advocacy department can help support efforts to challenge new jail construction in your area.
