We've just published analyses of the two new Bureau of Justice Statistics reports, Prisoners in 2019 and Jails in Indian Country, 2017-2018. Read on for the highlights of our analyses, or visit our website to read these articles in full:

• Prison incarceration rates inch down, but racial equity and real decarceration still decades away
• New BJS data reveals a jail-building boom in Indian country

Prisoners in 2019: Prison incarceration rates inch down, but racial equity and real decarceration still decades away

by Alexi Jones

Last week, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released Prisoners in 2019, an annual report that breaks down the number of people incarcerated in state and federal prisons. Along with the report, BJS released a press release that paints a deceptively rosy picture of mass incarceration in the United States, which has been parroted by numerous media outlets.

The press release boasts that the United States’ incarceration rate (419 per 100,000 people) is at its lowest since 1995, and that Black Americans are incarcerated at the lowest rate in 30 years. But this framing misses the bigger picture: 1.4 million Americans are still incarcerated in state and federal prisons — meaning that the prison population is still five times larger than it was in 1975, before the “war on crime” really took hold and the number of people under correctional control exploded.

Moreover, Black Americans are still incarcerated in state and federal prisons at five times the rate of white Americans, which means we are looking at decades more of racially disparate mass incarceration in the United States unless lawmakers are willing to make much bolder changes.

Not only is our state and federal prison population still massive, the data in the report reveals that our pace of decarceration has been stubbornly slow. Recent criminal justice reforms have not been nearly enough to counteract the massive growth of our prison populations over the past forty years. At the current pace of decarceration:

• It will be 2044 when the federal prison population returns to pre-mass incarceration levels — 24 years from now.
• It will be 2088 when state prison populations return to pre-mass incarceration levels — 68 years from now.
• It will take until 2039 for the Black incarceration rate to equal the 2019 white incarceration rate—19 years from now.
• And it will be 2199 when the women’s prison population returns to pre-mass incarceration levels — 179 years from now.

You can read the full web version of this article, including graphics and footnotes, at www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/10/30/prisoners_in_2019/.

Jails in Indian Country, 2017-2018 reveals a jail-building boom on tribal lands

by Emily Widra, Wanda Bertram, and Wendy Sawyer

New data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that the number of jails in Indian country has risen rapidly in recent years, from 68 jails in 2000 to 84 in 2018 (an increase of almost 24%). The number of people in Indian country jails has also grown — by over 1,000 people, or about 60% — even though the total number of people living in these areas has hardly changed.

The rapid expansion of jail space in Indian country — that is, on tribal lands — holds with a recent nationwide trend. Jail populations have skyrocketed over the past three decades, leading first to overcrowding, and then to sheriffs announcing that they need to build more jails to alleviate overcrowding. But as we’ve previously discussed, while new jails might make existing jails less crowded in the short term, they can enable more incarceration in the long term. And in Indian country, it appears that they have.

As of 2018, 35% of Indian country jails are still holding more people than they were designed for. Compare this number to the 34% of Indian country jails that were above capacity in 2013: The share of overcrowded jails has actually increased slightly over the last several years. Only 55 jails in Indian country have populations consistently below their maximum capacity. As the number of jail beds has grown, so has the number of people incarcerated:

Building new jails in Indian country — as in the U.S. in general — enables the criminal justice system to lock up more people for longer periods of time. Most people in jails are being held pretrial; in other words, they are still legally innocent. Indeed, the share of people held pretrial in Indian country jails increased by 20 percentage points (an 80% increase) from 1999 to 2018, and the average length of stay in Indian country jails has doubled since 2002. (At the same time, the share of local jail populations outside of Indian country that are held pretrial has increased by 23% and the average length of stay has stretched by 33%.)

You can read the full web version of this article, including all graphics and footnotes, at www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/10/30/bjs-indian-country/.