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.

Can you help us sustain this work?

Thank you,
Peter Wagner, Executive Director
Donate

Staff picks

  • The harms of short jail stays Being detained in jail — even for a day or two — has far-reaching impacts, from job loss to death.

    Suicide in jails has been an overlooked national crisis for years. The onset of social, physical, and economic harms from being in jail is so immediate, nearly half of jail suicides occur in the first week of detention.

    Bar chart showing most suicides in jails occurred shortly after entering detention

    The rate of suicide in local jails — which generally hold people detained pretrial or convicted of low-level offenses — is far greater than that of state prisons or the American population in general.

    Graph charts the suicide rates for local jails, state prisons, and the general American population from 2000 to 2019. The jail suicide rate is out of step with the nation and prisons.

  • States of Incarceration: The Global Context (2024) This interactive graphic compares every U.S. state's use of prison to that of other nations.

    States of Incarceration report graphic

    We showed that the average U.S. incarceration rate is way out of line with the international community:

    graphic comparing the incarceration rates of the United States with other founding NATO members, showing the United States far higher than the other nations

  • Excessive jailing Our national reliance on pretrial detention has driven the bulk of jail growth over the past four decades. Many of the 460,000 people currently jailed pretrial are there simply because they can’t afford money bail, while others remain in detention without a conviction because a state or federal government agency has placed a “hold” on their release. This update of our 2017 report contains the latest available data about pretrial detention in jails across the U.S.

    animated line chart showing that from 1983 to 2019, the driving force of jail expansion as been the rise in pretrial detention across the country
  • Women's Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2024 The United States is one of the top incarcerators of women in the world, but this graphic is the first to aggregate the disparate systems of confinement and illustrates where and why 191,000 women are locked up in the U.S.

    pie chart showing the number of women locked up on a given day in the United States by facility type and, where available, the underlying offense

  • How many people are locked up in the United States? (2022) (Created: 2022)
  • Incarceration pie chart and correctional control pie chart by state (Created: 2018)
  • The steep cost of medical co-pays in prison puts health at risk

    (See our 2022 update of prison copay policies here.)

    If your doctor charged a $500 co-pay for every visit, how bad would your health have to get before you made an appointment? You would be right to think such a high cost exploitative, and your neighbors would be right to fear that it would discourage you from getting the care you need for preventable problems. That's not just a hypothetical story; it's the hidden reality of prison life:

    Graph showing how much minimum wage earners in each state would pay if a single co-pay took as many hours to earn as a co-pay charged to an incarcerated person does. The average equivalent co-pay is about $200 and in West Virginia, it's over $1,000.

  • Following the Money of Mass Incarceration In this first-of-its-kind report, we find that the system of mass incarceration costs the government and families of justice-involved people at least $182 billion every year. In this report and visualization, we follow the money:

    Excerpt of a larger graph showing the $182 billion system of mass incarceration and the relative size of its sub-parts from policing, to courts to private companies. Private prisons are a very small part of the total.

  • Fighting for Prison Telephone Justice We have been working with partners across the country to bring fairness to the prison and jail phone industry that wants to charge families of incarcerated people $1/minute for simple phone calls. These companies would have you believe that, in an era of Skype and unlimited long-distance, the families of incarcerated people still live in the 1950s.

    graph showing normal phone calls haven't cost $1/minute since 1950



Stay Informed


Get the latest updates:



Share on 𝕏 Donate