SJC Exchange Library

Originally posted by Wanda Bertram on 12/2/2024

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Hi friends,

As you know, jails are a major but under-discussed aspect of mass incarceration in this country. To help fill some basic gaps in knowledge around jail populations, we released a new briefing last Friday in collaboration with the Jail Data Initiative at NYU. Our briefing offers a demographic profile of jail populations and highlights the burden of incarceration faced by specific vulnerable groups.

This new analysis builds on our 2019 report Arrest, Release, Repeat, which provided a national statistical picture of jail populations. We use more recent (2021-2023) data from more than 600 jails across the country to update that picture. Key findings include:

• Of the approximately 5.6 million people in this country who go to jail every year, 1.2 million go to jail multiple times.
• The most common type of charges among people booked in jail were "public order" offenses, such as disorderly conduct and trespassing.

• At least 4% of people in the sample were unhoused (likely a significant undercount, for reasons we explain in the briefing), but those that were unhoused reported higher rates of jail re-bookings within a single year.
• Black and Indigenous people are overrepresented in jails, and Indigenous people are more likely than people of any other racial group to end up in jail multiple times in a year.

The briefing is here: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2024/11/27/jail_bookings/

In other news: In case you missed it, the federal government approved an important new rule extending Medicare benefits to people on community supervision, a change that we and many other groups have pushed for. We have a quick blog post about it here.

Lastly: As part of a series of pieces lifting up our allies' work, we published a blog post today about The Humanization Project and their work to reform Virginia's justice system, including their victory on HB 5148, a law tripling the amount of good time available to people in prison.

I hope these resources are useful in your work.

Take care,

Wanda 

Prison Policy Initiative