Jail and prison populations continue to creep up, despite the pandemic.

Prison Policy Initiative updates for October 21, 2021 Showing how mass incarceration harms communities and our national welfare

Data update: as the Delta variant ravages the country, correctional systems are dropping the ball (again) [[link removed]] While some prison systems and local jails have maintained historically low populations, others have returned to pre-pandemic levels, despite the ongoing dangers of COVID-19. [[link removed]]

by Emily Widra

The COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, particularly inside prisons and jails. The death rate from COVID-19 in prisons is more than double [[link removed]] that of the general U.S. population. In state and federal prisons across the country, over 2,800 people have died of COVID-19 and almost 438,000 people in prison have been infected, and thousands [[link removed]] of additional cases are linked to individual county jails. As the more contagious [[link removed]]Delta variant ravages parts of the nation, public health officials [[link removed]] continue to recommend prison population decreases as a primary method of risk reduction. Our data show that with just a few exceptions, state and local leaders are continuing to fail to reduce their prison and jail populations.

The federal Bureau of Prisons, state governments and departments of corrections, and local officials have a responsibility to protect the health and lives of those who are incarcerated. After 18 months of outbreak after outbreak in prisons and jails, it is clear correctional authorities must be held accountable for their failure to reduce their populations enough to prevent the illness and death of those who are incarcerated and in surrounding [[link removed]] communities [[link removed]].

Prisons

Even 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 18% since the start of the pandemic, it has not been enough to prevent large COVID-19 outbreaks in the state’s prisons [[link removed]]. In fact, as of October 6th, 2021, California’s prisons were still holding more people than they were designed for, at 112% of their design capacity [[link removed]] (and up from 103% in January 2021 [[link removed]]). Considering the continued overcrowding in the California prison system, it’s not surprising that the state is responsible for seven out of the ten largest COVID-19 prison clusters [[link removed]].

For the available population data for these 50 states and the Bureau of Prisons, see Appendix A [[link removed]].

Many states’ prison populations are the lowest they’ve been in decades, but this is not because more people are being released from prisons. The limited data available from eleven states shows that the average number of monthly prison releases have actually decreased since 2019.

Information from 11 states with detailed population data show fewer people have been released from these state prisons in response to COVID-19 in 2020 than in 2019, and, in 2021, prison releases are even lower than the two prior years.

Instead, data suggest most of the population drops we’ve seen over the past 18 months are due to reduced prison admissions, not increasing releases. In the ten states for which we have data, both admissions and releases have decreased in recent years, making clear that prisons are not using all available tools [[link removed]] at their disposal to stop the spread of the virus in their facilities. Reducing the number of people admitted to correctional facilities is critical to reducing the number of people behind bars, but to quickly decarcerate, states should release far more people, too.

Monthly release and admission data from the 10 states with available data show that courts slowing admissions are offsetting a troubling slowdown of releases.

Despite evidence that large-scale releases do not inherently endanger public safety [[link removed]], states have elected to release people from prison on a mostly case-by-case [[link removed]] basis, which an October 2020 report [[link removed]] from the National Academies described as “procedurally slow and not well suited to crisis situations.”

Thankfully, 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 [[link removed]] bill S2519 [[link removed]] in October 2020, which allowed for the early release of people with less than a year left on their sentences. A few weeks after the bill was signed, more than 2,000 people were released [[link removed]] from New Jersey state prisons on November 4th. In February 2021, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper announced plans [[link removed]] to release 3,500 people in state custody (with 1,500 of those releases to take place within 90 days). The releases were the result of a NAACP lawsuit challenging prison conditions in North Carolina during COVID-19. The state said it would release people using discretionary sentence credits (similar to “good time credits”), home confinement, and post-release supervision. But these are the only two instances we are aware of where large-scale release efforts are actually taking place in state prison systems.

Jails

Jail 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 415 county jails of varying sizes, most (88%) decreased their populations from March to July of 2020, resulting in an average change of a 24% population decrease across all 415 jails. These population reductions came as the result of various policy changes [[link removed]], 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.

But later in the pandemic, those trends reversed. Between July 2020 and January 2021, the populations of 69% of the jails in our sample increased, reversing course from the earlier months of the pandemic. As of October 2021, 29% of the jails in our sample have higher populations now than they did in March 2020. Overall, the average population change across these 415 jails since March 2020 has diminished to only a 7% decrease, suggesting that the early reforms instituted to mitigate COVID-19 have largely been abandoned. For example, by mid-April 2020, the Philadelphia city jail population reportedly dropped by more than 17% after city police suspended low-level [[link removed]] arrests and judges released [[link removed]] “certain nonviolent detainees” jailed for “low-level charges.” But just two weeks later — as the pandemic raged on — the Philadelphia police force announced that they would resume arrests [[link removed]] for property crimes, effectively reversing the earlier reduction efforts. Similarly, on July 10th, 2020, the sheriff of Jefferson County (Birmingham), Alabama, announced that the jail would limit admissions [[link removed]] to only “violent felons that cannot make bond.” That effort was quickly abandoned when the jail resumed normal admission operations [[link removed]] 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.

Despite continued dangers of COVID-19 & the Delta variant, the number of people held in our sample of 415 county jails across the country has not continued to decrease over the past year, and has, in fact, slowly increased.

In New York City, the jail population sharply declined after the pandemic was declared. Importantly, NYC jails - particularly Rikers Island [[link removed]] - were some of the first jails in the country to witness a COVID-19 outbreak. And yet, across different demographics, NYC jail populations have slowly leveled out, suggesting that the policies responsible for the necessary decarceration are no longer in practice. In addition to suffering the effects of COVID-19, Rikers Island is also facing an unprecedented crisis [[link removed]] following a history of over-incarceration and, according to a federal monitor [[link removed]], “decades of mismanagement.” At a time when jail populations should be at an all time low, Rikers Island’s confined population has surpassed the pre-COVID-19 population.

Graph of the daily NYC jail population. By all metrics, the NYC jail population dropped quickly early in the pandemic, but by July 2021 it was higher than before the pandemic. For more, see the full report [[link removed]].

Even before COVID-19, prisons [[link removed]] and jails [[link removed]] were a threat to public health [[link removed]]and considered notoriously dangerous places [[link removed]] during any sort of viral outbreak. And yet, correctional facilities continue to be the source of a large number of infections in the U.S. The COVID-19 death rate in prisons is almost three times higher [[link removed]] than among the general U.S. population, even when adjusted for age and sex (as the prison population is disproportionately young and male). Since the early days of the pandemic, public health professionals [[link removed]], corrections officials [[link removed]], and criminal justice reform advocates [[link removed]] have agreed that decarceration is necessary to protect incarcerated people and the community at large from COVID-19. Decarceration efforts must include releasing more people from prisons and jails. Despite this knowledge, state, federal, and local authorities have failed to release people from prisons and jails on a scale sufficient to protect incarcerated people’s lives - and by extension, the lives of everyone in the communities [[link removed]] where incarcerated people eventually return, and where correctional staff live and work.

* * *

For more information, including footnotes, appendices, and more, see the full online version of this report [[link removed]].

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Our work is made possible by private donations. Can you help us keep going? We can accept tax-deductible gifts online [[link removed]] or via paper checks sent to PO Box 127 Northampton MA 01061. Thank you!

Other news: States of emergency: The failure of prison system responses to COVID-19 [[link removed]]

More than 18 months into the pandemic, COVID-19 is still claiming lives behind bars. But a lack of transparency and consistency from state governments makes it hard to track — and compare — how states are addressing this crisis.

Our recent report [[link removed]] fills this gap. It compiles data along 16 factors to offer a state-by-state review of how prisons have responded to COVID-19.

Please support our work [[link removed]]

Our work is made possible by private donations. Can you help us keep going? We can accept tax-deductible gifts online [[link removed]] or via paper checks sent to PO Box 127 Northampton MA 01061. Thank you!

Our other newsletters Ending prison gerrymandering ( archives [[link removed]]) Criminal justice research library ( archives [[link removed]])

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