Gov. Abbott’s bail proposals would make communities less safe, drain taxpayer dollars, and worsen racial disparities

The proposals before the Texas legislature would dramatically increase the state's already bloated jail populations.

by Sarah Staudt, May 14, 2025

This week in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott and conservative lawmakers are trying to change the state constitution to enshrine the worst features of the current bail system. These proposals, if passed and then approved by voters, would cause a rise in Texas’ already bloated jail populations. As a result, more people will be detained in private prisons out of state, taxpayers will be saddled with huge expenditures, and public safety and public health will get worse.

Disturbingly, proponents of these measures are calling them “bail reform” when in fact they are the exact opposite. “Bail reform” generally refers to the effective policies enacted around the country to make bail processes fairer and to reduce pretrial jail populations. A system of wealth-based detention that determines who should be in jail based on how much money they have in their bank accounts is an illogical and ineffective policy. Efforts to change or eliminate these money bail systems in Illinois, New Jersey, and elsewhere have been highly successful, have not led to rises in crime, and have saved communities countless millions of dollars in bail payments.

Texas conservatives are proposing to do the opposite. The proposals would make it mandatory in many cases for judges to hold people until their trials without bail, and in other cases would require the use of monetary bail in situations where people are currently being released without needing to pay any money. It is vital that Texas legislators and voters oppose these regressive policies, and that activists around the country understand the negative impacts of these kinds of changes to bail systems.

Overusing pretrial jailing undermines fairness and harms public safety and public health

Decades of research shows that growing the pretrial jail population is a mistake that will harm the justice system, public safety, and public health. There is ample evidence that lower jail populations do not harm public safety. Moreover, the overuse of pretrial jailing destabilizes both the individuals who are incarcerated and their communities, stoking the root causes of crime and harming public safety in the long run.

Individuals in custody are affected in a variety of negative ways by pretrial jailing. People incarcerated pretrial are more likely to:

• lose their jobs and experience housing instability;
• commit suicide, and are more likely to overdose after release;
• become re-involved in the criminal legal system in the future, as measured by long-term re-arrest rates;
• fail to appear in court;
• be convicted and be sentenced to longer jail and prison terms, worsening prison overcrowding and mass incarceration as a whole.

Overuse of pretrial jailing also harms the fairness of the criminal legal system as a whole by worsening racial disparities and disproportionately impacting women. People in poverty and Black and brown people are less likely to be able to afford bail, and bails are set at higher rates for Black and Latino people. Women are also less likely to be able to afford monetary bail when it is set (even though bail is set at lower amounts for them). Black people are less likely to be released on their own recognizance and more likely to be detained without bail. Texas already imprisons Black people in jails at disproportionate rates, and expanding pretrial jailing is likely to worsen that problem.

A deeper dive into the regressive bail package

The package of regressive measures being pushed in the Texas legislature consists of three parts (known as SJR 5, SB 9 and HB 75, and SJR 1). The exact language of these measures has been changing daily, but the core problems of each provision remain the same.

SJR 5 expands no-bail jailing without due process

SJR 5 would change the Texas constitution to allow detention without monetary bail for a wide variety of charges. The United States Supreme Court has been clear for decades that detention before trial, particularly without bail, should be a “carefully limited exception.” The federal government and states that have reduced or eliminated monetary bail, like Illinois and New Jersey, have tried to ensure that no-bail detention is “carefully limited” by restricting the charges for which it can be used and enshrining important due process protections in the law. However, Texas’ recent proposals would expand jailing without these careful limitations.

Although the exact provisions of SJR 5 are changing almost daily, many of the drafts have lacked key due process protections. It is vital that any version of SJR 5 that advances includes basic provisions that ensure that detention decisions are fairly made and that jail is only used as a last resort. Some of those key provisions would include:

• Limiting the availability of no-bail detention only to serious, violent cases, rather than allowing it in broader categories of charges;
• Ensuring that everyone who may be jailed without bail has access to counsel.
• Ensuring that prosecutors be held to a high standard of proof that a person will pose a danger to others — “clear and convincing” evidence, rather than simply a “preponderance” of evidence.
• Requiring that detention based solely on risk of fleeing the jurisdiction hinges on whether someone is likely to willfully flee prosecution. If no-bail detention is allowed based solely on whether someone is likely not to appear in court through no fault of their own, it will increase the unnecessary detention of poor and unhoused people, who sometimes struggle to find transportation and other resources necessary to appear for their court dates.
• Requiring that jail only be used if there is no less restrictive set of conditions that could protect the public. No-bail jailing should always be a last resort, and should only be used if there are no other alternatives.

Without these key due process protections, increasing no-bail detention is likely to lead to more people being held in jail longer, increasing jail populations without improving public safety.

SB 9 and HB 75 entrench the use of monetary bail

While SJR 5 seeks to increase the number of people held without bail, SB 9 and HB 75 seek to use monetary bail even more often than it’s currently being used. These bills would undo progress that has been made in reducing the use of monetary bail in Texas localities like Harris County.

SB 9 and HB 75 would require the use of money bail in many cases, including misdemeanors. Currently, people are often released on these charges without having to pay money. A particularly disturbing set of cases included in SB 9 and HB 75 are so-called “terroristic threat” cases. Although these charges sound very serious, they actually include any threat to people or property that causes an official or volunteer emergency agency to respond. This can include misdemeanors that often are charged against school-aged children because of social media posts. Including these non-violent charges in the set of charges where money bail will be required will do nothing to improve public safety — but it will ensure that poorer accused people are stuck in jail more often.

These bills also create procedural barriers that will prevent people from being released pretrial in a timely fashion. As we have noted, even one day in jail can lead to a range of negative outcomes. First, the proposals restrict the ability of magistrates and law hearing officers to set bail, and these kinds of decision makers play a key role in how large municipalities make bail decisions quickly. Second, it allows prosecutors to unilaterally prolong detention even when a judge intended to set an affordable bail. Prosecutors would be allowed to appeal these decisions, claiming that bail was set too low, and strand people in custody while the appeal is pending.

SJR 1 targets immigrants with mandatory jailing

The last provision in this regressive bail package combines the harms of the immigration system with the harms of the criminal legal system, requiring no bail detention for a group of people the proposal refers to as “illegal aliens.” The definition of “illegal aliens” has changed in various drafts of the proposal, but includes DACA recipients (so-called “dreamers” who entered the United States as children) and asylum seekers. Because criminal legal system statistics are not broken up by immigration status, it is impossible to estimate how many people this will affect, but it will certainly have a disproportionate impact on Texas’ Latino residents.

Because the proposal requires detention even in non-violent cases, judges will be barred from considering individual facts and circumstances. As a result, they will end up detaining people who do not pose a threat to anyone or who are charged with weak cases that are unlikely to lead to a conviction. Even when a judge decides that a person can be safely released to await trial in the community, the law will overrule that judgment and require them to send the accused person to jail. In other words, the measure ties the hands of the very people who are entrusted with the responsibility of ensuring that the criminal legal system is administered fairly. Judges hearing individual cases — not legislators in Austin — should make these decisions.

SJR 1 would also unnecessarily burden Texas taxpayers and local governments with the cost of incarcerating undocumented people who, under current law, would instead be detained by the federal government. Under federal law, many undocumented people charged with a wide variety of crimes are already required to be held in immigration detention. By requiring no-bail detention in their criminal cases as well, SJR 1 shifts the burdens and costs of incarcerating those people from the federal government to local jails — all without providing any additional funding to localities to absorb these costs.

Regressive bail policies will worsen Texas’ already out-of-control pretrial jailing crisis

Texas cannot afford to adopt these regressive policies. The state is already well above the national average for incarceration rates overall, and its pretrial jail population has been rising steadily for decades. This creates a serious overcrowding problem in Texas jails; 41% of Texas counties already send incarcerated people to other counties or states while awaiting trial. Harris County alone spends more than $50 million per year on out-of-state jail contracts. These expensive arrangements are often made with private prison companies, costing Texas taxpayers more money while enriching private corporations. To be clear, this problem cannot be solved by building bigger jail facilities — in most cases, it is a lack of staff, not a lack of bed space, that leads counties to outsource pretrial incarceration.

Expanding pretrial jailing will also cost lives. Deaths in jails are on the rise across Texas, and the situation is worsened when people are sent out of state, since those facilities do not have to follow standards set by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, nor do they have to follow death reporting and investigation rules.

Lawmakers are voting on these proposals in the next few days, and there are real opportunities to stop them from moving forward, or to push for important revisions that strengthen due process protections. There will also be an opportunity for Texans to voice their opposition to SJR 5 and SJR 1 at the polls if they do advance past the legislature. Texas deserves true reform measures that seek to reduce harmful pretrial jailing, rather than so-called “tough-on-crime,” anti-immigrant measures masquerading as “bail reform”.

100 days of the Trump administration rolling back progress in the criminal legal system

Today, we released a new tracking tool that shows the full scale of the crisis unfolding in communities and behind bars, and a new resource page for folks looking to learn more about the repression and detention of undocumented immigrants.

by Mike Wessler, April 30, 2025

With the first 100 days of President Trump’s second term complete, today, we released a new tracker on our website that highlights the ways the administration is making the criminal legal system larger, harsher, and less effective. The new tool, which will be updated regularly, highlights the ways that the administration is eviscerating the rule of law, undermining solutions that reduce incarceration and improve community safety, encouraging the use of extreme sentences and harsh law enforcement tactics, making prisons and jails worse, and reducing transparency in the carceral system.

Actions from the administration have come so fast that it has been nearly impossible to keep track of them all. This new tool connects the dots on these actions to show that they’re not individual policy choices but instead part of a larger strategy that doubles down on the failed policies that created the nation’s mass incarceration crisis in the first place.

The tracker also explains that, while the federal government directly controls only a relatively small slice of the American carceral system, the administration is using its bully pulpit and control over federal spending to coerce state and local governments into expanding their criminal legal systems and making them even more brutal.

Additionally, today we released a new resource page on our website that focuses on the intersection of criminal and immigration law, often referred to as “crimmigration.” While we include immigration detention in our broad view of mass incarceration, it is not our primary area of expertise. For those looking to learn more about the crimmigration crisis, we have compiled resources from experts and organizations directly focused on immigration on this new page.

The new federal policy tracker is available at: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/federaltracker.html

The new crimmigration resource page is available at: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2025/04/30/crimmigration_resource_roundup/

This new tracker and resource page are just the first steps in our organization’s commitment to create tools, data, and resources for advocates, lawmakers, and journalists as they work to push back on this new crisis in America’s criminal legal system.

Crimmigration resource roundup: Where to find data and resources on the criminalization of immigrants

A list of valuable online resources from organizations and agencies focused on immigration detention.

by Prison Policy Initiative, April 30, 2025

The current presidential administration is hellbent on making life difficult, if not impossible, for immigrants in the United States. Following through on campaign promises of mass deportation, Donald Trump has directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to raid neighborhoods and workplaces or otherwise expedite the removal of hundreds of thousands of people² who are in the country under various programs. This is an escalation of the troubling, decades-long merger of criminal and immigration law, sometimes referred to as “crimmigration.“ The government’s treatment of immigrants as criminals — from policing and criminally prosecuting them to incarcerating them in oppressive detention centers — raises profound concerns about due process, constitutionality, and the humane treatment of people.

About 48,000 immigrants¹ are languishing in immigration detention centers, local jails, private prisons, and other facilities like hospitals and hotels. Tens of thousands more are in federal prisons and local jails, primarily for simply entering the country; thousands more are children, in shelters, awaiting permanent placement. Add to this the hundreds of people from Venezuela that the U.S. has now disappeared to a mega prison in El Salvador, arguing it has no duty to provide them due process, and no power or responsibility over what happens to them next.

These numbers provide only a glimpse at the complex web of immigration detention, but they’re important given the many false narratives and misinformation filling the airwaves. It’s more important than ever to know where timely, reliable data exist about immigration detention and advocacy efforts to end the unjust confinement and removal of people and families who enter the U.S.

While we include immigration detention in our broad view of mass incarceration, it is not our primary area of expertise. For those looking to learn more about the crimmigration crisis, we’ve compiled several resources from experts and organizations directly focused on immigration. These lists are far from exhaustive and resources listed in no particular order; if there are others you think we should know about, please get in touch via our contact form.

Information and statistics about immigrant detention and removal

• The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) is an essential resource for immigration data and summary reports about trends in immigration detention. (It also offers data and analysis on other federal agencies and issues.)
• Freedom For Immigrants, an organization working to abolish immigration incarceration, maintains a detailed interactive map on immigration detention, with data points like ICE field offices, companies that contract with ICE, and deaths in ICE detention.
• The federal agency itself, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), maintains the following data, though it should be approached with a measure of “data skepticism”:
  • ICE’s Detention Statistics dataset is updated twice per month and contains detailed data about people in custody, where they’re confined, the number of people on electronic monitoring or other surveillance technologies,³
    and other metrics like length of stay and segregation. (Scroll down to the bottom of the linked page to find the download links for the most recent data and previous year-end reports.)
  • ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) statistics dashboards present the agency’s arrest, detention, removal, and expulsion data in a more interactive format, and include information about country of citizenship, how many people had a criminal conviction or pending charges, and changes over time.
  • ICE publishes lists of both active and pending 287(g) partnerships — those state and local law enforcement agencies who voluntarily report the immigration status of people in their custody to ICE, and carry out other immigration functions on ICE’s behalf.

Immigration advocacy efforts (national-level)

• The National Immigrant Justice Center, which has been providing legal services, research, and advocacy for over 40 years, has a lot of information on its website for those interested in how immigration intersects with mass incarceration, legal representation, the LGBTQ+ community, and other topics.
• Similarly, the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, which engages in policy advocacy as well as training and support for legal advocates, has compiled a number of policy maps, explainers, toolkits, model policies, and other timely resources for advocates on its Immigration Enforcement webpage.
• Detention Watch Network has comprehensive overviews of immigration detention issues, from family detention to ineffective oversight and the laws, quotas, and financial incentives that keep immigration detention centers filled.
• United We Dream has an extensive library of resources ranging from guides and fact sheets to webinars and livestreams.
• The Black Alliance for Just Immigration has compiled all immigration-related executive actions from the Trump administration, with clear explanations of what they entail and how they may impact Black immigrant communities.
• The Pioneer Valley Workers Center, an organization of low-wage immigrant workers in western Massachusetts, has advice for those looking to set up a “rapid-response network” of volunteers and services that can provide immediate assistance during immigration crackdowns and workplace raids. Though originally published in 2018, this resource remains relevant today.

Analysis and commentary

• César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is a writer, law professor, and fierce advocate for a just and functional system of immigration laws. In addition to authoring three books about crimmigration, he maintains a newsletter, Immigration Law Unhinged, which has been tracking the Trump administration’s actions.
• Syracuse Professor Austin Kocher also writes a helpful data-focused newsletter with insights about immigration data and policy, as well as tips for data literacy for people working with official immigration data published by ICE.
• John Washington is a journalist and author of The Case for Open Borders, which exposes the dangers and lost creative potential of closed national borders, and makes the case for drastically rethinking how we approach borders.
• A recent Truthout article details the embrace of increased immigration detention by jails and private prisons across the country.
• In These Times, a monthly news magazine focused on politics and the economy, has published an opinion piece on the current blitz on immigrants and others who merely express ideas counter to the current administration.
• Silky Shah is a longtime immigrant justice organizer and currently the Executive Director of Detention Watch Network. Her writing can be found in several media outlets, but her book Unbuild Walls is a thorough primer on the intertwined systems of immigration and incarceration.
• Debunking misinformation is just as helpful as putting out accurate information. The American Immigration Council has done just that, with a fact sheet amassing dozens of studies all showing plainly that there is no connection between immigration and crime.
• The Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, put out this helpful explainer on why immigration is beneficial to the U.S. economy, busting myths about how immigration impacts jobs, taxes, housing costs, and more.
• Migrant Insider provides regular coverage and analysis of immigration news with a special focus on happenings ‘inside the Beltway’ — i.e., in Congress, the executive branch, and more.
• Jess Pishko’s Posse Comitatus newsletter is an indispensable resource on sheriffs, who play a unique and important role in immigration enforcement. One recent article examines Florida as “ground zero” for Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

Resources for immigrants, journalists, attorneys, and educators

For immigrants, “Know your rights” resources are all over the internet. These are some we found to be the most valuable:

• United We Dream published a Preparedness Packet of essential documents and key legal information to keep in a safe place, in case of immigration emergencies.
• Muslims for Just Futures has a free double-sided poster print-out with guidance on how to handle an unexpected visit from immigration law enforcement.
• Freedom for Immigrants‘ Resources page contains contact information and answers to common questions about immigrant detention and legal assistance.
• The National Immigration Law Center has a library of FAQs, fact sheets, and one-pagers about immigration enforcement and the rapidly changing policies and executive orders impacting immigrant communities.

Journalists, attorneys, and educators may find these additional resources helpful:

• Freedom for Immigrants has specific resources for journalists covering these issues.
• The Immigrant Legal Resource Center is a treasure trove of resources for attorneys and legal advocates, offering legal trainings, practice manuals, technical assistance, and other educational materials, including timely, responsive guidance about new policies and practices. In addition to serving legal advocates, they publish resources for directly-impacted people and community advocates.
• The National Immigration Project trains thousands of attorneys each year to ensure high-quality legal representation for immigration. Their library of resources for attorneys includes practice advisories, quick guides, and summaries of relevant case law.
• For educators, we suggest checking out this robust toolkit from the Children Thrive Action Network, which features a wide range of resources for helping children and families facing deportation, preparing communities to respond to workplace raids, and educating the public and lawmakers about the impact of immigration enforcement on children.
• The Zinn Education Project offers educators several role play lessons to help students think critically about immigration, particularly in historical context.
• The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, “strongly encourages schools and school districts to adopt a Safe Zones policy that outlines what educators, and staff should do if ICE attempts to engage in immigration enforcement at school.” It offers a toolkit for creating these protections.

President Trump said, “home-growns are next.” Here’s our response.

President Trump’s recent comments about sending Americans to a Salvadoran prison mark a new, dark turn in the fight to end mass incarceration.

by Prison Policy Initiative, April 17, 2025

Standing in the Oval Office on Monday, just before members of the media were ushered into the room, President Trump said to President Bukele of El Salvador, “Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.”

Those “home-growns” he’s talking about, they’re United States citizens. They’re you and me.

Those “five more places” he asked the Salvadoran dictator to build, they’re “prisons”¹ like the one where the Trump Administration has already sent hundreds of immigrants, many of whom were snatched off the streets and shipped off without due process. This includes Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whom the Trump administration has refused to bring back to the United States, defying a unanimous order from the Supreme Court.

The actions of the Trump administration against immigrants in this country, many of whom were here legally, are an unconstitutional human rights violation. At Prison Policy Initiative, we know that we are not experts in the immigration system in the United States, and as such, have so far deferred to the amazing organizations, experts, and advocates leading the fight against these policies. Trump’s words make clear that a different approach is needed from us.

Our mission at Prison Policy Initiative is to provide facts, research, and data about the ways mass incarceration harms residents of the U.S. — and not just those behind bars.

After these comments, we’ve been asked by countless people to weigh in on the steadily increasing signs that Trump is working to deport and incarcerate U.S. citizens to El Salvador. However, the truth is that there are no facts or data to provide context for this situation.

American presidents have done some really heinous things, and while these injustices provide clues about what we can expect next, they are not exact parallels to the threat that every resident of the U.S. currently faces.

American and Salvadoran prisons have more in common than you think. They’re large, brutal, costly, and don’t make communities safer. They destroy the lives of the people ensnared in them and the lives of their families. Both countries incarcerate similar numbers of people per-capita and both of their prisons serve as a death sentence for many inside. It is important to note, though, that the American system has at least the guise of due process and legal standards for facilities — such as prison conditions, oversight, and transparency — while this Salvadoran facility does not. Sending U.S. residents to far-flung prisons without due process would be a dramatic escalation of our country’s already misguided policies.

Those three words — “home-growns are next’ — should send a chill down the spine of every person in the country.

We don’t know exactly what Trump and his subordinates are planning. He’s made clear that Attorney General Pam Bondi is exploring the legality of incarcerating American citizens in another country. All credible legal experts agree that doing so would be unconstitutional.

But as we’ve already seen, the Trump administration doesn’t see the Constitution as an impediment to its actions. So there is little doubt that once the administration recognizes it can’t find a legal rationale for deporting U.S. citizens, it will surely make one up out of thin air.

In his remarks, he indicated that he was talking about deporting “violent people.” Perhaps this is an attempt to assure people that his unconstitutional plan to deport American citizens won’t go too far. But the truth is, many so-called “violent” crimes don’t actually involve physical harm. In some states, even drug offenses are deemed a violent crime.

The simple fact is that law enforcement can spin nearly any criminal accusation to be a “violent” offense in the U.S. criminal legal system. There is little doubt that if given the chance, the administration would warp the definition of “violent crime” beyond its already sagging bounds.

Of course, some apologists will attempt to assure the American people that as long as they don’t commit a crime, they have nothing to be afraid of. But does anyone really doubt that Trump is planning to use the full force of law enforcement to go after those who displease or oppose him? For months, he has said he wants do just that. This would make it so any act he doesn’t like would put you at risk of deportation to a Salvadoran prison, without due process and the opportunity to defend yourself in a court of law.

You would think that a president convicted of multiple felony offenses, which he insists are politically motivated, would be more attuned to the risks of such political prosecutions. But you’d be wrong.

Those three chilling words — “home-growns are next” — signal a dark pivot for our country and a dramatic expansion of the already devastating criminal legal system.

For an organization that prides itself on its ability to use visualizations and clear language to make sense of the goings-on in the criminal legal system, we are, for perhaps the first time ever, left at a loss for what to say.

But just because we’re at a loss today, doesn’t mean we’re sitting on the sidelines. Over the coming weeks, months, and maybe even years, as this crisis unfolds, we’ll be here:

• When we can provide data and analysis, we’ll share them with you.
• When we can elevate the voices and actions of experts and organizations in areas that are outside of our expertise, we’ll point you to them.
• And when there are opportunities to take action, we’ll tell you about them and be by your side.

We don’t know what comes next, but we’re in this fight with you.

Seven facts about mass incarceration that sound like April Fools’ Day hoaxes, but aren’t

Fines for suicide attempts, prisons built near toxic wastelands, the overwhelming number of people in the system…it's hard to believe, but it's true.

by Wanda Bertram, April 1, 2025

We at the Prison Policy Initiative are in the business of making America’s draconian, exploitative, sprawling incarceration system more obvious to everyone. The basic facts of mass incarceration are easy to grasp when laid out in, say, a pie chart. But there are other elements of the criminal legal system that never stop boggling the mind — even for us.

For April Fools’ Day, here are seven facts about incarceration and supervision that are as hard to believe as they are hard on people in the system:

Prisons and jails maintain “welfare funds” that are supposed to benefit incarcerated people, but often use the money to shore up their budgets or spend it on treats for themselves.

When incarcerated people and their loved ones pay for phone calls or commissary goods, it creates revenue for companies, which kick back some of the money to the facilities themselves. This money is funneled into “inmate welfare funds.” But what happens to it then? In our report Shadow Budgets, we revealed that prisons and jails often use the funds not for special purchases on behalf of incarcerated people, but to shore up their own operating budgets — or even to pay for perks for themselves.

In one county — Dauphin County, Pennsylvania — the local paper exposed the jail using its welfare fund for purchases as inappropriate as fitness trackers and gun range memberships for staff.

For more, see the original story from PennLive.

One-third of state and federal prisons sit within three miles of federal Superfund sites.

Research warns against living, working, or going to school near Superfund sites — the most toxic places in the country — as this proximity is linked to lower life expectancy and a litany of terrible illnesses. But many incarcerated people have no choice. With many prisons located near toxic wastelands, people in prison all too often develop health problems: For instance, in western Pennsylvania, a state prison located on top of a coal waste deposit has led to skin rashes, sores, cysts, gastrointestinal problems, and cancer.

The average yearly income of someone in jail pretrial is less than $20,000.

Nearly half a million people are sitting in a local jail awaiting trial. Their average yearly income hovers just under $20,000, meaning that it’s easy to keep them locked up by imposing cash bail (the median bail amount for people detained on bail who are accused of felonies is $25,000). Women and Black people in jail have even lower incomes on average, making them even more vulnerable to being stuck in pretrial detention, which can very quickly lead to losing one’s job, losing custody of children, forgoing medical appointments, and so on. And pretrial detention doesn’t just throw someone’s life into chaos — it makes it more likely that they will plead guilty just to get out of jail.

Felony convictions may not disqualify someone from being president, but they still block people from jobs like bartending, car sales, and pest control.

19 million people in America have felony records. And occupational licensing requirements, the standards and rules that govern who can work in certain professions, often explicitly exclude anyone with any felony conviction. These rules thus lock millions of people out of jobs like nursing, sales, bartending, and firefighting, no matter the details of their conviction — making it much more likely that formerly incarcerated people will end up in low-paying, itinerant jobs rather than stable employment.

You can’t help but ask: If someone with a felony conviction isn’t barred from becoming president, why should they be barred from all of these positions that have far less power and responsibility?

Many of the 2.9 million people on probation have to take regular drug tests — which they often must pay for — even those whose convictions have nothing to do with drugs.

In our report One Size Fits None, we combed through probation rules in 76 jurisdictions and found that 62% of those places require all people on probation to submit to regular drug tests. Not only is drug testing dubiously effective in advancing any public safety goals; the rules mean that even if someone’s conviction had nothing to do with drugs, they have to get tested anyway. Worse, many of these jurisdictions make people on probation pay for their own tests, at a cost of between $15 and $20 per test (often multiple times a week).

Several state prison systems slap financial sanctions on people who attempt suicide or harm themselves.

Not only do most prisons coerce incarcerated people to pay copays to see a doctor; some actually make people pay the prison back for costs incurred through acts of self-harm. Iowa, Georgia, Nevada, and New Mexico’s policies on disciplinary fines state that incarcerated people can be made to reimburse the state if they attempt suicide or hurt themselves in prison, an environment known to aggravate mental illness. In Virginia, corrections staff recently discussed financially penalizing people who self-immolated in protest last year.

Nearly half of all Americans have an immediate family member who has been incarcerated.

FWD.us reports that 113 million adults, or 45% of all adults in America, have had an immediate family member locked up for at least one night. These figures underscore that while having a criminal record — or even having an incarcerated loved one — carries heavy stigma in this country, it is an incredibly common experience. Making the criminal legal system fair and just is not something that impacts a select few; it’s directly relevant to our friends and neighbors.

And 10 things you shouldn’t believe

While these facts about incarceration are hard to believe but unfortunately true, there are also a number of myths floating around about the criminal legal system. Head over to our recent report Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2025 where we bust 10 common myths about incarceration the far too many people do believe. We cover the exaggerated impact of private prisons, phantom “factories behind fences,” the crime waves that weren’t, and more.

Resource spotlight: UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project leads the way in prison mortality statistics

There is less transparency about prison deaths than ever before. A new central resource aims to bring carceral mortality data out of the shadows.

by Leah Wang, March 24, 2025

For almost 20 years, from about 2000 until 2019, the federal government offered at least some idea of how many people across the U.S. die in prisons and jails each year, thanks to the Death in Custody Reporting Act (DCRA). But for the past six years, policy changes have left researchers, journalists, and advocates on their own when it comes to learning of deaths in custody.¹ Prison and jail mortality data — now irregularly published by the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) — are now far less detailed, and consistently underreport deaths.²

Fortunately, a passionate team of data-wranglers at UCLA Law — an extension of the invaluable UCLA Law Covid Behind Bars Data Project — has shifted their focus to report on all-cause mortality in state and federal prisons, filling the void left by the DCRA implementation turmoil.

Given the current administration’s values and priorities, it’s reasonable to expect less criminal legal system data transparency from federal agencies over the next few years, not more. At a time when the public is paying increasing attention to what happens behind bars, we highly recommend checking out academic and grassroots resources like the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project (we’ve curated a list of others at the end of this post).

Tracking prison deaths

Led by two of the country’s leading scholars on prison and jail conditions, UCLA Law professors Sharon Dolovich and Aaron Littman, the Behind Bars Data Project is “the country’s most comprehensive public resource tracking prison deaths nationwide.” Project team members tirelessly submit public records requests, compile and web-scrape publicly-available mortality data, and work with partner organizations to pull together data by state. The website allows users to examine deaths in each state’s prisons, with helpful context like the total prison population and a calculated crude mortality rate for recent years.

This screenshot from the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project website shows how users can compare prison death counts and rates across states.

Even with all the hard work of the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project team, not all jurisdictions are forthcoming with all aspects of mortality data, such as the name, race, or sex of those who have died, where they died (i.e., inside a cell, a medical unit, or an outside hospital), or the circumstances of their deaths. Helpfully, each state’s Data Reporting Summary indicates what details each state has made available.

The team is also analyzing the mortality data, examining possible drivers and correlates of prison deaths such as restrictive housing (also known as solitary confinement), racial disparities, length of incarceration, and other factors. They anticipate completing more research, blog posts, and peer-reviewed publications in the near future.

Prison deaths in context: Using the data to demand transparency and change

A wide swath of academics, journalists, and advocates have been utilizing UCLA’s mortality datasets for a few years at this point. (We, for example, wrote extensively about the COVID-19 pandemic ravaging prisons and jails using the team’s data). Data users are urging lawmakers and correctional officials to implement common-sense reforms, like releasing medically vulnerable and/or elderly people from prisons, overhauling bail practices to reduce jail time, and improving access to medical care and basic life-sustaining measures like air conditioning and adequate food in prisons. Meanwhile, some of the mortality data being published by states are heavily redacted and limited, so some advocates are simply asking for more transparency and stronger reporting systems.

As the Behind Bars Data Project team continues to collect and analyze prison mortality data, they also have plans to look more broadly at measures of the health of people in carceral institutions using creative sources of information on healthcare access, expanding our collective understanding of how incarcerated people contend with illness and death in “death-making institutions.” As we at the Prison Policy Initiative are among those working to shed more light on correctional health issues and the inadequate healthcare in prisons and jails, we are excited for what’s to come from the Behind Bars Data Project.

For further reading, check out some other valuable resources on justice-involved deaths:

• Reuters’ investigation of jail deaths in 2020, which led to the largest and most comprehensive database of jail deaths to date;
• The Washington Post’s database of police shootings, covering over 10,000 fatal police shootings from 2015 to 2024;
• A front-page article from The New York Times on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on prison deaths, which prominently featured the work of the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project;
• Ongoing investigations by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on scores of deaths and tight-lipped corrections officials in the Georgia prison system;
• A multi-year data collection effort of facility-level prison deaths in Louisiana led by law professor and leading expert on prison conditions Andrea Armstrong;
• Finally, Ida B. Wells, who courageously tracked extrajudicial lynchings in the late 19th century, leading to her statistical bombshell, A Red Record.

Danger in the water: Report exposes widespread water contamination in Texas prisons

Thousands incarcerated in Texas’ prisons may have been exposed to lead, arsenic, and other dangerous contaminants.

by Emmett Sanders, March 14, 2025

An organization in Texas has sparked concerns with a new report finding that the water in many of the state’s prisons is likely dangerous to drink. Texas Prisons Community Advocates (TPCA) is a grassroots advocacy organization whose work (like their 85 to Stay Alive campaign) focuses on exposing dangerous and inhumane prison conditions. Their new report examines the results of water samples taken from the state’s prisons by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), the state’s agency for environmental oversight. TPCA examined publicly available records of samples that were taken across 16 Texas prison water systems between 2019 and 2023. Overall, dangerous metallic and bacterial contaminants including lead, arsenic, e. coli, and more were detected in more than 90 samples. Thanks to this report, a bill (SB 1929) has already been introduced in the Texas legislature that would require more frequent and thorough water testing in Texas prisons.

The study was spurred by dozens of letters TPCA have received from incarcerated people detailing unaddressed concerns and suspicious illnesses. The major findings of the report include that:

• 38% of TDCJ water systems sampled tested positive for lead.
• Arsenic, which can cause skin, bladder, and lung cancer, as well as Copper, Coliform, and E. Coli were also found in multiple TDCJ water systems across the state.
• Of the 16 TDCJ water systems sampled, 15 received notes of violations from the TCEQ between 2019 and 2023.
• Overall, the study estimates more than 30,000 incarcerated people may have been affected by contaminated water in the 16 TDCJ water systems sampled alone.

The findings here echo those of other studies and reinforce what advocacy groups like Fight Toxic Prisons have long been saying: Prisons are built in ways that prioritize confinement over environmental safety for the people they confine. Water contamination in prisons is particularly problematic as incarcerated people rarely have the means to follow boil orders and are often given insufficient amounts of water during crises. Bottled water can be unavailable or cost-prohibitive. This can leave many with no choice but to drink, prepare food with, and bathe in water with contaminants that can cause cancer, kidney and liver failure, and death. Last year, in recognition of the right of people in prisons to be free from environmentally hazardous conditions, members of Congress introduced the Environmental Health in Prisons Act, a bill that would offer greater protections, increase oversight, and improve conditions for federal prisoners.

No prison sentence should include being forced to drink contaminated water, and neither incarcerated people nor their families should be forced to deal with long-lasting consequences that can not only undermine their physical and mental health, but can economically devastate families and communities as well. Access to clean water is a human right that must be honored for people behind bars.

Prison Policy Initiative’s Advocacy department is proud to have supported TPCA in their efforts to expose the prevalence of contaminated water in Texas prisons by helping to locate data, navigate data sources, review drafts, and provide graphics and other support like one-page fact sheets of the report’s findings. If you are a community-based advocate or legislator and would like to speak to the Advocacy department about helping with a criminal legal system reform project, please use our contact form and select the topic “Organizations and elected officials looking for advocacy assistance.”

For further information on environmental hazards in prisons, consider the following resources:

• Heat, floods, pests, disease, and death: What climate change means for people in prison
• Prisons are a daily environmental injustice

A New Billion Dollar Jail Will Leave Hawai’i Worse Off

At the request of the Hawai’i-based Reimagining Safety Coalition, the Prison Policy Initiative examined the state’s plans for a new jail and found serious issues.

by Regan Huston, February 27, 2025

On Thursday, the Hawai’i-based Reimagining Public Safety Coalition released a new analysis by the Prison Policy Initiative that closely examined plans to build a new correctional facility to replace the current O’ahu Community Correctional Center (OCCC). The memo found serious flaws with the proposed construction that would undermine public safety, exacerbate racial disparities, and worsen existing staffing problems.

The 17-page memo argues three key points:

1. Pretrial incarceration is overused in Hawai’i, causing harm to the public. A growing body of research shows that using jails to incarcerate people pretrial not only undermines the presumption of innocence, but also causes lasting harm to public safety and public health.
2. Jail expansion would exacerbate existing racial disparities in Hawaii’s criminal legal system. Hawaii’s criminal legal system disproportionately affects Native Hawaiians and other non-white minority groups. Building a new, nearly billion-dollar jail not only risks entrenching existing harmful criminal legal system practices, but also uses money that is desperately needed to improve the lives of Native Hawaiians and others in the community.
3. Building a new jail is unlikely to decrease the harms caused by pretrial incarceration, and is likely to make existing staffing problems worse.When new facilities are built without a change in the personnel delivering services inside, existing harms persist. Moreover, many of the harms caused by jailing are a result of the very fact of being removed from family and community, regardless of the conditions inside.

The memo also points out that the current plan for the jail ignores straightforward measures that could be used to reduce Hawaii’s jail population, many of which are actually cited in the Forecast Report, including:

• Changing how it deals with technical violations of probation. In January 2025, 21% of OCCC’s population were there for technical violations, such as missing appointments or not notifying a probation officer of a change of address — things that are not crimes in any other context. This is a huge percentage in comparison to other municipalities.
• Decreasing the pretrial population of its jails by implementing bail reform. As of July 2024, 61.7% of the people detained at OCCC were pretrial detainees who have not been convicted of a crime. Many of these people are there simply because they’re too poor to pay their bail.

The memo explains that with ample opportunities to lower its jail population, Hawai’i is in a strong position to decrease the number of jail beds it needs. Decarceration is the solution that is most likely to promote public health and well-being, manage staffing problems, and provide a better justice system for Hawai’i residents.

Is your community seeking to build a new jail or expand the capacity of its existing facility? We’re happy to help you push back on their arguments (drop us a line to tell us about your fight). There is no need to wait, though. We have created a how-to-guide with tips for pushing back on “jail needs assessments” that local leaders put together to justify the construction and provide strategies for pushing back on false or misleading arguments they’re making.

Federal prison rules push for “financial responsibility” while impoverishing people

Proposed changes to the Inmate Financial Responsibility Program by the Bureau of Prisons risk pushing incarcerated people and their families further into poverty

by Danielle Squillante, February 20, 2025

This week, along with the National Consumer Law Center and expert Stephen Raher, we submitted comments on the federal Bureau of Prisons’ updated proposed rules for its Inmate Financial Responsibility Program (IFRP). These rules, which we first wrote about when they were proposed in 2023, are purported to be aimed at ultra-wealthy people in federal prisons who amassed unusually large amounts of money in their commissary accounts while failing to pay legal fees and restitution. However, they’re written so broadly that they’d make the lives of the vast majority of incarcerated people and their loved ones, who are generally poorer and from disadvantaged backgrounds, much more difficult and threaten their success after their release from prison.

The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has adjusted the rules since they were first introduced to make them slightly less punishing, but they still would have a devastating effect on incarcerated people and their families. Under these rules, the BOP would:

• Garnish 10% of wages earned by incarcerated people, which can be as low as $0.12 per hour.
• Take half of the money in an incarcerated person’s commissary account that is in excess of $250 as a one-time seizure of funds at their initial classification meeting.
• Through a series of complex and legally dubious formulas, seize a portion of the money that incarcerated people receive from their families and friends, making it even more difficult for incarcerated people to meet their basic needs behind bars.

Although the Bureau addressed some of the more egregious elements of the rules as initially drafted, the proposed changes to the IFRP are a misguided response to the false concerns that incarcerated people are hoarding money in their commissary accounts while refusing to pay legal debts. The Bureau reviewed data on commissary accounts and found that as of December 2024, only 2% of commissary accounts had balances greater than $5,000 while approximately 77% of commissary account balances were $249.99 or less. The overwhelming majority of people incarcerated in federal prisons are struggling to afford basic necessities — not living a life of luxury behind bars.

Proposed changes to the IFRP further burden incarcerated people and their families

People incarcerated in state and federal prisons were, before they went to prison, some of the poorest people in the country — and incarceration only pushes them further into poverty. In federal prisons, incarcerated people who are working earn between $0.12-$1.15 per hour. These meager wages don’t begin to cover the range of costs associated with being incarcerated, which include commissary, communication costs, and medical co-pays, to name a few. Most people, whether they have a work assignment or not, rely on outside support to meet their basic needs.

The rules ignore how frequently incarcerated people rely on items purchased from commissary to meet a range of needs throughout the entirety of their sentence. Almost everything in prison has a price tag, even for people who are considered indigent, and products are often marked up to prices far above what someone outside of the prison walls pays. Additionally, because prison meals are typically poorly portioned and of low quality, incarcerated people often rely on commissary to supplement their diet. They also rely on it for basic writing materials, basic hygiene items, clothing and shoes, religious items, and electronic devices such as fans. These additional expenses were not factored into the Bureau’s thinking on these rules but constitute a considerable cost to incarcerated people.

The proposed changes to the IFRP are particularly concerning now that the Bureau of Prisons has ended its pandemic-related phone policy of providing 500 minutes of free phone calls to incarcerated people. As of January, phone calls cost $0.06 per minute, while video calls usually cost $0.16 per minute. Although some people are eligible for free phone calls up to 300 minutes if participating in First Step Act-related programming, other families of incarcerated people will have to manage this added expense to remain connected to their loved ones.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 57% of people incarcerated in federal prisons have one or more dependent children. The incarceration of a parent or caregiver results in the potential loss of family income while creating additional costs for the family to manage — often making it difficult for families to meet their basic needs. Numerous family members of incarcerated people submitted public comments stating how difficult it would be for them to shoulder additional costs as they are already struggling financially. The proposed rules will further burden incarcerated people and their families — but they don’t have to.

An alternative approach that meets the Bureau’s goals

Rather than adopting these new rules, in our letter, we recommend an alternative approach that accomplishes the goals of the program without further burdening incarcerated people and their families. Key provisions of our recommendations include:

• Protect incarcerated people who have commissary account balances that are less than the federal poverty level from having their money seized.
• Shield incarcerated workers from having their wages garnished unless and until they earn at least the federal minimum wage.
• Exempt incarcerated people from IFRP participation for at least two years prior to reentry, given the numerous costs associated with transitioning back into the community.

The overwhelming majority of people in federal prisons and their support systems on the outside are struggling to meet their basic needs. The updated proposed changes to the IFRP are less severe than the slash-and-burn approach to debt collection they initially took, but they would still push incarcerated people and their families deeper into poverty. We urge the Bureau of Prisons to consider our alternatives to their proposal.

New guide and webinar: Challenging myths about recidivism

by Wanda Bertram, February 13, 2025

Decision-makers often cite worries about recidivism as a primary reason to oppose criminal legal system reforms. These worries are caused by both the concept of the “revolving door” of incarceration and by politicians’ fears that a single violent recidivism event will hurt them politically. The realities of recidivism, though, are complex, and the more advocates know about the facts of how many people return to prison and what those numbers mean, the better equipped they can be to help politicians make informed decisions about policy.

Earlier this month, we released a new guide to recidivism statistics and their history, and how advocates for decarceration can challenge the way these flawed statistics are used to undermine their efforts. The new guide covers:

• The history of the “Willie Horton Effect,” why the power of political backlash against reform is overhyped, and how advocates should respond when lawmakers are swayed by isolated stories of recidivism.
• The different types of recidivism metrics and what they mean, how and why to be cautious about commonly-cited statistics, and the role of “technical” probation and parole violations and minor offenses in driving recidivism.
• Recidivism statistics related to people convicted of violent/sexual offenses, in the context of common arguments for “carving out” these individuals from criminal legal reforms.
• How advocates can push lawmakers to consider other metrics of post-release success besides recidivism, focusing on a person’s quality of life and contributions to their community.

This guide is part of our ever-expanding Advocacy Toolkit, a series of resources for criminal legal reform advocates based on our own research and advocacy.

On March 19, 2025, we hosted a webinar where our policy and advocacy team, Sarah Staudt and Emmett Sanders, discussed pushing back against unproductive and inaccurate uses of recidivism stories and statistics.