HELP US END MASS INCARCERATION The Prison Policy Initiative uses research, advocacy, and organizing to dismantle mass incarceration. We’ve been in this movement for 23 years, thanks to individual donors like you.

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chart showing that while the median felony bail amount for detained defendants is $25,000, the median annual pre-incarceration income of people in jail because they can't afford bail is under $20,000. Their non-incarcerated peers have a median income of $41,610

Data Source: Median annual incomes are based on our 2016 analysis in Detaining The Poor, adjusted to 2024 dollars and rounded to the nearest ten dollars. The median felony bail amount was reported by Bureau of Justice Statistics in Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties, 2009, Table 16. (Graph: Brian Nam-Sonenstein, 2024)

This graph originally appeared in Shadow Budgets: How mass incarceration steals from the poor to give to the prison.



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