{"id":11466,"date":"2021-02-03T12:52:17","date_gmt":"2021-02-03T17:52:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/?p=11466"},"modified":"2026-01-21T14:57:27","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T19:57:27","slug":"january-population-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/2021\/02\/03\/january-population-update\/","title":{"rendered":"How much have COVID-19 releases changed prison and jail populations?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article was updated on October 21st, 2021<\/a> with more recent jail and prison population data. That version<\/a> should be used instead of this one.<\/p>\n

\nFamilies and advocates want to know: How many people have been released from prisons and jails specifically because of<\/i> efforts to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in correctional facilities and surrounding communities? Despite our ability to track overall correctional populations during the pandemic<\/a>, the answer to this crucial question isn’t clear. Because of the disparate, disjointed nature of our local, state, and federal criminal justice systems, it is always difficult to track the effects of specific reforms, or to determine which policies are driving changes in the overall number of incarcerated people. During the current pandemic, this makes it impossible to pinpoint just how much of the recent population reductions were the result of special efforts to release people due to COVID-19 — as opposed to “normal” releases or changes in incoming admissions<\/i>. But what is clear is that there are plenty of ways to reduce correctional populations, and that states and local governments are not using these tools to their full potential. \n<\/p>\n

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Prisons<\/h2>\n

\nEven in states where prison populations have dropped, there are still too many people behind bars to accommodate social distancing, effective isolation and quarantine, and increased health care requirements. For example, although California has reduced the state prison population by about 22% in the past 12 months, it has not been enough to prevent large COVID-19 outbreaks in the state’s prisons<\/a>. In fact, as of January 20th, 2021, California’s prisons were still holding more people than they were designed<\/a> for, at 103% of their design capacity.\n<\/p>\n

\n\"graph\n<\/picture>Figure 1.<\/b> Prison population data for 30 states where sufficient population data was readily available from January 2020 to January 2021, either directly from the state Departments of Correction or the Vera Institute of Justice. See our COVID-19 response tracker<\/a> for more information on many of the most important policy changes that led to these (generally small) reductions in some states. For the population data for these 30 states, see Appendix A<\/a>.
\nSharp-eyed readers may wonder if Connecticut and Vermont are showing larger declines than most other states because those two states have \u201cunified\u201d prison and jail systems, and pretrial populations typically respond to policy changes more quickly than prisons. However, data from both states show that the bulk of their population reduction is coming from within the \u201csentenced\u201d portion of their populations. (For the Connecticut data, see the Correctional Facility Population Count Report<\/a>, and for Vermont, see the daily population reports<\/a>.)\n<\/p>\n

\nMany states’ prison populations are the lowest they’ve been in decades, <\/b>but this is not because more people are being released from prisons<\/b>. The limited data available from a handful of states shows that the number of prison releases did not change much between 2019 and 2020, suggesting that most of the population drops that we’ve seen over the past year are due to reduced prison admissions<\/b>. (Certainly, reducing the number of people admitted to correctional facilities is<\/i> critical to reducing the number of people behind bars, but to quickly decarcerate, states should be releasing far more people, too.)\n<\/p>\n

\n\"graph\n<\/picture>Figure 2.<\/b> These four states publish monthly release and admission data for 2018, 2019, and most of 2020. Although we cannot be certain that this analysis is representative of the other 42 state prison systems and the federal Bureau of Prisons, these data do begin to show us a pattern of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic: reducing prison admissions, while maintaining the status quo of prison releases.<\/b> (We’ll be collecting this data going forward and in additional states to build an even more comprehensive picture of how federal and state prison systems have responded to COVID-19.)\n<\/p>\n

\n\"graph\n<\/picture>Figure 3.<\/b> These eight states published monthly release data for 2019 and for most of 2020. While not nationally representative, these eight states show that fewer people have been released from these state prisons in response to COVID-19 than in the previous year.\n<\/p>\n

\nDespite evidence that large-scale releases do not inherently endanger public safety<\/a>, states have elected to release people from prison on a mostly case-by-case basis, which an October 2020 report<\/a> from the National Academies described as “procedurally slow and not well suited to crisis situations.”\n<\/p>\n

\nThankfully, some states have recognized the inefficiency of case-by-case releases and the necessity of larger-scale releases. For example, in New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy signed<\/a> bill S2519<\/a> in October, which allowed for the early release of people with less than a year left on their sentences.1<\/a><\/sup> A few weeks after the bill was signed, more than 2,000 people were released<\/a> from New Jersey state prisons on November 4th.2<\/a><\/sup>\n<\/p>\n

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Jails<\/h2>\n

\nJail populations, like prison populations, are lower now than they were pre-pandemic. Initially, many local officials — including sheriffs, prosecutors, and judges — responded quickly to COVID-19 and reduced their jail populations. In a national sample of 429 county jails of varying sizes, most (87%) decreased their populations from March to July, resulting in an average population reduction of 23% across all 429 jails.3<\/a><\/sup> These population reductions came as the result of various policy changes<\/a>, including police issuing citations in lieu of arrests, prosecutors declining to charge people for “low-level offenses,” courts reducing cash bail amounts, and jail administrators releasing people detained pretrial or those serving short sentences for “nonviolent” offenses.\n<\/p>\n

\nBut the data now tells a different story about the latter part of the pandemic. Since July, 66% of the jails in our sample had population increases, suggesting that the early reforms instituted to mitigate COVID-19 have largely been abandoned<\/b>. For example, by mid-April, the Philadelphia city jail population reportedly dropped by more than 17% after city police suspended<\/a> low-level arrests and judges released<\/a> “certain nonviolent detainees” jailed for “low-level charges.” But on May 1st — as the pandemic raged on — the Philadelphia police force announced that they would resume arrests<\/a> for property crimes, effectively reversing the earlier reduction efforts. Similarly, on July 10th, the sheriff of Jefferson County (Birmingham), Alabama, announced that the jail would limit admissions<\/a> to only “violent felons that cannot make bond.”4<\/a><\/sup> That effort was quickly abandoned when the jail resumed normal admission operations<\/a> just one week later. The increasing jail populations across the country suggest that after the first wave of responses to COVID-19, many local officials have allowed jail admissions to return to business as usual.\n<\/p>\n

\n\"graph\n<\/picture>Figure 4. <\/b>Despite the rising national case rate of COVID-19, the number of people held in our sample of 429 county jails across the country has not continued to decrease<\/b> over the past six months, following early initial reductions. This graph contains aggregated data collected by NYU\u2019s Public Safety Lab<\/a> and updates a graph in our December 2nd briefing<\/a>. It Includes all jails where the Lab was able to report data on March 10th and for at least 75% of the days in our research period, which ended Jan. 20, 2021. (The Public Safety Lab is continuing to add more jails to its data collection and data is not available for all facilities for all days.) This graph presents the data as 7-day rolling averages, which smooths out most of the variations caused by individual facilities not reporting population data on particular days. The temporary population drops during the last weeks of May,August, and November are the result of more facilities than usual not being included in the dataset for various reasons, rather than any known policy changes. To see county level data for all 429 jails included in this analysis, see Appendix B<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

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Why is it so hard to identify the cause of population shifts? <\/h2>\n

\nEven under normal circumstances, prison and jail populations fluctuate frequently due to a variety of factors, making it difficult to pinpoint what is causing specific changes. In a way, visualizing shifts in the number of people confined is a bit like talking about how much water is in a bathtub that has multiple faucets and multiple drains, each controlled by different people who don’t necessarily communicate with each other. Measuring the depth of the water (or the number of people locked up) is easy, but determining why<\/i> the water level changes is complicated. The criminal justice system is not so different, in that different agencies affect the number of incoming incarcerated admissions via arrest, prosecution, conviction, and sentencing policies. At the same time, there are many ways that people can leave prison or jail, too — which are also controlled by various agencies — such as release without bail, maxing out a sentence, parole, clemency (including mass clemencies), retroactive sentence reductions by a legislature, compassionate release, or death.\n<\/p>\n

\nDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of people incarcerated across the country is clearly down, but it is not immediately clear how much of that reduction we can attribute to admission mechanisms, as opposed to release mechanisms. For example, changes to the admission mechanisms<\/b> that we have seen enacted to reduce jail and prison populations include:\n<\/p>\n