Our mission is to empower activists, journalists, and policymakers to shape effective criminal legal system policy, so we go beyond our original reports and analyses to curate a database of the best empirical research on the criminal legal system available online. This newsletter includes just the newest additions to this database.

The cruel nexus of mental health and mass incarceration

Hello friends,

The issues of mental health and mass incarceration are inextricably linked. Instead of providing treatment and care to many people facing mental health challenges, the nation locks them in prisons and jails. And once someone is behind bars, their mental health challenges will almost certainly get worse, while accessing care and support becomes even more difficult. It is a brutal cycle that ruins lives.

There is a ton of outstanding research about the links between mass incarceration and mental health. This month, in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, we’re highlighting a few pieces that have caught our eye because they effectively show how broken the current system is:

• The Treatment Advocacy Center has an amazing report (with data from all 50 states) that explains how the limited number of hospital mental health beds and the flawed system for determining who gets access to that treatment mean that most people can only access care if they end up behind bars first.
• The mental health harms of incarceration cannot be overstated. We pulled some of the best research available that shows how being incarcerated takes a mental toll, and how that continues even after a person is released.
• Suicide continues to be a leading cause of death in prisons and jails. But new research shows that the elevated risk of suicide follows someone throughout their life after incarceration.
• Mental health conditions are often present at the same time as substance use disorder. This recent study suggests that justice-involved women, who we know have a higher likelihood of dual diagnoses, face immense physical and social barriers to getting the mental health care they need.

This only begins to scratch the surface of the damning research about mental health and mass incarceration. I encourage you to visit our full collection of research on this topic to learn more.

Let’s get to this month’s updates to our Research Library. We’ve added 24 new reports focusing on crime, drug policy, felony disenfranchisement, and more.

We hope this work is useful and informative!

Leah Wang, Senior Research Analyst

We've The Prison Policy Initiative has added 24 new reports to the Research Library:

Community impact

See 110 reports on the impact of the criminal legal system on housing, schools, employment, neighborhoods, and more.

• What's Next: Community Perspectives on (Re)Investment After Less Is More New York by Columbia University Justice Lab and Unchained, November, 2023
  "Town hall participants identified several specific areas of investment where they wanted savings from Less Is More to be directed...housing was mentioned more than any other single resource across the town hall discussions."

Conditions of confinement

See 275 reports on prison and jail conditions such as solitary confinement, labor, discipline, food, and more.

• Investigation of the Fulton County Jail by U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, November, 2024
  "The Jail's failure to provide adequate medical care inside the Jail includes failure to provide confidential healthcare screening, failure to provide sick call slips and respond to sick call requests promptly..."
• Where Do You Go When Your Prison Cell Floods? Inadequacy of Current Climate Disaster Plans of US Departments of Correction by Morgan Maner et al, October, 2022
  "Most state and DOC emergency management (EM) plans do not outline how to protect the safety of incarcerated populations and carceral staff. Common themes across state and DOC-level EM plans include resident labor and use of materials."
• Natural hazards and prisons Protecting human rights of people in prison in disaster prevention, response and recovery by Penal Reform International, December, 2021
  "People in prison are largely dependent on prison staff to ensure their health and safety during disasters. Unlike people in the community, they cannot make their own decisions to evacuate to safer areas or to stock up on basic supplies."
• The Prisoner Trade by Emma Kaufman, April, 2020
  "Today, prisoners have no right to be incarcerated in the state where they were convicted, and prison officials may trade prisoners -- either for money or for other prisoners -- across state lines."
• Up the Creek Without a Paddle: Consequences for Failing to Protect Prisoners During a Natural Disaster by Rachel Shaw, March, 2019
  "Managing knowledge is an important tool to handle these emergency situations...This includes having an accurate form of record management that can withstand the common consequences of a natural disaster."

Crime

See 286 reports on crime, crime rates, and victimization.

• The Hidden Crisis: How Poverty Drives Crime in Rural Oklahoma by Oklahomans for Criminal Justice Reform, February, 2025
  "In Oklahoma City & Tulsa, violent crime is more likely to involve a gun, a stranger, and occur outside the home. Meanwhile, in smaller communities, violent crime is more likely to involve a family member, use personal weapons, and occur inside the home."
• Myths and Realities: Prosecutors and Criminal Justice Reform by Brennan Center for Justice, October, 2024
  "Our analysis also finds no clear relationship between the pro-reform prosecutorial approach and the incidence of crime."

Drug policy and treatment

See 178 reports on punishing and treating drug use in the criminal legal system.

• Only One In Twenty Justice-Referred Adults In Specialty Treatment For Opioid Use Receive Methadone Or Buprenorphine by Noa Krawczyk et al, December, 2017
  "Only 4.6 percent of justice-referred clients received agonist treatment, compared to 40.9 percent of those referred by other sources."

Felony disenfranchisement and voting rights

See 93 reports on laws barring people from the polls because of criminal convictions.

• Toward Effectuating the Right to Vote from Jail by Jackie O'Neil, August, 2024
  "State legislatures should take AB 286 (Nevada) as a starting point and impose comprehensive, strong obligations on jails to eliminate the barriers to voting in jail and encourage detained Americans to exercise their legal right to vote."

General

See 167 reports on the criminal legal system.

• Born Sinners Versus Born Winners: The Need for Estate Planning Inside Texas Prisons by Zayne Saadi, May, 2020
  "[Incarcerated people] lack access to the essential resources for drafting a formal, typed will--including an attorney or computer--and must instead execute handwritten wills upon whatever writing materials can be found."

Health and healthcare

See 217 reports on access to healthcare, chronic and infectious disease, mortality, and more.

• Continuity of Prescription Medication Use Among Adults Leaving State Prison by Laura Dague et al, February, 2025
  "Prescription continuity between prison release and the community was limited, even for drugs with high clinical need and relevance for population health.
• Discrimination based on criminal record and healthcare utilization among men recently released from prison: a descriptive study by Joseph W Frank et al, March, 2014
  "Among 172 men recently released from state prison, 42% reported a history of criminal record discrimination by healthcare workers."

Incarceration rates and trends

See 338 reports on the growth of prison and jail populations.

• Demographic Profiles of New Hampshire: A Focus on Incarceration by New Hampshire Center for Justice and Equity, April, 2024
  "Despite the lack of data on facility-level demographics across NH, what is reported indicates that NH incarcerates people of color at disproportionately high rates compared to White populations, mirroring national trends."

Jails

See 290 reports on jail populations, jail conditions, jail construction, and more.

• Who is jailed, how often, and why: Our Jail Data Initiative collaboration offers a fresh look at the misuse of local jails by Prison Policy Initiative, November, 2024
  "While unique jail admissions (the number of individual people admitted to jail) account for three-quarters of jail bookings, more than 1 in 5 people (22%) booked into jail are booked again within 12 months."
• The Rikers Island Longitudinal Study: Research Report by Samantha Plummer and Jaclyn Davis, Columbia Justice Lab, October, 2024
  "The Rikers Island Longitudinal Study [from 2019 to 2021] aimed to understand how defendants' experiences in the pretrial process affected and were affected by their social and economic life conditions."

Mental health

See 89 reports on the prevalence and treatment of mental illness in the criminal legal system.

• Criminal Justice System Involvement Among U.S. Military Veterans: Prevalence, Correlates, and Mental Health BurdenPaywall :( by Andrew W. Meisler, Mayumi O. Gianoli, and Robert H. Pietrzak, January, 2025
  "Justice system involvement [in a nationally representative sample of veterans] was associated with racial/ethnic minority, lower income/education, combat, and other lifetime traumas."

Poverty and wealth

See 160 reports on fines, fees, debt, and the criminalization of poor people.

• Seizing the Safety Net: Collecting Criminal Justice Debt With Tax Refund Offsets by National Consumer Law Center, January, 2025
  "The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is intended to increase employment in the formal labor market by increasing incentives...However, seizure of the EITC undermines this incentive, exacerbat[ing] existing pressure to drop out of the formal labor market."

Pretrial detention

See 130 reports on [category description from database].

• Beyond Bail: A National Survey of Pretrial Justice Reform in the United States by The Bail Project, March, 2025
  "To be included [in this report], a reform must have demonstrably shifted a jurisdiction away from wealth-based detention and toward a more equitable pretrial process that reduces unnecessary incarceration."

Probation and parole

See 128 reports on the costs and outcomes of detaining people before trial.

• One Size Fits None: How 'standard conditions' of probation set people up to fail by Prison Policy Initiative, October, 2024
  "In our sample, 34 jurisdictions require supervision fees with the cost of probation supervision for twelve months ranging from $170 to $917."
• Caged Birds and Those That Hear Their Songs: Effects of Race and Sex in South Carolina Parole Hearings by David M.N. Garavito, Amelia Courtney Hritz, and John H. Blume, January, 2024
  "The parole board was significantly less likely to grant parole to incarcerated men compared to women and to Black people compared to white people...Black men were least likely to be granted parole, whereas white women were the most likely."

Reentry and recidivism

See 254 reports on on the challenges and outcomes for people released from incarceration, including collateral consequences.

• Prior Incarceration and Performance on Immediate and Delayed Verbal Recall Tests: Results From National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health-Parent Study by Alexander Testa et al, March, 2024
  "Among the full sample, incarceration history is associated with 11% lower word recall in the bivariate analysis and an 8.5% lower word recall after including control variables."
• Economic Booms and Recidivism by Ozkan Eren and Emily Owens, 2023
  "We estimate that a ten thousand dollar increase in the per capita value of energy production is associated with a 2.8% reduction in the 1-year recidivism of ex-offenders relative to those released into other counties or at different times."

Sentencing policy

See 143 reports on the rise and impact of excessive criminal sentences.

• The Link Between Race-Ethnicity and a Pre-Sentence Prison Recommendation by Utah Commission on Criminal & Juvenile Justice, October, 2019
  "We analyze 9,788 felony Pre-Sentence Investigation reports in Utah between 2015 and 2017...we find that Hispanics have an increased likelihood of receiving the most severe sentence recommendation in comparison to Whites."