Welcome Lucius Couloute!

Welcome Lucius Couloute, our new Policy & Communications Associate!

by Wendy Sawyer, January 31, 2017

Please welcome our new Policy & Communications Associate, Lucius Couloute.

Lucius is currently a doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the Sociology department; previously, he earned his Bachelor’s degree from UMass in Economics. His dissertation examines the role of race and insecure employment experiences during prisoner reentry. Lucius is from Hartford, where he also serves as a member of the Greater Hartford Reentry Council.

Welcome, Lucius!

New report reveals who pays for and who benefits from mass incarceration

In a first-of-its-kind report, the Prison Policy Initiative aggregates economic data to offer a big picture view of who pays for and who benefits from mass incarceration.

January 25, 2017

In a first-of-its-kind report, the Prison Policy Initiative aggregates economic data to offer a big picture view of who pays for and who benefits from mass incarceration.

The report, Following the Money of Mass Incarceration, and infographic are a first step toward better understanding who benefits from mass incarceration and who might be resistant to reform.

In the report, the Prison Policy Initiative:

• provides the significant costs of our globally unprecedented system of mass incarceration and over-criminalization,
• gives the relative importance of the various parts,
• highlights some of the under-discussed yet costly parts of the system, and then
• shares all of its sources so that journalists and advocates can build upon its work.

Following the Money of Mass Incarceration establishes that:

• Almost half of the money spent on running the correctional system goes to paying staff. This group is an influential lobby that sometimes prevents reform and whose influence is often protected even when prison populations drop.
• Private companies that supply goods to the prison commissary or provide telephone service for correctional facilities bring in almost as much money ($2.9 billion) as governments pay private companies ($3.9 billion) to operate private prisons.
• Commissary vendors that sell goods to incarcerated people — who rely largely on money sent by loved ones — is itself a large industry that brings in $1.6 billion a year.

“Following the Money of Mass Incarceration finds that mass incarceration and over-criminalization are deeply embedded in our economy,” said report co-author and Prison Policy Initiative Executive Director Peter Wagner. “Changing our nation’s criminal justice priorities is going to require challenging a lot of entrenched but often hidden interests.”

The report is available at: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/money.html.

Evading regulation, some in-state phone calls from jails cost over $1.50 a minute

The first ever national survey of in-state jail phone rates finds some jails charge more than $1.50 a minute.

by Aleks Kajstura, January 19, 2017

Two recent submissions to the FCC shed new light on the high cost of in-state phone calls from jails. While the campaign to make phone calls from prison and jail more affordable for family and friends of incarcerated people has made significant progress, the new filings underscore how private companies continue to avoid regulation while charging unconscionable rates.

These submissions present new research which reveals that some in-state calls cost over $1.50 a minute, and finds pricing structures that “bear a remarkable similarity” to practices prohibited by the FCC.

In order to “highlight the current ICS [Inmate Calling Service] landscape” for the FCC, Lee Petro, counsel for the Wright Petitioners, and the Prison Policy Initiative (thanks to members of our Young Professionals Network) conducted a survey of jails served by the major ICS providers.

The most significant discovery made from reviewing the current pricing policies of the ICS providers was that several ICS providers have imposed a rate structure for intrastate ICS calls that bear a remarkable similarity to the now-prohibited “connection fee” which was prohibited in the 2015 Second Report and Order, and memorialized in Section 64.6080 of the Commission’s rules.

These pricing schemes have resulted in 15 minute calls that would cost $24.95 from the Arkansas County Jail via Securus and $17.77 from the Douglas County jail in Oregon via Global Tel*Link.

You can find the summary of the Comments submission findings in the Ex-Parte submission, and the rates for all of the jails surveyed in exhibits B and C of the Comments submission (starting on page 82), and exhibits A and D in an updated filing reflecting Legacy’s correction of their advertised rates.

The multi-million dollar market of sending money to an incarcerated loved one

Private companies amassing monopoly contracts, creating potential to rake in $172 million from friends and family sending money to incarcerated loved ones.

by Stephen Raher, January 18, 2017

As with many areas of government, prisons and jails are increasingly shifting costs to those who can least afford it: incarcerated people and their families. In correctional facilities, this often takes the form of copays for medical care, forcing incarcerated people to purchase clothing or hygiene items, and cutting food service in favor of for-profit “canteens.” Because most incarcerated people lack money to cover such expenses, this means that family members must frequently transfer money to “inmate trust accounts.”

Historically, families could send money to an incarcerated relative’s account by simply mailing a money order. But private companies saw an opportunity to use these accounts as a potential source of profits. For an upcoming report, we set out to find the answer to a seemingly straightforward question: How much do these companies earn off of money transfers? It’s hard to say, because there is no publicly-available data that gives a complete picture; however, certain limited data can be used to arrive at a rough estimate.

Four states have published data on the volume of money transfers in their state prison systems. This data covers Nevada, Ohio, and Wyoming (all calendar year 2011), and Pennsylvania (2014). Dividing the total amount of transferred funds by the states’ respective prison populations yields average annual transfers of $737 per incarcerated person. Multiplying this average amount by the total population of all state prisons (in 2016) would yield annual transfers of $995 million.

But the amount of money transferred doesn’t tell us how much money the companies make on the process. The difficulty in estimating fee revenue comes from the fact that the amount of the transaction fee varies among jurisdictions. In addition, some jurisdictions may still allow family members to send funds for no fee through the mail; while other states may charge a fee for payments by mail, or simply prohibit no-fee options.

Direct evidence of fee revenue is available for JPay, Inc., one of the largest payment processors for prisons and jails. JPay is currently a subsidiary of telecommunications firm Securus Technologies, which is owned by private equity firm Abry Partners. In an April 2015 presentation to potential lenders, Securus stated that in 2014, JPay made $53 million in fees (page 49) on transfers of $525 million (page 38). This suggests an average fee of 10% (i.e., $53 million ÷ $525 million = .10).

If, as stated above, the total amount of state-prison money transfers is $995 million per year, then with fees at 10%, payment processors could potentially make up to $99 million in fees, assuming every prison system in the country privatized money transfer services and eliminated no-fee options. This aligns precisely with the Securus/JPay investor presentation, which estimates the total market for money transfers in state prisons to be worth $99.2 million in corporate revenue (page 45).

My discussion so far has not mentioned county jails and the federal prison system, because information about money transfers in these settings is even more difficult to find. In fact, some of the only information available at this time is Securus’s estimate of the total potential market. In 2015, Securus told potential investors that the total potential fee revenue from county jails and federal prisons was $58 million and $15 million respectively.

Notably, the most lucrative money transfer market may not even involve correctional facilities. Among the proliferation of user fees being imposed on the poor are fees levied on people serving time on probation or parole. Processing those payments means lots of money for companies like Securus/JPay. In fact, Securus believes that it if it obtained contracts for every state, federal, and local prison/jail in the country, it would be able to earn up to $172 million in fees. In contrast, the company believes that the total market for probation- and parole-related payments is worth nearly $300 million in fees.

Governments process hundreds of millions of dollars of payments every day. In the context of tax payments, court filings, license applications, and other types of user fees, agencies have created innovative no-cost options (including electronic payments) that facilitate quick, efficient transfers. But in the correctional setting, administrators have largely ignored these innovations, instead opting to outsource this function to private companies seeking to profit. As a result, money transfers are yet another way in which private companies profit off of families and friends seeking to support their incarcerated loved ones.

Vera finds costs outweigh benefits in a “user-funded” criminal justice system

Money bail. Pretrial detention. Fines and fees. Race. Poverty. Vera connects the dots in a new report on user-funded justice in New Orleans.

by Wendy Sawyer, January 10, 2017

Money bail. Pretrial detention. Fines and fees. Race. Poverty.

Vera connects those dots today in Past Due: Examining the Costs and Consequences of Charging for Justice in New Orleans. The report provides new evidence that there are few winners in a system that punishes defendants who can’t afford to pay bail, fines and fees — and then charges taxpayers for the cost of jailing them when they can’t pay.

Like many local and state criminal justice systems, New Orleans uses bail, fines, and fees to compel the “users” of the system to pay for some of the cost of policing, prosecuting, and jailing them. In theory, these costs are meant to enhance accountability; for example, money bail is intended to ensure appearance in court, when the defendant can get his or her money back. And the fees charged to defendants at sentencing — such as court costs or probation fees — are seen as cost saving measures for services brought on by defendants themselves.

But Vera’s report lays out the deep dysfunction of the system in New Orleans. Importantly, it gives us a clear picture of who is burdened most: black residents make up 59% of the population, but paid 84% of bail bond premiums and 69% of fines and fees. And in New Orleans, black households earn less than half what white households do. These racial and economic disparities should make a user-funded scheme seem like a bad idea from the outset. In practice, Past Due shows, it’s even worse.

First, Vera’s researchers tackled bail, which they found was a requirement for most booked defendants. As we have shown before, bail is set too high for many poor defendants to pay. In New Orleans, people were detained an extra 51 days on average because, even with bail amounts as low as $100, it was hard or impossible for them to pay. On any given day, nearly one-third of the New Orleans jail is occupied by people who are there simply because they can’t afford bail.

Besides those who can’t pay bail, New Orleans must also set aside a few beds in jail for those who can’t afford the fines and fees levied upon them at sentencing. Vera found that 536 people were arrested for non-payment of criminal fines and fees in 2015, almost all for municipal cases where the average amount imposed was just $228. People interviewed and surveyed by Vera were confounded by the expectation to pay court debts when their criminal justice involvement made their financial outlook bleaker than ever. As one person said, “I understand I gotta pay the money, but how can I pay the money if I’m a convicted felon and can’t get a job?”

While Past Due confirms much of what we know about the problems with bail, fines, and fees, its value to policymakers with an eye on the bottom line is the cost-benefit analysis it provides. Vera compared how much the city of New Orleans collected from bail, fines, and fees to how much it cost to jail people who could not afford to pay, and found that the city spent $1.9 million more than it brought in. This report makes clear that reforming the systems of bail and criminal justice fines and fees is not only a moral imperative, but also financially prudent.

The potential savings from reducing the jail population “pale[s]s in comparison to the potential to reduce the human toll of jail.” In a technical report accompanying Past Due, researchers estimated the taxpayer savings of $31 per day for every person kept out of jail — compare this with the $380 daily cost of jail borne by each incarcerated person, which accounts for the risk of violence, loss of liberty, lost wages, child care, and jail fees. This is to say nothing of the net effect on the families and communities of people who are jailed.

Vera’s report urges us to question user-funded systems that transfer millions from “historically disadvantaged black communities with the least money to spare” and then lock people up when they can’t pay.

President Obama’s parting reminders on criminal justice reform

President Obama's article speaks to some of the most important lessons we've learned in our work to end mass incarceration.

by Bernadette Rabuy, January 10, 2017

Last week, President Obama surprised criminal justice reformers with an article in the Harvard Law Review on The President’s Role in Advancing Criminal Justice Reform. While the President spends more of the article summarizing his efforts to reform the criminal justice system than sharing an analysis of the challenges he faced trying to make our criminal justice system more just, President Obama’s article speaks to some of the most important lessons we’ve learned in our work to end mass incarceration. We believe that understanding the following points is key to meaningful justice reform:

• State and local policies drive mass incarceration. Citing our report, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie, Obama explains that, “State and local officials are responsible for most policing issues, and they are in charge of facilities that hold more than 90% of the prison population and the entire jail population.” President Obama’s reminder should spark hope among advocates. While criminal justice reform is likely to be more challenging at the federal level during the Trump administration, Americans should not forget how impactful state and local reforms can be in reducing the incarcerated population.

  

• Mass incarceration is bad for all Americans. President Obama reminds readers that “It would be a tragic mistake to treat criminal justice reform as an agenda limited to certain communities. All Americans have an interest in living in safe and vibrant neighborhoods…” The sheer scale of our criminal justice system means both that mass incarceration has harmed the lives of many Americans and that government resources that could be used for other social services are instead spent on locking people up. For these reasons, even Americans who have never come into contact with the criminal justice system or don’t have a loved one behind bars have an interest in the country reducing its unprecedented use of incarceration.
• The true reach of our criminal justice system goes beyond those behind bars. President Obama cites our blog to explain that beyond the incarcerated, there are the many Americans with criminal records, the people released from prisons each year, and the 11 million people who cycle through local jails. In our view, keeping the true scope of the system in mind will make it that much easier for advocates to steer clear of reforms that simply transfer people from one piece of the correctional control pie to another and think more expansively about what reducing incarceration rates means for correctional supervision like probation and parole.

President Obama’s article is further evidence of how far our country has moved away from the tough on crime narrative that used to be overwhelmingly popular with Democrats and Republicans alike. At this time when hateful rhetoric is becoming more normalized, we hope that more people can take a cue from Obama who speaks about those who have committed crimes as people who have made mistakes.

For more reactions to President Obama’s article, we recommend:

• Jonathan Blanks, Obama praises himself on criminal justice reform but he could have done so much more, Rare
  This article points out that Obama fails to mention in his law review article how the federal government has responded to states’ growing liberalization of state marijuana laws and explains why that omission may have been intentional.
• Radley Balko, When Obama wouldn’t fight for science, The Washington Post
  Radley Balko explains how the Department of Justice denounced a report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology about forensic science and what the ramifications of the Department of Justice’s refusal to assess forensics might be.
• Mark Joseph Stern, The George W. Bush Advice Obama Should Have Taken, Slate
  Slate published a new interview with Margaret Colgate Love, who served as United States pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997. Love explains that Obama could have had a more meaningful clemency legacy if he had used his pardon power more or created a clemency commission like President Ford.

Another century of mass incarceration?

If the U.S. doesn't make reducing the correctional population a policy priority, generations will continue to be burdened by mass incarceration.

by Joshua Aiken and Wendy Sawyer, December 30, 2016

It’s that time of the year again, when many of us like to take stock and commit to changes that will bring us closer to our goals. It’s not a bad time for policymakers to do the same.

Here at the Prison Policy Initiative, we often find it useful to look back at how our criminal justice system has evolved over time. Year-to-year fluctuations are less distracting from that perspective, so we can also identify the pivotal political changes that have had truly dramatic impacts, like the “tough on crime” policies that led to the current era of mass incarceration.

Looking forward, however, is harder when you are data-driven. It’s hard to tell how current policies will play out in the future, and the impact of policy changes is even harder to gauge. We have been warned about the dangers of extrapolating the results of past policy changes to predict the future, but this time of year encourages some imaginative thinking — so we extrapolated recent trends anyway. We hope that as new elected officials are preparing to take office, these rough projections will drive home the urgency of criminal justice reform.

To be taken with an extra-large grain of salt, here are our projections of how long it would take us to undo the aberrant buildup of correctional control in the U.S. since the 1970s, holding constant the current average yearly decline:

• It’ll be 2049 when the federal prison population returns to normal — 33 years from now.
• It’ll be 2122 when the state prison populations return to normal — 106 years from now.
• It’ll be 2084 when the local jail populations return to normal — 68 years from now.
• It’ll be 2098 when the population under probation and parole supervision returns to normal — 82 years from now.

(See how we chose the “normal” baseline in the methodology notes below.)

Policymakers can speed things up: for example, the federal prison population has declined drastically over the last five years, in large part due to policy changes. But, sadly, millions more Americans are going to be churned through jails, locked in prisons, and placed under correctional control unless lawmakers at all levels of government start taking criminal justice reform seriously. If the U.S. doesn’t make reducing the correctional population a policy priority, our children and even great-great-grandchildren are more than likely to be burdened by mass incarceration.

A few notes about methodology:
The late 1970s is an especially useful point of reference because it is right before the “war on crime” really took hold–incarceration rates had been relatively flat for decades and the number of people under correctional control had not yet exploded. In order to determine our baselines we used incarceration rates to ensure that 1975, 1977, and 1980 were representative of historical trends. We used 1975, 1977, and 1980 as our starting points, as those are the years the U.S. first started collecting yearly data on the two leading forms of correctional control: state prison populations (1975) and probation (1977). Before 1983, jail population data was recorded every ten years, so we used the count from 1980 as the closest match to the other baseline years. Federal prison population counts are available back to at least 1925; we used 1975 to match the state prison population count.

For the average yearly decline, we calculated the total decline in population from each correctional population’s peak to 2015, then divided by the number of years since the peak. To project future populations, we started with 2015’s population and subtracted the average decline for each subsequent year. This treats the annual population as an arithmetic sequence; we chose to make it as simple as possible.

These projections are for total counts, not rates, so they do not account for changes in population size. Extrapolating one set of data was dicey enough for us, without adding additional uncertainty about the size of the general population.

Sources:
The data for our projections came from the Bureau of Justice Statistics 2015 updates: see our posts on the incarcerated population and the population under probation and parole supervision.

For the federal prison population, we used 1975 as our baseline (24,131 people) and 2011 (197,050) as our peak value with an average yearly decline since the peak (4,591/year) to arrive at our projection of 2049.

For the state prison population, we used 1975 as our baseline (216,462) and 2009 (1,365,688) as our peak value with an average yearly decline since the peak (11,255/year) to arrive at our projection of 2122.

For the local jail population, we used 1980 as our baseline (163,994) and 2008 (785,533) as our peak value with an average yearly decline since the peak (8,190/year) to arrive at our projection of 2084.

For the population under probation and parole supervision, we used 1977 as our baseline (990,157) and 2007 (5,119,047) as our peak value with an average yearly decline of the probation population since the peak (62,896/year) and an average yearly increase of the parole population since the peak (18,184/year) to arrive at our projection of 2098.

Our best data visualizations in 2016

2016 was another big year for powerful data visualizations from the Prison Policy Initiative. These are our 10 favorites.

by Peter Wagner and Wendy Sawyer, December 30, 2016

2016 was another big year for powerful data visualizations from the Prison Policy Initiative. These are 10 of our favorites:

1. The “whole pie”

We updated our most famous data visualization for 2016, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie:

This year’s report included four slideshows of additional detail on different parts of the carceral system and some of the state-to-state comparisons.

Perhaps the most exciting addition was the report’s detailed dive into the population of people confined in jails, most of whom are legally innocent:

In a major update to our graph first produced last year, we powerfully illustrated that virtually all of the growth in the jail population has been in the number of legally innocent people who are detained in jails:

2. Every U.S. state is out step with the rest of the world

The Governors of 49 states can look at Louisiana and feel like their state is an enlightened bastion of moderation, at least on incarceration. But how do each of the 50 states compare to the countries of the world? Badly.

On the theory that comparing Iowa to El Salvador (a country that recently endured a civil war and now has one of the highest homicide rates in the world) might not be fair, the report includes a graphical comparison of the U.S. incarceration rate to that of its closest allies, the founding members of NATO:

3. Looking at probation

Some of the seemingly less punitive states are actually the most likely to put their residents under some other form of correctional control, finds our report Correctional Control: Incarceration and supervision by state. The report builds off Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie, to provide the big picture of mass incarceration to produce versions of the pie chart for each state.

The centerpiece of the report is an interactive chart that ranks each state and D.C. by rate of total correctional control, which includes incarceration, probation, and parole.

The report also includes an animation that illustrates just how dramatic the differences are between the states:

Thinking of the U.S. criminal justice system as one system can be a mistake. There are 50 state systems, plus one in each of the approximately 3,000 counties and often separate systems in the approximately 30,000 municipalities. These differences matter a great deal.

4. Bail perpetuates poverty

In May, Bernadette and Dan unlocked rare government data to show that the ability to pay money bail is impossible for too many defendants because it represents eight months of a typical defendant’s income. Detaining the Poor also showed how much harder it is for women and people of color to afford bail.

People in local jails unable to meet bail are concentrated at the lowest ends of the national income distribution, especially in comparison to non-incarcerated people. As this graph shows, 37% had no chance of being able to afford the typical amount of money bail ($10,000) since their annual income is less than the median bail amount.

The report also includes a very helpful illustration of the path from arrest to pretrial detention:

Since the 1980s, there has been a significant, nationwide move away from courts allowing non-financial forms of pretrial release (such as release on own recognizance) to money bail, although this does vary substantially depending on jurisdiction. This chart illustrates the possible paths from arrest to pretrial detention. Almost all defendants will have the opportunity to be released pretrial if they meet certain conditions, and only a very small number of defendants will be denied a bail bond, mainly because a court finds that individual to be dangerous or a flight risk. The only national data on pretrial detention that we are aware of comes from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties series. Nationally, in 2009, 34% of defendants were detained pretrial for the inability to post money bail. This report focuses on this important population: those who are detained pretrial because they could not afford money bail.

5. Probation fees

Court-ordered fines and fees have expanded dramatically as states have realized their revenue potential. But for the low-income people who are caught up in the system, these costs mean a greater risk of financial strain and even incarceration. In December, Wendy compared probation rates and incomes across Massachusetts and found that low-income communities are hit hardest by probation fees:

The District Court locations were grouped by the per capita income of the towns and cities they each serve. Probation rates are higher in court locations that serve populations with lower incomes.

In the appendix of the report, we created a interactive scatterplot comparing each District Court’s probation caseloads and per capita income:

6. Shining a light on jail suicides

To cast light on the avoidable epidemic of jail suicides, we updated last year’s graph with a new article:

Bernadette’s article on the life-threatening reality of short jail stays also includes a graph illustrating groundbreaking data collected by the Huffington Post showing that most suicides occur in just the first few days of detention in jail.

7. A crime wave?

The President-elect says there is a crime wave. Is there? We looked:

For most cities, murder is much lower now than during the 1980s or 1990s. The data for 1985-2014 comes from the FBI. The FBI has not published the 2015 full year data yet, so we relied on data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which historically is very similar if slightly higher than the FBI’s figures. For that reason, this graph may overstate the increase in murder in 2015 in these cities.

For more on the need for city-specific crime data, see Wendy Sawyer’s analysis Making a mountain out of a molehill.

8. Public vs. private prisons

We’ve long argued that prisons owned and run by corporations that contract with state governments get far more attention than they deserve. But another huge provider of contractual prison services gets almost no attention whatsoever: local jails.

Since 1999, private prisons and local jails have housed roughly the same number of those serving state and federal prison sentences. But when those interested in justice reform talk about profiting off of mass incarceration, they almost always leave local jails out of the conversation.

For more on this topic, see our article: Some private prisons are, um, public.

9. Beyond the crime bill

During the Democratic primary, many people blamed the Clintons for mass incarceration by pointing to the 1994 crime bill. But that was perhaps the least important of seven major bills. One of the most harmful, and the least discussed, was the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. In May, we made this data visualization of data collected by law professor Margo Schlanger for her article Trends in Prisoner Litigation, as the PLRA Enters Adulthood to make the magnitude of this change clear:

The filing rate by incarcerated people dropped significantly after the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act. And ironically, despite Congress’ fears of a prison lawsuits flooding the courts, this data that controls for the size of the prison population shows that in 1996, when the Prison Litigation Reform Act was passed, fewer lawsuits per 1,000 incarcerated people were being filed than during the ten year period of 1979-1988.

10. The Crippling Effect of Incarceration on Wealth

A fascinating study by Khaing Zaw, Darrick Hamilton, and William Darity Jr. shows that incarceration has a staggering effect on the accumulation of wealth over the course of a lifetime. To accompany our blog post on the original article, we made a data visualization of the data — including detail by racial group — published in the original article:

Voices that are pushing the envelope – best commentary of 2016

Our favorite criminal justice commentaries of 2016 that shined light on the too often forgotten areas of criminal justice reform

by Bernadette Rabuy, December 29, 2016

This year, we were pleased to see writers, researchers, advocates, and public officials take a stand against mass incarceration. Here are some of our favorite examples of writing that pushed the envelope and shined light on the too often forgotten areas of criminal justice reform:

• Are We There Yet? The Promise, Perils and Politics of Penal Reform
  By Marie Gottschalk
  Prison Legal News
  January 1, 2016
  
  A comprehensive article by Marie Gottschalk, author of Caught, takes a critical look at the causes of mass incarceration and the various obstacles to reform such as the overemphasis on reforms that only affect those convicted of non-serious, nonviolent, and nonsexual offenses. Gottschalk’s article is useful for both those new to criminal justice issues and those looking to become more effective advocates for reform.
• The Meaning of Life Without Parole
  By Clint Smith
  The New Yorker
  February 8, 2016
  
  In this poetic piece, writer Clint Smith reminds readers of the humanity of his students who are serving long prison sentences in a Massachusetts state prison. Smith raises the urgent but difficult question: How, if at all, will criminal justice reform impact those convicted of violent offenses?
• Debtors’ Prison in 21st-Century America
  By Whitney Benns and Blake Strode
  The Atlantic
  February 23, 2016
  
  Writer Whitney Benns and attorney Blake Strode trace the pervasive practice of St. Louis counties locking people up for failure to pay fines and fees with the region’s troubled past. They explain how the St. Louis regional structure and longstanding racial segregation made the current practice of debtors’ prisons far from surprising.
• On pardons, Obama could go down as one of the most merciless presidents in history
  By George Lardner Jr. and P.S. Ruckman Jr.
  The Washington Post
  March 25, 2016
  

  In this oped, George Lardner Jr., a former Washington Post reporter, and P.S. Ruckman Jr., a professor and editor of the Pardon Power Blog, explain that despite President Obama’s Clemency Project 2014, Obama’s clemency record makes him one of the least merciful presidents in history. The oped also challenges the stringent criteria set forth by the Obama administration for commutation requests such as that applicants must have served at least ten years of their prison sentence.

• Why I refuse to send people to jail for failure to pay fines
  By Ed Spillane
  The Washington Post
  April 8, 2016
  
  In this groundbreaking oped, Ed Spillane, judge of College Station Municipal Court and president of the Texas Municipal Courts Association, shares why he refuses to lock poor people up for failure to pay fines. Instead, Judge Spillane urges other judges to be creative and consider alternatives like community service, payment plans, anger-management training, or even mercy.
• How to make mass incarceration disappear: John Pfaff, magical statistics and sentencing reform
  By Scott Henson
  Grits for Breakfast
  April 11, 2016
  
  Grits for Breakfast explores Fordham law professor John Pfaff’s counterintuitive and thought-provoking theories about mass incarceration, finding that they hold true for Texas: increased prison admissions, not longer sentences, have been driving mass incarceration since the late 90s. Henson concludes that, beyond prosecutorial reform, sentencing reform can still impact prison admissions such as by reducing common, low-level charges like drug possession or theft from felonies to misdemeanors.
• Bail bondsmen aggressively fight forfeitures
  By Scott Henson
  Grits for Breakfast
  June 13, 2016
  
  Henson uncovers a little-known truth: the bail bond industry often gets away with not paying bond money when defendants fail to appear in court. As a result, the bail bond industry gets to profit even without fulfilling its obligations.
• Why Prisoners Deserve the Right to Vote
  By Corey Brettschneider
  Politico
  June 21, 2016
  
  Corey Brettschneider, a professor at Brown University, writes that our country should go farther than giving the formerly incarcerated the right to vote; we should move in the direction of Maine and Vermont by allowing those currently behind bars to vote. Granting this right would allow us to listen to the incarcerated as we shape criminal justice policy and have a long-term impact on their political participation.
• Private prisons are not the problem: Why mass incarceration is the real issue
  By Daniel Denvir
  Salon
  August 24, 2016
  
  In the wake of the federal government’s announcement that it would phase out the use of private prisons to hold incarcerated people, Daniel Denvir uncovers the disappointing truth that a very small proportion of people in federal prisons would be affected. Denvir explains that the core of the problem of mass incarceration is that our society incarcerates too many people, and a clear majority of those people are in public prisons, not private.
• Mentally ill people in solitary confinement — we need to get them out
  By Dave Mahoney
  The Hill
  August 30, 2016
  
  Dave Mahoney, chief law enforcement officer of Dane County (Madison) Wisconsin, gets straight to the point: mentally ill people should not be in solitary confinement; it is nothing short of cruel. According to Mahoney, even jails in general are the wrong place for the mentally ill.

Our favorite criminal justice research from 2016

2016's most useful and under-exposed research that contributed to our movement's understanding of key issues in criminal justice.

by Wendy Sawyer, December 29, 2016

As 2016 comes to a close, the Prison Policy Initiative wanted to highlight some of our colleagues’ research that we thought was the most useful and the most under-exposed and contributed to our movement’s understanding of key issues in criminal justice:

• Growing Up Locked Down
  ACLU of Nebraska
  January 2016
  The psychological and physical harms of solitary confinement are so much worse for children who are still developing. The ACLU of Nebraska finds that the state overuses “the most inhumane correctional practices” of solitary confinement in every one of its juvenile justice facilities. Children there were placed alone in cells as punishment for minor offenses, like talking back or having too many books. The report calls attention to the “serious mental health impacts of solitary confinement for vulnerable youth” and the pressing need for policy reform.
• The Gavel Gap: Who Sits in Judgment on State Courts?
  by Tracey E. George and Albert H. Yoon for the American Constitution Society
  June 2016
  In a democratic society, the courts should reflect the communities they serve. This report is the first to give a crystal clear picture of just how un-representative state court judges are by gender, race and ethnicity. To support further research and advocacy, it provides a new dataset of biographical information about state court judges. The report makes the case that if courts’ want to increase both their understanding of the communities they serve and public confidence in their decisions, courts must close these wide gender and racial “gavel gaps.”
• America’s Top Five Deadliest Prosecutors: How Overzealous Personalities Drive the Death Penalty
  Fair Punishment Project
  How is it possible that five prosecutors were responsible for 440 death sentences? The Fair Punishment Project details the bloodlust, racism and willful misconduct that made it possible for each of these notorious prosecutors to win scores of death penalty sentences. This report shows that the death penalty is an unusual punishment sought by a small number of zealots in just a few parts of the country.
• Paying the Price: Failure to Deliver HIV Services in Louisiana Parish Jails
  Human Rights Watch
  March 29, 2016
  Recognizing that the populations at risk of HIV and the incarcerated populations overlap, this report illustrates the urgent need for reform in Louisiana, which it describes as “‘ground zero’ for the dual epidemics of HIV and incarceration.” An accompanying video on the website gives voice to stakeholders by including interviews with formerly incarcerated people, HIV and health services providers, and representatives of the criminal justice system.
• Punishment Rate Measures Prison Use Relative to Crime
  Pew Charitable Trusts
  March 23, 2016
  This report looks beyond imprisonment to offer a new metric, “the punishment rate,” with which to gauge punitiveness. By comparing the size of prison populations to the frequency and severity of crime reported, rather than to the number of residents, Pew shows that the U.S. has become more punitive than traditional analysis suggests. Extending this analysis to individual states, Pew finds that Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming are all significantly more punitive than their imprisonment rates suggest.
• Race, Wealth and Incarceration: Results from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Race and Social Problems
  Originally published in Race and Social Problems, Vol. 8, Issue 1, 2016. The final publication is available at Springer Link
  By Khaing Zaw, Darrick Hamilton, and William Darity, Jr.
  March 2016
  The authors of this study examine the wealth disparity between young men who experience prison and those who never do, using a survey that follows a group of young men for 27 years. They find that the men who are incarcerated have less wealth to begin with and, over time, accumulate only a small fraction of the wealth accumulated by their peers who are never incarcerated. (This is consistent with our findings that pre-incarceration incomes of incarcerated people are 41% lower than their peers.) We blogged about this report and produced two graphics based on it: The Crippling Effect of Incarceration on Wealth.
• Get To Work or Go To Jail
  By Noah Zatz, Tia Koonse, Theresa Zhen, Lucero Herrera, Han Lu, Steven Shafer, and Black Valenta at UCLA Labor Center
  March 2016
  Work at a terrible job, or go to jail. Those are the two choices for many people on probation and parole, as outlined by this research brief. Probation and parole conditions, as well as court orders to find work to pay court debts or child support, can force people to choose between bad (or unpaid) jobs and jail time. The threat of jail depresses labor standards and legal protections, which create cascading effects on all workers. The report provides estimates of incarceration for “failure to work” and links this threat to the practice of incarcerating people who fail to pay court fines and fees – something we discussed in our report on probation fees.
• Roadblocks to reform: District Attorneys, Elections, and the Criminal Justice Status Quo
  ACLU of Oregon
  April 2016
  District Attorneys have the power to make the justice system more progressive. But this report concludes that uncontested elections and appointments in Oregon lead DAs to block progressive criminal justice reform and maintain the status quo for their own self-interest. The ACLU makes a powerful case for why the national movement needs to pay more attention to DA races.
• Unlicensed & Untapped: Removing Barriers to State Occupational Licenses for People with Records
  by Michelle Natividad Rodriguez and Beth Avery with the National Employment Law Project
  April 2016
  Not only do people with criminal records face discrimination from employers, they also often face barriers in obtaining occupational licenses to work as a barber, hairdresser, health care worker, or teacher – even decades after their sentence ends. This report evaluates the effectiveness of state laws intended to ensure fairness for applicants with records and it provides recommendations for states, including a model law.
• Louisiana Death Sentence Cases and Their Reversals, 1976-2015
  Originally published in The Southern University Law Center Journal of Race, Gender, and Poverty, Vol. 7, 2016.
  by Frank R. Baumgartner and Tim Lyman
  April 26, 2016
  An analysis of 241 death sentence cases in Louisiana since Gregg v. Georgia reinstated the death penalty in 1976 finds that the death penalty is still applied in discriminatory ways, and the frequency of reversals suggests the death penalty process is rife with errors and ultimately arbitrary in application.
• Correcting Food Policy in Washington Prisons: How the DOC Makes Healthy Food Choices Impossible for Incarcerated People & What Can Be Done
  Prison Voice Washington
  From Washington state, a troubling example of how incarcerated people suffer when states try to cut costs. By eliminating all fresh, natural food in favor of processed products from a single prison food factory, the state has created “food deserts” in its prisons, failing to provide food that meet minimum standards for nutrition and increasing healthcare expenditures. This report shows how a nation that recognizes nutrition as a public health issue continues to neglect its incarcerated population.
• Incarceration Trends
  Vera Institute of Justice
  December 2015
  Vera’s Incarceration Trends project was technically launched in 2015, but it came out after we wrote last year’s list of best reports and it is too useful to ignore. A combination of two written reports and an interactive data tool, Vera’s research involved aggregating county-level data from 1970 to the present so that local incarceration rates can be compared over time and across jurisdictions. While also calling attention to racial and gender disparities, Vera’s Trends project is an incomparable resource that sheds historical light on the local face of mass incarceration.