"ReEntry" was created by formerly incarcerated people to communicate the contradictions, difficult decisions, and unexpected events that make staying out of prison nearly impossible for people under community supervision.
It’s not easy leaving prison. Most people go through the reentry process with little to no preparation, planning, or support and face a barrage of rules that turn everyday activities into trapdoors to incarceration. But because many people have no idea what it’s like to live under supervision, it’s easy for the media, politicians, and law enforcement to capitalize on the fiction that recidivism rates1 reflect personal – and not institutional – failure.
The “ReEntry” simulator presents a variety of no-win dilemmas that people on probation have to navigate on a regular basis. In this screenshot, you have to decide which presents a bigger risk: missing an appointment with your probation officer or missing work.
In “ReEntry,” you have seven minutes to navigate life on probation while adhering to the terms of your release. Unfortunately, three violations of your probation conditions will send you back behind bars. Such non-criminal or “technical” violations are a significant engine of incarceration for people on probation and parole and, indeed, the system as a whole: supervision violations account for 42% of prison admissions nationwide.
You start the simulator with $60 in your pocket and instructions to meet with your probation officer at regular intervals. But within seconds of your journey, the simulator asks you to “spin the wheel,” which presents you with difficult decisions and circumstances out of your control — many of which pose imminent threats to your freedom. Your $60 disappears quickly, of course, as various fees and everyday costs start to pile up.
For example, the simulator demonstrates how, in many states, a single monthly probation fee would eat up your entire $60, and you’ll be hit with a violation if you can’t pay. What happens when a traffic accident blocks the road on your way home, and you miss curfew? Do you spend your last few dollars getting an ID or try to wing it without one? Do you take your friend’s under-the-table job offer and make the money you desperately need, or turn it down to avoid being punished for unreported income? These scenarios demonstrate the contradictory nature of reentry and shed light on the artificial roadblocks facing those simply trying to get their lives on track.
Soon, it’s time for your appointment with your probation officer. They’re running behind, but you can’t afford to be late for work. Do you wait for your meeting, or do you leave for work? As the simulator continues, it becomes clear why, in states like Colorado, two-thirds of people who had their probation revoked in 2019 had at least one missed appointment (as compared to less than a quarter of those who successfully completed probation).
Reentry is an inherently insecure and uncertain experience; you never quite know which twist or turn might lead you back to jail or prison. Spinning the wheel is, on some level, a profound metaphor for the lack of control and agency afforded to criminalized people.
We’ve run through the simulator dozens of times and have yet to successfully navigate probation—a taste of how “unwinnable” it is for people in the system. Anyone who spends time with “ReEntry” will find themselves feeling frustrated and defeated because that’s the experience of being under supervision. Give it a try and see if you can make it through unscathed.
Footnotes
Recidivism rates are an often-used but problematic measure; there are various definitions and none of them say much about any actual risk individuals pose to public safety or their likelihood of success after release. ↩
New report highlights actionable solutions that will shrink the size of the carceral system, promote public safety, and take action on racial inequities in the system.
November 29, 2023
Today, as lawmakers across the country prepare to return to state capitol buildings for their 2024 legislative sessions, we released our annual list of high-impact, legislative reforms that are ripe for victory in the new year. These 32 reforms will reduce the number of people behind bars, make communities safer, and take steps to address long-standing racial inequities in the system.
Each reform provides critical context about the problem it seeks to solve, points to high-quality research on the topic, and highlights solutions and legislation that have already been implemented in other states.
The list is not intended to be a comprehensive platform. Instead, we’ve curated it to offer policymakers and advocates straightforward solutions that would have a significant impact without further investments in the carceral system. We particularly focused on reforms that would reduce the number of people needlessly confined in prisons and jails. Additionally, we selected reforms that have gained momentum in recent years, passing in multiple states.
We sent this list to over 600 lawmakers, in all 50 states, from all political parties, who have shown a commitment to reducing the number of people behind bars in their state and making the criminal legal system more just and equitable. As they craft legislation for the upcoming legislative sessions, this list will provide them with actionable solutions to some of the most pressing challenges their states’ criminal legal system faces.
Requiring people on supervision to avoid others with criminal legal system contact can actually hinder their success in the community. We found that it’s common for probation and parole agencies to impose these “association” restrictions, tearing apart critical social networks and threatening to lock people up for harmless — and even helpful — interactions.
For the 3.7 million people on parole or probation in the United States, the very people who can best support their success are often unable to help because of supervision conditions that prohibit them from being in contact. Individuals reentering their communities on probation or parole often rely on support networks of family and peers who have been through similar reentry experiences.1 Though research supports the unique benefits of these social connections, many states actually prohibit people on supervision from this contact, under the false assumption that it will lead people into criminalized behaviors. These “association” restrictions — sometimes called “no-association conditions” — are isolating and costly to those on supervision. And the stakes are high: Failure to follow association restrictions can result in incarceration.
In prior work on probation and parole, we’ve referred to more widely known, difficult-to-satisfy supervision conditions — like securing employment and paying relentless fees— as examples of why supervision doesn’t “work” for so many people and too often results in incarceration for “technical” violations. In this briefing, we add to this work by compiling the most thorough research and data on association restrictions to date. We show that, despite their illogical foundations and documented harms, they are imposed on hundreds of thousands of people (and impact many others) at any given time. If states and local jurisdictions truly want people on supervision to succeed, they should acknowledge and ultimately abandon association restrictions.
Someone paroled from prison or ordered to probation must navigate the world underneath burdensome and unrealistic rules. Association restrictions may prohibit people on supervision from communicating, working, or living with family, friends, or other community members with a criminal history. If an officer or judge finds they have violated this rule, they could be sent back behind bars. In many states, a parole or probation officer can cut someone off from “associating” with any particular individual at all, due to their wide discretion under state statutes and supervision contracts. (Image by Kevin Pyle.)
Parole and probation conditions outlaw crucial relationships
Research suggests that association-related release conditions are common in parole and probation. These restrictions are relics of antiquated supervision systems that required people under their control to live virtuous lives, “be good,” and associate with “good people.” They generally prohibit interactions between people on supervision and large swaths of the population, such as those with felony convictions or others on probation or parole. As a result, people must steer clear of certain places altogether, producing a complex web of prohibited activities and relationships that make it even harder to find housing and work, arrange for transportation, participate in treatment programs, or otherwise succeed in reentry.
“Standard” and “special” supervision conditions
Learn about the differences between the two
Parole and probation typically come with a set of “standard” conditions or rules that are mandatory for everyone regardless of their crime or circumstances. These often include obeying the law and maintaining contact with a supervision officer, but also may include irrelevant mandates like drug testing even for people whose conviction was unrelated to drug use. The number and scope of standard conditions varies widely by jurisdiction, but researchers have found an average of 21.9 standard conditions, with some states listing as many as 38 conditions that every person on parole must follow, or else risk incarceration.
There are often “special” conditions too, which are optional additions a judge, parole board, supervision officer, or other authority can impose at their discretion — and often at any point while someone is on supervision. In many jurisdictions, special conditions offer authorities carte blanche for setting nearly any rule imaginable. Some examples of special conditions include mandated treatment programs, a curfew, and restrictions on associating with certain other people, but they can also extend to bizarre rules regarding where one can sit inside a car, or becoming pregnant.
Standard supervision conditions in one jurisdiction can be “special” in another. We don’t know how often special conditions are imposed on top of a standard set, but it’s possible that people are subject to special conditions nearly as often: In a 2019 study of parole conditions, an employee of the Idaho Commission of Pardons and Parole admitted to the author that during her tenure, no parole agreement was ever issued without association restrictions, which are special there.
In most parole systems, association conditions are standard
While they’re not the most infamous supervision conditions,2 association restrictions are incredibly common across probation and parole systems, and impact hundreds of thousands of people. In a recent study, researchers found that over half of the 187 supervision programs they examined (including parole, probation, and electronic monitoring) in 2023 had some regulation about “who people can be around, talk with, or socialize with.” But these rules are especially entrenched in parole systems: A recurring census of standard parole conditions revealed that rules related to “undesirable associates/correspondence” have been used by an average of 30 jurisdictions over each of the six censuses, the first of which was in 1956.3
But when we look beyond standard conditions, it’s clear these restrictions are imposed almost universally. According to a 2019 law review article, nearly all parole jurisdictions (50 states, D.C. and the federal supervised release system)4 have association restrictions, whether they are standard or special conditions that could be imposed at any time by an authority such as a parole officer or judge. This valuable survey, which we’ve updated for this briefing, also identifies which categories of people are off-limits for individuals on supervision. (We’re thankful to Professor James M. Binnall for this work addressing association restrictions so comprehensively.) Using Professor Binnall’s categories, we found that some states go to great lengths to control these relationships:
More than half of jurisdictions (28 of 52) have some form of association restriction that is standard. But even states where it wasn’t a standard condition (California, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Minnesota) had an association restriction spelled out in its optional special conditions.
Ten states have a problematic “discretionary” condition, where a parole officer, parole board, judge, or other authority can simply decide to restrict interactions with any individual or group of people they claim would undermine their client’s success.5
Association restrictions most commonly prohibit contact with people with felony convictions (7 states) or people with any criminal conviction (10 additional states). Massachusetts and Iowa have a restriction on associating with anyone with a criminal record, which would apply to others on supervision and currently incarcerated people, too. It’s worth noting that an estimated 1 in 3 U.S. adults has a criminal record.
Fourteen states explicitly restrict association with people described vaguely as “involved in” or “actively engaged in” criminal activity; this restriction often extends to places where criminal activity is or may be happening. Here we included vague restrictions like Mississippi’s “persons of bad reputation” and Alabama’s “persons of disrepute or harmful character.”
Twelve states restrict association with currently incarcerated people and visiting correctional institutions generally, and eight states restrict other people on supervision. Given how many people in prison report a family history of incarceration,6 there are countless family visits and communications that are prohibited as a result of these restriction categories.
Five states restrict association with purported members of gangs or other “criminal organizations,” who are already tracked in some cities in a separate effort to over-police neighborhoods of color.7
In many states, people on supervision can seek permission to associate with specific individuals in restricted categories — to visit a loved one in prison, for example — by asking their supervision officer or through a more formal hearing. But many may decide that these extra hurdles aren’t worth it to be told “no” or to have their interactions even more closely scrutinized. Overall, the landscape of association restrictions is highly repressive, leaving people to navigate reentry without valuable support.
How different states limit relationships for people on parole
We examined state statutes and correctional agency documents for all 50 states, D.C., and the federal system to identify association restrictions in parole by category of restriction, denoting where these restrictions are standard conditions. Some states have multiple categories of restrictions, and some states have mandatory parole instead of (or in addition to) discretionary parole; we do not distinguish between the two. We credit Professor James M. Binnall’s Divided We Fall: Parole Supervision Conditions Prohibiting “Inter-Offender” Relations for carrying out this analysis in 2019 and conceiving of the restriction categories we used.
*As of 2021, thanks to the Less is More Act, New York has done away with its association restriction, which previously prohibited contact with anyone who had a criminal record or who had been adjudicated as a youthful offender. The source linked in the table, the most recent parole handbook found on the state parole agency’s website, appears to be from 2019, before the law went into effect.
Standard condition?
Felony convictions
Criminal convictions
People targeted as gang members
Other people on supervision
Discretionary
Criminalized activity
Currently incarcerated people
Link to statute or agency document
People with a felony conviction
People with a felony or misdemeanor conviction
Includes language like “street gang,” “criminal organization,” “criminal gang member”
Includes parole, probation, other supervised release, or those in law enforcement custody
A catch-all provision allowing a field agent specifically to impose association restrictions on individuals
People targeted for alleged “illegal activity” or “controlled substances,” and people targeted for “disreputable character” or similar
Probation agencies ban certain people from interacting as well
Nearly 3 million people are on probation, the most common type of mass punishment. While we don’t have a complete picture of how the thousands of probation agencies nationwide approach association restrictions, research confirms that some of the largest jurisdictions impose them:
Georgia, which has the largest probation population in the U.S. atover 347,000, requires people to “avoid persons or places of disreputable or harmful character.”
The three biggest counties in Texas — Harris, Dallas, and Tarrant counties — also impose this condition on anyone under probation supervision.
California, which hadover 157,000 people on probation in 2021, imposes a standard condition wherein people must “refrain from becoming abandoned to improper associates.”8
If these conditions sound a bit archaic and vague, it’s because they are. Association restrictions needlessly complicate life in the community and should be eliminated from supervision rules.
Association restrictions are presumptuous and undermine social networks that are important for reentry
The senselessness and cruelty of association restrictions undermine the very purpose of supervision, which includes helping people get the resources and build the relationships they need to achieve stability in the community. Breaking down some of their biggest harms, we argue that:
Association restrictions have it wrong and backward. The idea that someone with even a minor or bygone criminal history will have a negative influence on someone under supervision is unfounded. The myth of the “career criminal” or permanent criminal disposition has been busted, time and time again. Evidence shows that the opposite is true: people actually benefit from associating with those with lived experience. Highly regarded reentry organizations often use “mutual-help” or “credible messenger” models employing formerly incarcerated people as counselors and mentors to others navigating reentry. This supportive, non-judgemental model is shown to have positive impacts on both participants and staff.
They are vague. Even when states are clear in categorically excluding whole groups of people, they are comically unclear about what it means to “associate” with those people. This nebulous language makes it difficult to know what counts as an association: Does an interaction with someone’s social media post, sending money through an app, or an accidental encounter at a gas station threaten public safety? It’s also difficult, then, for someone to challenge the legality of an association restriction when the courts can make their own interpretation. According to law professor Fiona Doherty, these restrictions are “purposefully — indeed, rigorously — unclear.”
They force people on supervision to live in isolation and fear. Many people plan to live with or receive substantial support from family after being released from prison. But such relationships and living options may suddenly be off-limits due to an association restriction, forcing stressful and costly relocation. Some people on supervision have desperately turned to internet forums, reasonably confused about how their living situation could be prohibited, given the requirement to maintain housing. Their fear and lack of clarity puts them at risk of violating their terms of release and being subject to incarceration — but it may also feel risky to seek answers from their supervision officer. Loved ones, too, are pulled into enforcing and cooperating with these restrictions, impacting many people beyond those with an actual supervision contract.
The millions of people in restricted categories make it nearly impossible to avoid prohibited associations. An estimated 24 million people in the U.S. have a felony conviction on record, while an estimated 80 million people have a criminal record of any sort.9 And nearly 2 million more people are currently incarcerated, which means they’re off-limits to people on parole in eight states, according to our analysis. Given that 44% of parole jurisdictions10 restrict at least one of these large categories of people, association restrictions have an outsized impact compared to the little criticism they’ve received.
These restrictions disproportionately impact Black communities. We know that Black people are overrepresented everywhere within the criminal legal system, including parole and probation systems,11 and most likely those with criminal records.12 The sheer scale of overcriminalization, as well as geographic and social segregation that continues to hinder economic opportunity, makes it difficult to avoid regular contact with other people in restricted categories, tearing apart vital relationships and community ties for Black people in particular.
Unfortunately, we don’t know how many people face consequences for violating association restrictions. But as with other over-enforced conditions, association restrictions that lead to any time behind bars are an example of excessive and costly “technical” violations. And judges have imposed some extreme punishments: In Texas, a man on probation was sentenced to four years in prison for being seen near enough to a “crack house” to be in association with people who sell drugs or engage in other illegal activity, thus violating Texas’ condition to “avoid persons or places of disreputable or harmful character.” Another man, on federal supervised release, received 18 months in prison, followed by three more years on supervised release for speaking to a fellow member of his treatment group on the subway.
Even parole and probation officers find association restrictions counterintuitive
Research suggests it’s difficult for supervision officers to enforce a rule that makes little sense to them.
Recent research into the key players who set and modify conditions of supervision — like judges, parole boards, and supervision officers — suggests that, both in theory and in practice, association restrictions don’t increase public safety or reentry success. The Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice examined parole conditions in Iowa and probation conditions in a Kansas county and found that supervision officers know their clients have loved ones who fall into these “off-limits” categories. Though the association restriction is standard in both of these jurisdictions, the officers admit it’s harsh and ultimately impossible to comply with:
[D]oing all these assessments you’ll learn that 9 times out of 10 the people in an offender’s life are people who have been in trouble themselves too. You can’t expect them to go from these people in their life and just to cut everyone completely out, friends, family, or whatever. — probation officer in Johnson County, Kansas
Because lots of times it’s their own family, so telling them they can’t be around their family, or someone that they care about, or is supportive of them, doesn’t make sense. — parole officer in Iowa
In these instances, supervision officers either did not or could not remove these conditions. Instead, many reported that they simply did not enforce them. Of course, not all officers use their discretion this way, and the persistence of these rules in supervision means that people will be forced to navigate reentry without the crucial support of loved ones.
As supervision technology advances, association is an easy target for aggressive enforcement
Experts studying association restrictions and other onerous supervision conditions warn of the creep of new surveillance technology into carceral systems like probation and parole. Smartphones and location-tracking apps, for example, may supplement older methods like GPS-enabled ankle monitoring, and artificial intelligence (AI) promises “real-time” monitoring of people on supervision. Those engineering or hoping to deploy these technologies may view them as benign or even altruistic developments, but we see them as an ominous new frontier in the enforcement of supervision conditions that are already burdensome.
As law professor Kate Weisburd warns, “There is little doubt that improved surveillance capabilities enhance the ability of supervising agents to detect violations.” The recurring parole census mentioned earlier also sounds the alarm: An “ever-expanding” arsenal of technological solutions, they argue, will lead to “enhanced micro-surveillance” of people on supervision. New technology will undoubtedly appeal to lawmakers as an acceptable mechanism for moving people out of prisons and saving taxpayer money. But as widely understood extensions ofcarceral systems (rather than alternatives to incarceration), probation and parole shouldn’t be given invasive technologies that expand their reach into people’s lives.
If association restrictions go unchecked as surveillance technology expands, state and local lawmakers will continue to trap people on supervision in cycles of incarceration and being “free.” People who judges or parole boards have already deemed “safe” to release to the community should be able to decide with whom they associate and from whom they seek support, housing, or job opportunities. Association restrictions perpetuate harmful assumptions about people with criminal legal involvement, set people up for failure, and should be abolished as a condition of probation or parole.
Footnotes
An early version of this concept is the “wounded healer,” a term coined by Carl Jung in 1951. The wounded healer idea claims that an analyst or physician’s own experience of being “wounded” (through illness, mental health struggles, or something else) promotes a sense of solidarity and improves communication between “healer” and “patient.” ↩
Perhaps the most widely known and imposed supervision conditions include finding and maintaining employment (which is very difficult for someone with a criminal record) and meeting all legal-financial obligations (which is very difficult for someone who is more likely to be poor, whether they were in state prison, jailed, or simply on probation). ↩
This long-term study of standard parole conditions provides an extremely useful historical perspective on how the number and nature of parole conditions has changed. Unfortunately, the study doesn’t capture the specific wording of states’ parole association restrictions, so it doesn’t tell us which states prohibit which group(s) of people through their restrictions. ↩
While not all states have a system of discretionary parole release, all have some form of “parole” or post-release supervision. Sixteen states have abolished or severely curtailed discretionary parole, but they still have laws in place governing parole for those who are still eligible (i.e., their crime happened before a certain date). The federal parole system was also abolished but replaced with a similar “supervised release” status. And D.C. operates its own “supervised release” system, responsible for D.C. residents granted parole by the U.S. Parole Commission as well as other supervision programs. ↩
Though not part of our analysis, the vast majority of jurisdictions allow for any additional condition at all to be imposed by the proper authority; this could conceivably include association restrictions with individuals or groups. ↩
More than half (59%) of state and federal prisoners report having an immediate family member who has been incarcerated, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Profile of Prison Inmates, 2016. ↩
Separate from association restrictions, some police departments and other agencies keep “gang databases” that list personal information about people — including children — identified as being “suspected” members of street organizations like gangs. These lists and their criteria for inclusion, often kept hidden from public view, also tear at the social fabric of communities and are widely regarded as a tactic for targeting Black and Brown residents. ↩
In 2015, a version of California Penal Code, as amended by Senate Bill 517, contained language restricting people on probation from “improper associates.” This is the version cited by Prof. Fiona Doherty in her 2016 paper Obey All Laws and Be Good: Probation and the Meaning of Recidivism; a current version of the state penal code does not have the same reference, and we couldn’t locate an updated resource outlining conditions of probation. ↩
This estimate is calculated using data from SEARCH’s 2020 Survey of Criminal History Information Systems and the methodology proposed by NELP’s 65 Million Need Not Apply, reducing the total number of people with criminal records in the United States by 30 percent (to account for people with records in multiple states). Note that this is a slightly different estimate than what we’ve published in the Whole Pie report, because that was based on 2018 survey data. This estimate is likely an undercount due to a lack of data on people who have been arrested for misdemeanors. ↩
Specifically, 23 out of the 52 parole jurisdictions whose restrictions we analyzed restrict people with felony convictions, criminal convictions, and/or currently incarcerated people. ↩
In 2021, white people made up 59% of the U.S. population, but only 38% of the probation population and 39% of the probation population. Meanwhile, Black people were approximately 12% of the U.S. population but made up 21% and 28% of the probation and parole populations, respectively. U.S. population data by race in 2021 are calculated from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, 2021 5-Year Estimates, and parole and probation population data by race in 2021 come from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. ↩
While it’s highly likely that the massive populations of people with criminal records are disproportionately Black, we do not have robust data on these populations. Some studies estimate the racial makeup of the felony conviction population on more granular levels. For example, over a six-year period in Massachusetts, Black people comprised 6.2% of the state population, but 19.7% of people convicted of a felony offense. And in New York, Black people make up about 14% of the population, but 40% of the felony conviction population. ↩
The expansion of pretrial electronic monitoring across 70 counties threatens to undermine Illinois’ groundbreaking Pretrial Fairness Act, despite both the lack of evidence of EM's efficacy and its well-documented flaws and harms.
Illinois recently made history by becoming the first state in the nation to end money-based pretrial detention with the implementation of the Pretrial Fairness Act. In response, the Illinois Office of Statewide Pretrial Services announced the expansion of pretrial electronic monitoring (EM) to 70 of Illinois’ 102 counties, many of which did not have it before. While Pretrial Services touts this as something to be celebrated, the advocates who originally fought for the Pretrial Fairness Act and other scholars have pointed out that this massive expansion of state control undermines the spirit of bail reform.
The Pretrial Services agency’s statement reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what research and evidence shows about electronic monitoring. As Michelle Alexander, legal scholar and author of The New Jim Crow, recently explained in an impassioned video, electronic monitoring is faulty technology that further embeds systemic injustices in communities of color, creates new avenues of harm, and does remarkably little to increase court compliance or public safety.
Electronic monitoring is not evidence-based
Stakeholders looking to innovate in pretrial policy often look for evidence-based practices—strategies with a documented ability to increase court compliance and positively impact public safety. While electronic monitoring proponents present the technology’s ability to do these things as a forgone conclusion, the reality is that few rigorous studies have been done to examine these claims. However, those that have, such as this new study conducted by nonprofit research group MDRC, find EM neither increased court appearances nor reduced new arrests. As this study notes, people on EM may have more new arrests than those not monitored, as the intense scrutiny of people on EM spotlights even minor infractions that might otherwise go unremarked. Researchers also note pretrial EM creates an entirely new path to incarceration via “technical violations,” which have nothing to do with criminality or public safety, but rather with the impacted person’s ability to navigate a multitude of ambiguous and often draconian conditions. In Los Angeles County between 2015 and 2021, 94% of people on EM who did not successfully complete EM were sent back to jail for technical violations rather than for a new arrest:
Figure 1: From Pretrial Electronic Monitoring in Los Angeles County 2015-2021, (Virani, 2021)
People may even be charged with felony escape for violating conditions or tampering with the device, and serve years in prisoneven after being found innocent of the charges that garnered them pretrial EM to begin with.
Electronic monitoring does not reduce jail populations
While EM programs are often depicted as replacing traditional brick-and-mortar incarceration, the reality is these programs are often used to augment and expand the reach of incarceration and may have little effect on the population of the jail itself. EM programs around the country have massively expanded, often in the wake of successful pretrial reform efforts. This has prompted advocates such as the No New SF Jails Coalition to include halting the expansion of EM in their decarceration demands, as they did when they finally closed the 402-bed jail at 850 Bryant in 2020. Nevertheless, San Francisco’s jail population was back up to 1,061 at last count, even though the number of people released on EM grew from 60 in 2016 to 1,659 by 2021. Similarly, the Harris County, Texas jail population of 9,533 reported for October 2023 is even higher than it was before the county’s EM usage exploded from 27 in 2019 to nearly 4,000 in 2021. Ultimately, jail populations in many jurisdictions have remained essentially the same or have even increased while EM usage has skyrocketed, significantly increasing the total number of people under surveillance:
Figure 2:Data on EM and jail populations were only available through 2021. As we note in the text above, however, average daily jail populations in these places are significantly higher at present than in 2021.
Electronic monitoring uses faulty technology
Proponents of EM also downplay the reality that the technology itself is unreliable. Signal drift (the propensity of GPS to place people where they are not), interference from architecture, and data issues are widespread and persistent:1
In May of 2017, Wisconsin’s Department of Corrections lost GPS signals for the 864 people electronically monitored roughly 57,000 times, translating to more than 2 false alarms per person per day.
In 2021 researchers in Chicago discovered that of the tens of thousands of alarms received each month, roughly 80% are non-actionable.
A 2021 article revealed a massive security breach with EM company Protocol which resulted in the private data of thousands under Chicago’s EM program being exposed online.
None of this prevents monitored people from being woken up in the middle of the night to be harassed, handcuffed, and even arrested in their own home after being falsely accused of absconding. Ultimately, faith in EM is as misplaced as Milwaukee advocate Amari Jones’ GPS signal when it identified him as being in the middle of Lake Michigan.
Harms of electronic monitoring
While little evidence exists to justify the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on electronic monitoring contracts around the country each year, firsthand accounts of the harms inflicted by EM are well-documented and plentiful, with folks such as long-time researcher and activist James Kilgore leading the charge.
Electronic monitoring creates huge financial burdens for many in already economically precarious positions
Electronic monitoring is often paired with conditions that restrict people’s ability leave their homes, thus severely limiting their ability to secure and/or maintain employment. People on EM may have to go through extremely complicated and lengthy processes just trying to gain approval to go to a job interview, and they may be able to work only on a fixed schedule or in a fixed location, precluding the flexibility required to work in industries like food service, waste management, or construction. Of course, these are some of the main industries in which many people impacted by the criminal legal system are able to find employment—when they canfind employment at all.
Though some jurisdictions, including Illinois, have eliminated user fees for electronic monitoring, many programs charge anywhere from $1.50 to $47 per day, with a potential initial enrollment fee of up to $300 for the “privilege” of being imprisoned in one’s own home instead of in a jail or prison cell. Some have challenged these rates as extortion, particularly as agreeing to pay these fees they can ill afford may be the only way some can get out of jail to take care of their children or receive medical care.
Electronic monitoring limits access to healthcare while exacerbating or creating physical and mental health issues
Electronic monitoring doesn’t just jail people in their homes and strain their finances, it can also negatively impact their health—both physical and mental. People on EM often report being denied permission to simply go to the doctor or to the pharmacy to have life-saving prescriptions filled.
Moreover, the devices themselves can be a source of acute physical and mental trauma. A survey of individuals subjected to EM by ICE found that an astonishing 90% experienced harm to their physical health due to their time on EM. Those monitored may experience physical harms such as open sores and even electrical shocks. Likewise, the negative impact on mental health created by the stigmatization and isolation imposed by the devices has often been noted by those subjected to EM, with some reporting depressive and even suicidal thoughts. Others have reported that EM can be a trigger for those combatting addiction issues, which could potentially lead not only to new offenses, but relapse, overdose, and even death.
Electronic monitoring reinforces racial disparities and undermines families and communities of color
While the focus here has been primarily on the individual monitored, many harms are also inflicted upon the family and the overwhelmingly Black and Brown communities from which they come. Electronic monitoring impedes a person’s ability to take their kids to school or to doctor appointments, to engage in key family events such as the birth of the child or a funeral, and, as some have noted, has been used in an attempt to turn those who seek justice for their communities into “cautionary tales” for others in order to undermine social justice movements.
Conclusion
While this litany of the harms of electronic monitoring is expansive, it is far from exhaustive. As those directly impacted have told us time and again, there is no part of life that EM does not make more difficult, and as studies have shown there is little evidence to support EM as a viable alternative to incarceration. These are facts the Office of Statewide Pretrial Services should have taken into consideration as Illinois began its move into the realm of Pretrial Fairness.
Footnotes
In their reference guide on the use of Electronic Monitoring, the Federal Courts note: “GPS drift points can be the result of the following: thickness of the ionosphere, satellite orbit, humidity, or multi-path distortion (GPS bouncing off buildings).” ↩
The United States’ reliance on incarceration outpaces most of the globe: every single state incarcerates more people per capita than virtually any independent democracy on Earth. But the sheer magnitude and impact of a system so large can be hard to fully comprehend. We looked back over some of the best criminal legal system research and chose these ten statistics as some of the most handy for advocates, policymakers, and journalists working to help the public appreciate just how far-reaching mass incarceration is in this country.
A note on our sources: All of the following statistics come from different sources and have been calculated using different methodologies, and are not necessarily compatible with one another. In addition, some of these statistics have been calculated by the Prison Policy Initiative, while others are from academic research and other organizations’ work in the field.
On any given day, about 2 million people in the U.S. are locked up in jails, prisons, and other spaces of confinement.
People cycle through local jails more than 7 million times each year.
3.7 million people are held under community supervision such as probation and parole — more people than are held in jails and prisons combined.
Police threaten or use force against more than 1 million people each year, disproportionately against Black and Latinx people.
The median felony bail amount ($10,000) represents eight months of income for the typical detained defendant.
Every state locks up Black people at a higher rate than white people. On average, Black people are imprisoned at rates six times higher than those of white people.
80% of women in jails and 58% of women in prisons are mothers, and most are the primary or sole caretakers of young children.
Our collection of prison discipline policies covers all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and highlights how each system classifies the severity of offenses and punishments.
Today, the Prison Policy Initiative is publishing a collection of discipline policies for all 50 state prison systems, the Washington, D.C. Department of Corrections, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons in our Data toolbox. It includes the discipline policy for each system, a list of offense severity classifications from most to least severe, and links to additional documents to help you understand each system’s classification scheme.
Advocates, researchers, and lawmakers can use this collection to examine the rules, offenses, procedures, and associated punishments for each prison system, or to answer questions about prison discipline systems such as:
What behaviors are considered “violations” in your state’s prisons?
How are different violations punished? How does the severity of punishment for certain actions compare to others?
How many different rules can be applied to punish a single action, such as a fight, potentially allowing prison staff to pick and choose or “stack” violations?
Does your state’s prison system punish people more harshly than others for similar violations?
What does the severity of punishment for certain actions — such as refusal to work or organizing a strike — tell us about the culture and priorities of prisons?
What is the “justice” process like inside prisons? How do people defend themselves? Is there due process inside?
We hope this new policy resource (and others, like our collection of DOC policy manuals) will help strengthen the movement to end mass incarceration. If you use the discipline policy collection in your work, tell us about it. Let us know what was helpful, what was not, and what other resources we can provide. If you’re an organization seeking assistance from our Policy and Advocacy staff, drop us a line to let us know how we can help.
Acknowledgement: We thank Prison Policy Initiative alum Emile Suotonye DeWeaver for the initial collection of policy documents and offense classifications.
Among the 27 states we surveyed, only 7 saw an increase in parole approval rate, and almost every state held substantially fewer hearings than in years past.
Note: On October 18, 2023, we made two edits to this piece : (1) Added data from Massachusetts that was released shortly after our analysis was published, (2) Fixed minor transcription errors to the appendix table.
Earlier this year, Alabama’s Board of Pardons and Paroles made headlines when it denied parole to someone who had died ten days prior to their parole hearing. This is just one of many threads in the Alabama parole board’s tapestry of dysfunction. For months, their three-person parole board operated with just two members despite requiring a majority vote to grant parole. It is no wonder that Alabama is on track to have a parole grant rate — the percent of parole petitions approved — of just 7% for 2023. This also comes as studies show racial disparities in parole grant rates are widening: for example, non-white people in New York were released at a rate almost 29% less than their white counterparts in 2022 (up from a difference of around 19% between 2016 and 2021).
With parole board practices so much in the news, we thought it was important to look around the country and evaluate the direction in which state parole boards are moving. We filed dozens of records requests and curated the best research to explore whether state parole boards are helping reduce mass incarceration or whether they are disregarding the hard-learned lessons of the pandemic, when they released even fewer people than before the crisis as people died behind prison walls.
The state of parole
In the 29 states1 for which we collected 2022 parole approval data, only 8 had grant rates above 50% – Connecticut, Idaho, Massachusetts, Nevada, North Dakota, Utah, Vermont, and Wyoming. Wyoming had the highest grant rate of 78%. At the other end of justice’s sliding scale, Alabama (10%) and South Carolina (13%) have the lowest parole approval grant rates in the nation. And while we don’t yet have data from most states for 2023, South Carolina’s recently updated parole data show that the state’s parole approval rate has dropped to an astonishingly low 7% in 2023.
To see full information about parole grant rates by year in each state from 2019-2022, see the appendix.
With few exceptions, parole grant rates dropped significantly from 2019 to 2022
In the 27 states for which Prison Policy Initiative was able to track changes in parole approval rates from 2019-2022, only 6 — Connecticut (+29%), Georgia (+17%), Texas (+11%), Hawai’i (+8%), Massachusetts (+8%), South Dakota (+6%), and Nevada (+1%) — have seen any increase since 2019. In the remaining 20 states from which we received data, parole grant rates have seen either no change or have seen a marked decline, with South Carolina (-63%) and Alabama (-67%) seeing the biggest drop offs in grant rates.
But state parole boards did not only choose to release fewer people. They heard fewer cases as well. With the exceptions of Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Arkansas, parole boards continued to hear significantly fewer total cases in 2022 than they did in 2019. The result is that since 2019, the number of people released through discretionary parole has decreased across the board.
To see full information about the number of parole hearings by year in each state from 2019-2022, see the appendix.
Ironically, South Carolina’s Department of Probation, Parole, and Pardon Services’ website is quick to highlight the money the state has saved by reducing the number of parole revocations over the past decade. Of course, it would be difficult to have more revocations, given that they released 69% fewer people via discretionary parole in 2022 than they did in 2019. South Carolina is far from alone, however. Alaska has reduced the number of people released through discretionary parole by 79% since 2019; Alabama 70% and Maryland by 66%. In fact, with the exception of South Dakota, every state for which data was providedreleased fewer people through discretionary parole in 2022 than in 2019, with an average overall decline of around 41% fewer people released per state. South Dakota’s increase is also extremely modest – the state released just 62 more people in 2022 than in 2019.
To see full information about the number of people released on parole by year in each state from 2019-2022, see the appendix.
Why are parole boards releasing so few people?
Denial is often effectively the default disposition for parole boards, and the burden of proof is usually on the person who is incarcerated to justify their release. This is problematic, as the board often considers factors that are beyond the applicant’s control, such as the availability of programming or education in the prison, or factors that cannot be changed, such as the nature of the offense for which they were incarcerated. When release rests on these factors, there is very little a person can do to influence the outcome.
Another issue is the general outlook some politicians and parole board members have toward people who are up for parole. State Representative Matt Simpson defended Alabama’s abysmal grant rates, saying “We’ve gotten to a point where the people up for parole are the ones that don’t need to be out; it’s not like it used to be where we had a number of non-violent offenders.” While recent reports have cast doubt on this claim, it still begs the question: how can those with this viewpoint provide a fair hearing to those who come before them? There is nothing fair about a body that decides people’s fates before they ever appear. It’s important to note that the seriousness of an offense is taken into account when a judge first sets a prison sentence. When parole boards solely or exclusively make their release decisions based on the underlying charge, they are continually punishing incarcerated people for a factor they cannot change. Moreover, policies that provide relief only for those with non-violent offenses are simply not impactful enough to address the juggernaut of mass incarceration. And although parole boards are charged with looking at a person’s likelihood of rearrest, they often seem to ignore the fact that people sent to prison for violent charges have the lowest rearrest rate of any group.
Parole Boards are influenced by politics
In 2019, Mississippi had a grant rate of 74% — one of the highest rates in the nation. However, that same year, the parole board made the ethical but unpopular decision to parole a person who had been incarcerated for 30 years. That person had their death sentence commuted on the basis of intellectual disability but the board determined them not to be a threat to public safety. In the aftermath of this decision, Mississippi saw its grant rates freefall 42 percent by 2022. The political outrage at the decision led to increased scrutiny and political pressure which has undermined Mississippi’s presumptive parole system.2
Though parole boards are typically thought of as serving a judicial function (i.e., weighing evidence and rendering a judgment that results in freedom or continued incarceration), they are still bureaucratic bodies beholden to political good will. Parole board members are usually appointed by governors and confirmed by legislative hearings, which often makes their selection fundamentally political. More than a third of states with parole boards in the US mandate no qualifications to sit on the board, meaning no actual knowledge of law, prison, the judicial system, mental health, or even basic social dynamics are required to sit on boards that can prevent a person from ever again experiencing life outside prison walls.
Policy efforts to increase release rates are often stalled or undermined
Efforts to restore discretionary parole in Maine, Virginia, and Illinois led by groups like Parole4ME and Parole Illinois have come achingly close to success in recent years. Some states with discretionary parole have begun to implement presumptive parole in an effort to increase fairness and remove subjectivity and political pressure. While presumptive parole is a key strategy to reduce incarceration, in states that have implemented it, the efficacy of this policy is limited by carveouts — exceptions in policies that exclude certain categories of people from relief. Most states with some form of presumptive parole will not apply the presumption to people with certain offenses, those who have received recent disciplinary infractions, or those who haven’t completed relevant rehabilitative programming. As we noted, offense-based carveouts do not have a strong basis in policy, and programming-related carveouts are problematic because programming is neither universal nor guaranteed and can vary immensely from prison to prison.3Reports have also shown that Black and Brown people who are incarcerated are more likely to receive disciplinary infractions than their white counterparts, meaning they are more likely to be denied presumptive parole based on this carveout.
Conclusion
Despite the dangers of incarceration in a post-pandemic world and the efforts of many to make the parole system more just, fewer people are receiving parole hearings, and fewer still are released through discretionary parole. In fact, discretionary parole accounted for only a small fraction of total releases from prison in 2021.
Expanding access to discretionary parole won’t by itself end mass incarceration; however, expanding its usage in conjunction with presumptive parole while eliminating undermining carveouts could be a powerful tool for decarceration. Hopefully, a review of parole in 2023 will see incarcerated people given a greater chance to be paroled.
Footnotes
While we sought to collect data from all 34 states with discretionary parole as a primary mechanism of release, not all states make parole board data publicly available and several were not forthcoming with data via records requests. Arkansas has a residency requirement for records requests that prevented submission; Missouri denied having records responsive to our request, which strains credulity; New Hampshire cited the records as exempt. We are awaiting data for Nebraska, and West Virginia. Kentucky and Idaho provided some information, but were unable to provide statistics for 2019. In the appendix to this briefing, we provide details about each state’s response to our open records requests. ↩
Presumptive parole is a form of non-discretionary parole in which people are automatically released if they meet certain established criteria. ↩
In this webinar presented on November 1, 2023, staff from the Prison Policy Initiative and a panel of criminal justice experts have a discussion on how advocates for reform can talk to policymakers about carveouts, with a particular focus on addressing fentanyl and sex offense-related charges.
Chicago 400 Alliance produced this video about people on public registries in Illinois, which is a great example of how to bring the stories of impacted people to legislators. To learn more about the Chicago 400 Alliance, coordinated by Laurie Jo Reynolds, you can view their website: https://www.chicago400.net/
To learn more about Drug Policy Alliance’s work advocating for a health-focused approach to fentanyl, you can find their website on the topic here. https://drugpolicy.org/campaign/build-a-health-approach-to-fentanyl/. To sign onto Drug Policy Alliance and Broken No More’s open letter from people who have lost loved ones to overdose, click here.
Many of the cities with the highest incarceration rates also have poverty rates well above the state’s average. For example, Central Falls, with a poverty rate of 25%, and Providence, with a rate of 22%, are both more than twice the statewide poverty rate.
Every single city and town — and every state legislative district — is missing a portion of its population to incarceration in state prison.
The state’s largest city, Providence, has both the most people in prison and the highest incarceration rate in the state.
There are dramatic differences in incarceration rates within communities. For example, in Cranston, the Arlington neighborhood had an incarceration rate of 281 per 100,000 residents, while in the neighborhood of Stone Hill, just a few miles away, no residents were incarcerated.
Data tables included in the report provide residence information for people in Rhode Island state prisons at the time of the 2020 Census, offering the clearest look ever at which communities are most impacted by mass incarceration. They break down the number of people locked up by county, city, town, zip code, legislative district, census tract, and other areas.
“The nation’s 40-year failed experiment with mass incarceration harms each and every one of us. This analysis shows that while some communities are disproportionately impacted by this failed policy, nobody escapes the damage it causes,” said Emily Widra, Senior Research Analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative. “Our report is just the beginning. We’re making this data available so others can further examine how geographic incarceration trends correlate with other problems communities face.”
The data show the cities with the highest state prison incarceration rates are Providence (354 per 100,000 residents), Woonsocket (325 per 100,000 residents), and Central Falls (300 per 100,000 residents). For comparison, Barrington is the town with the lowest prison incarceration rate, at 12 people in state prison per 100,000 residents.
“This report reemphasizes the urgent need for legislative action to correct Rhode Island’s starkly gerrymandered legislative districts. This issue has remained unaddressed for over a decade,” said John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island. “It’s far past time that incarcerated people are counted where they live instead of where they happened to be on Census Day.”
The report cites studies that show that incarceration rates correlate with a variety of negative outcomes, including higher rates of asthma, depression, lower standardized test scores, reduced life expectancy, and more. The data included in this report gives researchers the tools they need to better understand how these correlations play out in Rhode Island.
“This report’s documentation of the many ramifications that flow from incarceration — social, educational, and medical — highlights the need for the state to more urgently address the overuse of our prison system and focus more on justice reinvestment initiatives,” said Steve Brown, Executive Director of the ACLU of Rhode Island. “This thorough analysis also provides another reason for legislators to fully address the unacceptable racial and demographic consequences of prison gerrymandering in the state.”
We just released our 2022-2023 Annual Report, and I’m thrilled to share some highlights of our work with you. We’ve had an incredibly productive year, releasing 19 major reports and 24 research briefings, including updates to our Whole Pie and Women’s Whole Pie. We also expanded our Advocacy Toolkit, provided technical support to advocates on the ground, and continued working with journalists on both sides of the wall to influence the national dialogue about criminal legal system reform. Here are a handful of successes we’re particularly proud of:
Publishing a major report on community supervision showing that all states — even those that consider themselves progressive leaders — put significant numbers of their citizens on probation and parole, systems that often replicate prison conditions in the community.
Releasing a groundbreaking report showing how companies in the commercial bail industry and their deep-pocketed insurance underwriters make huge profits, even when they fail to do their one job: ensuring their clients’ appearance in court. We also released a companion tool for journalists who want to investigate their local bail bond industry.
Advancing our campaign to protect incarcerated people and their loved ones from price gouging by private telecommunications companies who are raking in millions off of phone calls, video visits, and electronic messaging. Our work helped pass the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act in 2023, which clarifies the FCC’s authority to regulate all phone and video calls from correctional facilities.
Helping Montana and Maine end prison gerrymandering. Progress on this issue has been so rapid that the National Conference of State Legislatures recently called state efforts to end prison gerrymandering “the fastest-growing trend in redistricting.”
Expanding our resources for advocates in counties with plans for new jail construction by developing a guide on understanding jail assessments and developing arguments to push back against jail construction proposals. We also held our first webinar, bringing together organizers to discuss strategies they employed to prevent new jails from being built.
These publications only scratch the surface 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.
