New data and visualizations spotlight states’ reliance on excessive jailing

We've updated the data tables and graphics from our 2017 report to show just how little has changed in our nation's overuse of jails: too many people are locked up in jails, most detained pretrial and many of them are not even under local jurisdiction.

by Emily Widra, April 15, 2024

Table of Contents

Warehousing effect

Renting jail space

COVID’s Impact

Recommendations

State-specific graphics

Methodology

Data appendices

Footnotes

One out of every three people behind bars is being held in a local jail, yet jails get almost none of the attention that prisons do. In 2017, we published an in-depth analysis of local jail populations in each state: Era of Mass Expansion: Why State Officials Should Fight Jail Growth. We paid particular attention to the various drivers of jail incarceration — including pretrial practices and holding people in local jails for state and federal authorities — and we explained how jails impact our entire criminal legal system and millions of lives every year. In the years since that publication, many states have passed reforms aimed at reducing jail populations, but we still see the same trends playing out: too many people are confined in local jails, and the reasons for their confinement do not justify the overwhelming costs of our nation’s reliance on excessive jailing.

People cycle through local jails more than 7 million¹ times each year and they are generally held there for brief, but life-altering, periods of time.² Most are released in a few hours or days after their arrest, but others are held for months or years,³ often because they are too poor to make bail.⁴ Fewer than one-third of the 663,100 people in jails on a given day have been convicted⁵ and are likely serving short sentences of less than a year, most often for misdemeanors. Jail policy is therefore in large part about how people who are legally innocent are treated, and how policymakers think our criminal legal system should respond to low-level offenses.

Figure 1. The frequent practice of renting jail cells to other agencies makes it difficult to draw conclusions from the little data that is available. This update to our 2017 report offers an updated analysis of national data to offer a state-by-state view of how jails are being used and we continue to find that pretrial populations continue to drive jail growth across the country. The data behind this graph is in Appendix Table 1.

More than 460,000 people are currently detained pretrial — in other words, they are legally innocent and awaiting trial. Many of these same people are jailed pretrial 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.

Pretrial detention disproportionately impacts already-marginalized groups of people:

• Low income: The median felony bail amount is $10,000, but 32% of people booked into jail in the past 12 months reported an annual income below $10,000.
• Black people: 43% of people detained pretrial are Black. Black people are jailed at more than three times the rate of white people.
• Health problems: 40% of people in jail reported a current chronic health condition. 18% of people booked into jail at least once in the past 12 months are not covered by any health insurance.
• Mental illness: 45% of people booked into jail in the past 12 months met criteria for any mental illness, compared to only 30% of people who had not been jailed.
• Experiencing homelessness: While national data don’t exist on the number of people in jail who were experiencing homelessness at the time of their arrest, data from Atlanta show that 1 in 8 city jail bookings in 2022 were of people who were experiencing homelessness.
• Lesbian, gay, or bisexual: 15% of people booked into jail in the past 12 months identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, compared to 10% of people not booked in the past year.

This confinement creates problems for individuals on a short-term basis and also has long-term effects. Research in different jurisdictions has found that, compared to similarly-situated peers who are not detained, people detained prior to trial are more likely to plead guilty, be convicted, be sentenced to jail, have longer sentences if incarcerated, and be arrested again. And these harms accrue quickly: being detained pretrial for any amount of time impacts employment, finances, housing, and the well-being of dependent children. In fact, studies have found that pretrial detention is associated with a decreased likelihood of court appearance and an increased likelihood of additional charges for new offenses. There is no question that wholesale pretrial detention does far more harm than good for an increasing number of people and communities.

State and federal agencies pay local jails a per diem (per day) fee for each person held on their behalf. For example, in 2024, the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections (prison system) pays local jails in Louisiana $26.39 per person per day, and more than 14,000 people in the Department’s custody were in local jails in 2022. The fees paid by different agencies to confine people in local jails range and depend on the contract between agencies: In 2023, the per diem rate negotiated between Daviess County, Kentucky and the U.S. Marshals Service increased from $55 to $70 per person per day. These per diem fees can rack up quickly: in fiscal year 2021, the U.S. Marshals Service paid North Carolina counties more than $31 million for jail holds, while the Louisiana Department of Corrections spent more than $123 million on their “local housing of adult offenders” program.

In 28 states and the District of Columbia, more than 10% of the jail population is being held on behalf of a state or federal authority. This both skews the data and gives local jail officials a powerful financial incentive to endorse policies that contribute to unnecessary jail expansion. Local sheriffs — who operate jails that are rarely filled to anywhere near their total capacity with people held for local authorities — can pad their budgets by contracting out extra bed space to federal and state governments. To be sure, sharing some jail capacity can be a matter of efficiency: for example, if one county’s jail is occasionally full, borrowing space from a neighboring county may be better than building a larger jail. And, in some states — like Missouri — state law requires that local jails agree to hold people for state or federal agencies. But the systematic renting of jail cells to other jurisdictions — while also building ever-larger facilities in order to cash in on that market⁶— changes the policy priorities of jail officials, leaving them with little incentive to welcome or implement reforms.

Fight jail expansionsWhat to do when your county proposes a bigger jail.

In our 2017 report, we found this phenomenon was most visible in Louisiana, where the state largely outsourced the construction and operation of state prisons to individual parish (county) sheriffs.⁷ The most recent data suggests that as of 2022, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Mississippi stand out as the worst offenders. In all three states, at least one-third of the state prison population is actually held in local jails (53% in Louisiana, 47% in Kentucky, and 33% in Mississippi).⁸

Another major consumer of local jail cells is the federal government, starting with the U.S. Marshals Service, which rents about 26,200 jail spaces each year — mostly to hold federal pretrial detainees in locations where there is no federal detention center. In the District of Columbia, South Dakota, New Hampshire, and New Mexico, more than 15% of the statewide jail population was actually held for the U.S. Marshals Service in 2019. Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement rents about 15,700 jail spaces each year for people facing deportation.⁹ In 2019, New Jersey stood out with 16% of the statewide jail population held for immigration authorities, followed by Mississippi (10%).

We should note there is significant geographic variation in just how much of a jail’s population is held for other authorities: more than a quarter of people in rural jails were held for state, federal, or American Indian and Alaska Native tribal governments in 2019, compared to only 11% of people in urban jails.¹⁰ The distribution also varies by state, as each has different levels of “excess” jail capacity, and federal officials have specific needs in different parts of the country.

The practice of holding people in local jails for other authorities carries significant personal, social, and fiscal costs, often exposing detained people to the harms of incarceration for longer periods of time than they would be otherwise. Jails are not designed to hold people for any significant period of time; they lack sufficient programming, services, and medical care to house people for months or years.¹¹ This practice also contributes to jail overcrowding, which fuels jail construction and expansion in turn. As scholars Jack Norton, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, and Judah Schept succinctly put it: “When they build it, they fill it, and counties across the country have been building bigger jails and planning for a future of more criminalization, detention, and incarceration.”

Updated state-specific graphics

In 2017, we argued that if lawmakers want criminal legal system reform, they must pay attention to jails. Years later, this remains true. To help state officials and state-level advocates craft reform strategies appropriate for their unique situations, this report offers updated data and state-specific graphs on conviction status, as well as changes in incarceration rates and populations in both prisons and jails.

Recent data offer a detailed snapshot of the cost of family contact in local jails

Some of the questions we receive most often about communication policies (and rates) in local jails can finally be answered, thanks to two new resources from Michigan and Minnesota.

by Wanda Bertram, April 11, 2024

How many jails have eliminated in-person visits? How much of a kickback does your average jail get from its telecom providers? How common are tablets in jails and what fees do incarcerated people pay to use them? Because the thousands of local jails in the U.S. are independently run, it’s hard to get comprehensive data to answer questions like these. So it’s encouraging to see two resources get published — out of Michigan and Minnesota, respectively — that will help fill the gap. I summarized my own takeaways from these reports in this blog post.

In Michigan, independent researcher Phil Lombard (using data obtained by requesting jail phone contracts in 40 counties) produced detailed spreadsheets showing the rates county jails are charging incarcerated people and their families for a variety of communication services, and the kickbacks these counties get from their providers. And in Minnesota, following the state legislature’s move last year to make prison phone calls free, the state Ombuds for Corrections published a report in September with similar data from 26 county jails, proving the necessity of reform for jails as well as prisons.

Both of these resources draw on a large and diverse sample of counties — large and small, urban and rural, and geographically varied — making it possible for researchers and activists to generalize from their findings about the state of telecommunications policy in local jails.

So what do the data show?

Video calling and e-messaging costs are desperately in need of regulation.

In both Michigan and Minnesota jails, the cost of these non-phone services vary widely. A 20-minute video call in Minnesota can cost between $3 and $10 (equating to as much as $0.50/minute); in Michigan, between $3 and $20 (or as much as $1/minute). E-messaging in both states ranges from just 9 or 10 cents per message to a bizarre $2 per message. As we have pointed out before about phone calls, the wide range of rates for these services is due to the fact that companies set prices based on profit-seeking, rather than on the cost of delivering the services.

Thanks to the Martha Wright-Reed Act passed by Congress last year, which confirmed the FCC’s authority to regulate video calls, the agency is required to hand down the first national video calling regulations sometime this year. And while e-messaging is still not subject to federal agency regulation, states have the power — either through legislation or through their public utilities commissions — to set rate caps for these and other telecom services. These reports should make it clear to the FCC and to states that regulating video calling and e-messaging is an urgent matter of consumer protection.

In-person visits and physical mail are disappearing in jails.

In Michigan, coincidentally, a coalition of public interest law firms is currently suing St. Clair and Genesee counties for their practice of banning visits and then cashing in on greater kickbacks from video calling. The new data show that this practice is not a novelty, but the norm in jails today.

A staggering 33 out of 40 jails in the Michigan sample have banned in-person visits (with one, Midland County, noted as having canceled visits specifically at the request of its video calling vendor, Securus). In addition, 20 out of 40 jails have either banned physical mail — following an example set by a disturbing number of state prisons — or restricted families to only sending plain postcards. The Minnesota report is not specific about which jails have banned visits or mail, but notes that “more than half the sample counties we surveyed do not allow in-person visits other than with an attorney.”

Excerpt from a table showing mail, e-messaging, visitation, and video calling rates and policies in a sample of Michigan jails. See the full data here.

The costs families pay would drop dramatically if jails didn’t take commissions.

Some of the most valuable data in these two new reports are the numbers showing that a substantial amount — even, in some counties, the majority — of the money families pay to telecom companies is directly kicked back to the counties themselves.

The Minnesota Ombuds for Corrections’s report provides detailed data tables showing how much families are charged for phone calls, video calls, e-messaging, and voicemail in various counties; as well as how much the counties that offer these services are taking in commissions. Some basic math shows that these kickbacks account for a significant amount of the rates families pay. For instance, the average commission paid to jails for video calling is 39% of total revenue. Vendors build these commissions into their rates, meaning that if jails did not demand these commissions, they could negotiate much lower rates with their providers. The typical Minnesota jail, which charges 29 cents per minute for video calling, could charge just 18 cents per minute if it refused commissions.

Table of video calling rates and commission amounts from the Minnesota Ombuds for Corrections’s “Cost of Connection” report.

Similarly, the Michigan dataset presents commission amounts for a variety of telecom services in many of the 40 sample jails. The average kickback paid to counties for video calling is 32% of total revenue. The average rate families pay to talk to their loved ones via video chat in these jails is 54 cents a minute, but if jails refused commissions, that average would drop to 36 cents per minute.

These two resources also offer insights into aspects of jail telecommunications we haven’t covered in depth before, which advocates might find useful. For instance, the Minnesota report highlights that tablets in some Minnesota jails are being rented to incarcerated people for a weekly or monthly fee, in addition to the well-known fees people pay to use the services on the tablets. And both resources show that people are paying steep fees for voicemail services: For the privilege of leaving an incarcerated loved one a voicemail that typically lasts a minute or less, families are paying around $1.50 on average and as much as $3.95.

These two new resources provide valuable data about jail communication policies and the urgent need for jail phone justice. I hope they will inspire federal and state regulators to take note.

Updated charts show the magnitude of prison and jail racial disparities, pretrial populations, correctional control, and more

Updated data visualizations illustrate the scale of — and disparities within — mass incarceration.

by Leah Wang, April 1, 2024

At the Prison Policy Initiative, we’re known for clear, powerful visuals communicating the harms of mass criminalization. We balance context and simplicity to create visualizations that are useful beyond our reports and briefings.

We usually only update our data visualizations about mass incarceration as part of a new report or briefing. However, some graphs are so powerful that they warrant special treatment. In recent months, new data have been released about racial disparities, probation, incarceration, and jail detention. So we’ve updated a few of our most comprehensive and compelling charts to equip advocates, lawmakers, and journalists with the latest information available.

Racial disparities in incarceration

Since 2020, the Bureau of Justice Statistics has reported on more racial and ethnic categories in jail populations, as well as prison populations by sex. These new statistics underscore the ongoing racial injustice of prisons, where the national incarceration rate of Black people is six times the rate of white people and more than twice the rate in every single state.

A few months ago, we released an updated dataset with incarceration rates by race (covering 2021 for prisons and 2019 for jails) for every state and the District of Columbia. Our Racial Justice page also contains reports, briefings, research, and visualizations focused on the intersection of race and mass incarceration.

State policies (still) drive mass incarceration

State-level policies are responsible for incarcerating the vast majority of people in the United States. Recent data show many state prison populations have nearly returned to, or even surpassed, their pre-pandemic levels—highlighting a serious need for policies that will permanently reduce prison populations. (State lawmakers and advocates should check out the high-impact policy ideas we compile every year for our Winnable Battles series.)

The long arms of mass incarceration and supervision

In addition to the 1.2 million people warehoused in prisons, over 650,000 languish in local jails, often as a result of prohibitively high cash bail. There, they may spend weeks, months, or even years in infamously terrible conditions before a decision is reached in their case. As you can see in the first chart below, pretrial detention has driven jail population growth over the past 25 years; at this point, more than two out of three people in jail are legally presumed innocent.

Beyond the 1.9 million people behind bars, millions more are subjected to the greater “mass punishment” system of parole and probation supervision, living in the community but under restrictive and counterproductive rules. More than 2.9 million people on probation and 800,000 people released from prison on parole must live with the constant threat of being jailed over a minor or even noncriminal “technical” violation. And although these populations have decreased somewhat since 2020, they’re still too high and are already rebounding as pandemic-related delays in the courts subside.

Visit our Jails and Bail and Probation and Parole pages for more research on these institutions’ roles in the carceral system.

One more thing: We’ve also updated the underlying data behind some of these charts in our data toolbox to empower advocates, lawmakers, and journalists to illustrate the consequences of mass incarceration in their communities. If you’re using this data in your work, let us know about it.

Research spotlight: PrisonOversight.org equips the fight for accountability in jails and prisons

The United States' massive practice of incarceration goes almost entirely unchecked. This new resource aims to change that by centralizing news, educational resources, legislative updates, and more to support movements for independent corrections oversight.

by Brian Nam-Sonenstein, March 25, 2024

Millions of incarcerated people face deadly and abusive conditions every day in the United States because most jailers and prison administrators have free reign over their lives. For many corrections departments, meaningful and effective oversight is the exception, not the rule. Take Oregon, for example: sheriffs inspect each other’s jails and give out perfect scores while reporting record-breaking death counts in their custody. In the state’s prisons, officials have failed to keep track of complaints against corrections staffers and flout requests for information about how often incarcerated people are locked down or experience overdoses.

Courts are basically the only oversight most jails and prisons have–an arrangement that leading oversight scholar Michele Deitch describes as “an anomaly on the world stage.” And courts are not well suited for this job: they’re reactive and narrowly focused on specific complaints, they move slowly, and they’re expensive. Perhaps most importantly, incarcerated people are routinely blocked from using them thanks to laws like the Prison Litigation Reform Act. So, what makes for effective oversight? Which states have oversight bodies and which don’t? And what are the differences between the various models?

Fortunately, PrisonOversight.org is working to answer questions like these, providing critical resources to a movement for more oversight that, according to a recent survey from Families Against Mandatory Minimums, 82% of Americans support. Here, we preview some of the data they’ve collected and encourage you to explore the site and support this essential project.

The state of prison oversight

PrisonOversight.org is a project of the National Resource Center for Correctional Oversight (NRCCO), which supports advocates, policymakers, and government officials in developing and strengthening oversight. Michele Deitch co-runs NRCCO alongside Associate Director Alycia Welch — another leading expert in correctional oversight.

One of the website’s most significant contributions to the movement is a helpful inventory of state-level oversight. According to their map, 19 states and the District of Columbia have an external, independent prison oversight body, while 31 states do not.

PrisonOversight.org’s map shows the patchwork of prison oversight in the United States. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have some form of prison oversight body, highlighted in blue in the above map.

Each state has a detailed profile that includes the most recent annual budget appropriation for oversight, staff size, structure, and more. According to their data, there is wide variation among the small group of states that have oversight bodies:

• Oversight budgets range from $200,000 (Nebraska) to $42 million (California) annually.
• Full and part-time staffing ranges from one person (Oregon’s lone ombudsman) to 211 (California); half have ten or fewer staff.
• While some are quite old,¹ most oversight bodies that exist today were established or re-established after the 1970s; nine have only been around since 2000. Five states have spun up oversight agencies since 2020.
• Only three of the 20 oversight bodies were non-governmental organizations.
• Four of the oversight bodies are so new that we lack basic information about them, such as their expected staff size, budget, and activities.

NRCCO is developing similar resources about jails and court-ordered oversight bodies that they will publish in the future.

What does effective oversight look like?

In her work analyzing corrections oversight internationally and in the U.S., Deitch notes that “The sheer geographical size of the United States, the enormous number of people incarcerated, and the federalist structure of our correctional system make a single national system of independent oversight impractical.” The best practice, she argues, would be for both state prisons and county jails to receive state-level oversight. She also highlights some helpful attributes of strong and effective oversight bodies. They must:

• Be independent of and external to the correctional agency;
• Have a mandate to conduct regular, routine inspections;
• Have unfettered, “golden key” access to the facilities, incarcerated persons, staff, and records, including the ability to conduct unannounced inspections;
• Be adequately resourced, with appropriately trained staff;
• Have a duty to report publicly their findings and recommendations;
• Use an array of methods of gathering information and evaluating the treatment of incarcerated people;
• Be required to cooperate fully in the inspection process and to respond promptly and publicly to the monitoring body’s findings and recommendations; and
• Focus monitoring duties on the treatment of incarcerated people and any risks the institution presents to their health, safety, and civil rights.

These lessons are clear in PrisonOversight.org’s design. The website’s helpful Oversight 101 section delves into the basics behind some of these attributes, noting, for example, that layered approaches to oversight are best. One section examines the limitations of leaving everything to the courts or placing too much faith in accreditation alone. There’s information on challenges in practicing oversight, such as insufficient staffing or insulation from political pressure. Helpful resources like model prison oversight legislation and links to recent legislation can help advocates and policymakers keep up with oversight experiments around the country. The Developments section tracks job opportunities in the field, conferences, and news reports.

No more taking impunity in corrections for granted

For hundreds of years in the U.S., incarcerated people have been abandoned to fight for their dignity and safety at the hands of officials who have little interest in or incentive to oblige. They are shunned from society through criminalization and incarceration and then plunged into opaque institutions designed to neglect, if not actively reject, their best interests. Their disappearance from public view perpetuates their abuse while law enforcement and correctional authorities enjoy complete control over what information makes it outside. Independent, external oversight can help shift this balance of power: by collecting and publicizing data on the conditions facing people in these institutions, oversight bodies can help incarcerated people overcome the brutal retaliation they face for speaking out. While enforcement powers vary across these oversight experiments, we all benefit from their ability to provide a meaningful counter to the opportunistic myth-making and rationalizations upon which mass incarceration has thrived.

Resources like PrisonOversight.org are helping to build the momentum for accountability that is long overdue. This project gives advocates helpful information to inform their strategies and public education efforts. It’s also an excellent resource for reporters to learn about what does or does not exist in their state, how oversight bodies work, who serves on them, and what they do and don’t publish. And researchers and policymakers benefit from the collection of state-by-state practices, with a level of detail that allows us to both see the big picture and experiment with different models.

We are grateful that a project like PrisonOversight.org has arrived on the scene. We highly recommend you check out their resources and incorporate the wisdom and recommendations it contains into your campaigns.

Welcome, Regan Huston!

Please welcome our new Digital Communications Strategist, Regan Huston!

by Danielle Squillante, March 18, 2024

We are excited to introduce our new Digital Communications Strategist, Regan Huston! In her new role, Regan will assist the Communications Department in using our social media platforms to raise awareness of the harms of mass incarceration.

Regan is a digital strategist passionate about making sense of the world’s chaos and improving media literacy across all social platforms. She holds a B.J. in Convergence Journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Before joining the Prison Policy Initiative, Regan worked as a Senior Social Media Manager for The Messenger and developed content and social strategies for NowThis and Vice News. She also serves on the board of the iSpeakMedia Foundation which is focused on advancing media literacy education across the nation. She is an experienced digital strategist and we are excited for her to apply her expertise to grow our digital audiences.

Welcome to the team, Regan!

Tenth-Anniversary Edition of The Whole Pie Report Provides the Big Picture of Mass Incarceration — and Busts 10 of the Most Persistent Myths about Prisons, Jails, and Crime

New report shows prison and jail populations rebounding after the pandemic and warns of the return of so-called “tough-on-crime” laws

March 14, 2024

Easthampton, Mass. — Ten years after publishing the first edition, today the Prison Policy Initiative released the 2024 version of its flagship report, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie. The report provides the most comprehensive picture of how many people are locked up in the U.S., in what types of facilities, and why. In addition to showing that more than 1.9 million people are behind bars on any given day in the U.S., it goes on to bust 10 of the most persistent myths about prisons, jails, crime, and more.

The report includes 34 visualizations of criminal legal system data, exposing long-standing truths about incarceration in the U.S., including:

• Many people in jail pretrial are stuck there simply because they’re too poor to pay their cash bail amount.
• Black people are overrepresented behind bars, making up about 42% of the prison and jail populations but only 14% of all U.S. residents.
• Technical violations — rather than new crimes — are the main reason people on probation or parole are re-incarcerated.

The report also shows that prison and jail populations have continued to rebound from their pre-pandemic lows, reversing a years-long decline in incarceration in the U.S. However, it explains that this growth is not due to increased crime but rather the criminal legal system returning to business as usual after pandemic-related slowdowns and the return of so-called “tough-on-crime” laws.

“The U.S. is at an inflection point in its failed experiment with mass incarceration. After years of progress reducing the number of people behind bars, many of the misguided policies that created this crisis in the first place are being resurrected,” said Peter Wagner, Executive Director of Prison Policy Initiative and co-author of the report. “The choices made by state, local, and federal officials over the next few years will determine whether the country repeats past mistakes or chooses a better path that makes communities safer and reduces the number of people incarcerated.”

Importantly, the report busts 10 of the most persistent myths about mass incarceration in America. In busting these myths, the report shows:

• Reforming the criminal legal system does not increase crime,
• Harsher punishments don’t deter crime, nor make communities safer,
• Jails and prisons are not equipped to provide mental health or substance use disorder treatment,
• And more.

“Too much of the conventional wisdom — and political rhetoric — about mass incarceration in America is just plain wrong,” said Wendy Sawyer, co-author of the report and research director for the organization. “While politicians and some in the media have found immense success ginning up fear about crime for their self-interests, this report gives the public the truth about what’s happening in the criminal legal system — and the tools to push back on bad faith arguments and lies.”

The original edition of Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie, released in 2014, provided the first comprehensive view of the systems of criminal confinement in the United States. It helped to fill a critical gap in the movement to end mass incarceration. Since then, the annual report has become a foundational part of hundreds of advocacy campaigns, thousands of news investigations, and countless pieces of legislation that sought to expose the harms of mass incarceration and reduce the number of people behind bars. The organization has also produced versions of the report that look specifically at the incarceration of women and the incarceration of young people.

The full report is available at: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024.html.

New report, Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2024, shows the size and scope of women’s incarceration in America

Report shows the unique and troubling role that jails play in women’s incarceration.

March 5, 2024

190,600 women and girls are locked up in the United States on any given day. That’s the top-line number from the new report Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2024, released today by the Prison Policy Initiative. However, that number tells only part of the story of women’s incarceration in America. The report dives deep into the data to provide the most recent and comprehensive data on how many women are incarcerated in the U.S., in what kinds of facilities, and why; as well as detailed data on incarcerated women’s demographic makeup and health.

Women in the U.S. experience a dramatically different criminal legal system than men do, but data on their experiences is difficult to find and put into context. The new edition of Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie, which the Prison Policy Initiative has published since 2017, fills this gap with richly-annotated data visualizations about women behind bars.

“Like in so many other aspects of life in America, the unique experiences of women in the criminal legal system are obscured by those of men, treated as an afterthought,” said Aleks Kajstura, co-author of the report. “While incarceration impacts all people, tearing them away from their families, damaging their health, and putting an additional financial strain on those already living on a razor’s edge, the criminal legal system is particularly harsh for women in unique and damaging ways.”

“The data in this report should serve as a wake-up call for policymakers. Mass incarceration is failing everyone in the country — and when the country locks up women, the ripple effects are especially devastating,” said Wendy Sawyer, research director for the Prison Policy Initiative and co-author of the report. “Instead of continuing with this failed policy, they should work to address the issues that get women locked up in the first place — poverty, unmet physical and mental health needs, and the over-policing of Black women and girls.”

The report particularly examines the important role of jails in women’s incarceration. 93,000 women are held in jails, and the majority— 51,000 — have not been convicted of a crime. It explains that unaffordable cash bail and a criminal legal system that funnels them into jails after conviction are likely responsible for so many women being held in these facilities. The report goes on to show that jails can be especially deadly for women, with high rates of death from suicide and drug or alcohol intoxication. Additionally, the report highlights that, because they’re generally designed for shorter stays, jails are poorly positioned to provide healthcare for women, and that these facilities make it difficult for women to stay in touch with their families, by charging high rates for phone calls and restricting mail.

Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2024 also includes a section offering insights about the backgrounds and experiences of women in state prisons. Key takeaways include:

• In the U.S., women are held in 446 state prisons, 27 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails, 1,323 juvenile correctional facilities, 80 Indian country jails, and 80 immigration detention facilities, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories.
• 58% of women in state prisons are parents to minor children, and of those, most are single mothers who were living with their children prior to imprisonment — making it likely that incarceration uprooted their children and led to termination of parental rights, permanently breaking up their families.
• Nearly 7,000 young women and girls are caught up in the various systems of confinement. Almost half are held in facilities for the juvenile justice system, and almost as many are unaccompanied migrant children in Office of Refugee Resettlement facilities.
• Girls of color and those who identify as LBTQ+ are disproportionately confined by the juvenile justice system. Black girls account for 32% of all girls in juvenile facilities despite making up just 14% of girls under 18 nationwide. Similarly, 40% of girls in the juvenile justice system are lesbian, bisexual, or questioning and gender non-conforming.
• Probation and parole play a significant role in the women’s criminal legal system, with an additional 808,700 women under these forms of control. They are forced to live under a complex set of rules and restrictions that set them up to fail and threaten them with reincarceration.

The new report is available here: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024women.html

Since you asked: How many women and men are released from each state’s prisons and jails every year?

We’ve drilled down into 2019 data to show prison and jail releases by sex in each state and made our best estimates of how many women and men were released from prisons and jails nationwide in 2022.

by Leah Wang, February 28, 2024

We often think about incarceration as something only experienced behind bars, but millions of people leave correctional facilities every year in serious need of services and reentry resources. Journalists, advocates, and other users of our website reach out frequently to ask if we know the total number of people released from prisons and jails in their state each year. Many are trying to fight for more resources for people returning home and want to know how these numbers break down by sex. While these are numbers you might expect would be easy to find, they aren’t published regularly in annual reports on prison and jail populations by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).

In fact, the annual data collected by the federal government about local jails (the Annual Survey of Jails) cannot generally be broken down by state at all; only the more infrequently-collected Census of Jails data can be used to make state-level findings. As for prisons, 2019 is also the latest year for which state-level release data by sex ¹ have been published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. (The total number of people released by each prison system is published annually by the BJS, most recently reporting 2022 data.)

To make this information more accessible, we’ve drilled down into the most recent data available to show how many men and women are released from prisons and jails each year.²

Why we need data disaggregated by sex or gender identity

For years, the mass incarceration of women has been overlooked, even though women’s incarceration has grown at twice the pace of men’s incarceration in recent decades. Women are disproportionately locked up in local jails, where they’re less likely to be able to afford money bail if they’re not convicted, or are more likely to be serving a shorter sentence for a property or drug offense. While there, women in jail experience bleak conditions like expensive phone calls, a lack of programming and education opportunities, and poor quality healthcare.

Being locked up in a state prison also presents a unique set of challenges for women, including the higher chance of being hundreds of miles away from loved ones. No matter how or where a woman is incarcerated, women are generally worse off than men leading up to their incarceration. And entire families are harmed when a woman is put in prison or jail: More than half of incarcerated women are mothers, and women are more likely than men to be primary caregivers to children. Ultimately, keeping women out of correctional facilities and supporting them post-release should be a top priority for lawmakers.

Unfortunately, data regarding women in the criminal legal system are neither updated regularly nor always compatible across years, obscuring our collective view of what’s happening to women in the criminal legal system and how specific reforms impact them. When it comes to gender identity in prisons and jails, the data are even worse, as government surveys typically include trans men under “females” and trans women under “males,” and do not ask further about self-reported gender identity.³ Without better data collection and reporting, the unique needs of women, as well as transgender and nonbinary people, will go on being disregarded in policy and practice.

Any work that chips away at mass incarceration for people of all genders should include fighting back against carveouts of “non-violent” offenses, addressing family separation, drastically improving reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare, and ramping up gender-responsive reentry services for these individuals.

What’s changed since these data were collected in 2019?

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a dramatic drop in correctional populations in 2020 and 2021 – although this was due to fewer admissions, not more releases – so there have been fewer people eligible for release in the last couple of years. Even though prison and jail populations have unfortunately largely rebounded since then, there were still 29% fewer releases from prisons and jails in 2022 compared to 2019.⁴ Because of this dramatic difference from 2019, we also calculated rough estimates of releases by sex in 2022 on the national level for those interested in what more recent release numbers look like:

Estimated releases from prisons and jails, by sex, in 2022

To estimate what 2022 releases from prisons might look like by sex, we started with the number of state and federal prison releases, excluding deaths, reported in 2022 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics: 443,534.⁵ We then used the 2019 data to find the percentage of all prison releases that were from female prisons, which was about 12%; this percentage was based on all releases including deaths, because deaths in prison aren’t reported by sex. Applying this percentage to total prison releases in 2022, we estimate that about 55,179 people were released from female state and federal prisons in 2022, of which about 3,951 were from federal prisons.⁶

To estimate the number of releases from local jails in 2022 by sex, we first had to estimate the number of total releases, which the Bureau of Justice Statistics did not publish. We started with the number of jail admissions reported for that year: 7.3 million, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.⁷ Most people are jailed for a relatively short time, typically released from jail the same year they are admitted, so we would expect the number of admissions to be very close to the number of releases.⁸ In 2019, there were just 1.15% fewer people released from jails nationwide than were admitted that year. We applied this percentage to the 7.3 million jail admissions in 2022, arriving at an estimated 7,215,958 releases from local jails in 2022. To estimate how many of those releases were women, we calculated the percentage of all jail releases in 2019 that were women (23%) and applied that percentage to our estimate for total jail releases in 2022. Because there is no national source of data for jail deaths in 2022, we could not exclude deaths from these estimates of jail releases.

Opportunities for further data analysis

We also get lots of questions about the number of people released to local communities (counties, cities, et cetera). While we don’t have a solution that works for every state, we do suggest two different ways to generate estimates in our previous briefing about releases.

Data collection efforts regarding incarcerated women are slowly improving in some areas: For example, the Bureau of Justice Statistics is considering adding questions about pregnancy and maternal health in its national surveys of correctional facilities. In the meantime, we hope this dataset is useful in your advocacy work. The 2019 release data can be accessed from our Data Toolbox; for more information about mass incarceration in your state, see our State Profiles pages.

Cautionary jails: Deconstructing the three “C”s of jail construction arguments

Communities across the country have been told that investing in new jail construction is the only way to solve old policy problems, but arguments for new jails can leave them with a billion-dollar case of buyer’s remorse.

by Emmett Sanders, February 20, 2024

Arapahoe County, Colorado, is expanding its jail just four years after taxpayers rejected a proposition to raise taxes for a new one. The justification for the $46 million expansion? Proponents cite the jail’s age, overcrowding, and a sudden sensitivity to the need to treat rather than warehouse people with addiction issues; the sheriff claims, “people’s needs have changed.” $30 million will come from COVID-19 pandemic relief funds; ¹ as the ACLU notes, using relief funds in this way is expressly forbidden by the Department of Treasury.

Similar arguments are being used to justify jail construction all around the country. Often, this means ignoring voters’ wishes, misusing and redirecting millions of dollars from community-based resources, and saddling citizens with decades of tax liability. New jail construction projects regularly fail to meet promises, leaving communities to deal with the aftermath. Drawing from examples across the country, we break down three common arguments for jail construction, discuss how they have been used to build or expand jails, and highlight how reinvesting in cages is not a solution to social problems like crime and substance use.

The three “C’s” of jail construction arguments

Jail proponents usually rely on one or more of three central arguments to make their case:

• The “Capacity” argument: a bigger jail is required to house everyone being incarcerated in the jurisdiction;
• The “Contemporary” argument: new construction is needed to update an outdated jail;
• The “Compassionate” argument: new construction is necessary to treat incarcerated people more humanely.²

On a surface level, these three “C” arguments are compelling because they speak to very real issues. What these arguments often overlook, however, is that these issues are largely driven by bad policies that have drastically expanded reliance on packing people in cages. Essentially, the prevailing claim is that the only way to solve the problem of incarceration is to expand our ability to incarcerate — when in fact, communities would be better served by shrinking jail populations. This sunk cost fallacy often leaves communities without real solutions and holding the bag for decades.

If you build it… (the “capacity” argument)

Proponents of jail construction often rely upon jail “needs assessments”³ to bolster their claim that building a bigger jail is the only way to meet capacity needs. These needs assessments come with many biases and flaws — often because they are written by construction firms who hope to eventually make even more money building the new jail. The simple truth is that no jail will ever be big enough to satisfy an over-reliance on incarcerate-first policies. Instead of solving capacity needs, bigger jails enable counties to continue bad practices — leading them to argue that they need newer, even bigger jails in the future, and spending millions of dollars in the process.

Greene County, Missouri, for instance, built a new 552-bed jail in 2001. This was supposed to resolve their capacity needs for at least a decade; however, within just 2 years, the jail had surpassed capacity again. Despite increasing bed space by remodeling and by adding a trailer jail annex, the continuation of bad policies, such as criminalizing poverty by rounding up and arresting unhoused people, led to what a 2017 needs assessment called “unsustainable” jail growth, which forced another $150 million 1,252-bed expansion in 2020.

Similarly, Lubbock County, Texas, spent $94.5 million in taxpayer bonds building a new 1,512-bed jail, which opened in 2010. Though intended to meet their capacity needs well into the future, jail population growth has persisted, leading county officials to spend a million dollars of the county’s budget incarcerating people in other counties. But there are other obvious solutions to Lubbock’s over-incarceration problem. Lubbock County mostly uses its jail to house people who haven’t been convicted of a crime; in January of 2024, 76% of the jail’s population were people being held pretrial, and fully one tenth of the people in the jail were being held pretrial for a misdemeanor. Pretrial detention practices play a huge part in the county’s perpetual capacity problems. County officials have nevertheless repeatedly looked to build their way out of these issues instead of implementing sustainable policy changes like ending pretrial detention for misdemeanors and reexamining alternatives to cash bond. As a result, Lubbock’s sheriff recently proposed a 996-bed expansion projected to cost taxpayers another $464 million, bringing the total to more than half a billion dollars, with no substantial policy change in sight.

While capacity arguments are often used to justify jail expansion, the truth is counties cannot build their way out of capacity issues without addressing the policies that created them in the first place. Despite claims that jail construction is driven by need, in many instances, the reverse is actually true. As Greene County’s assessment noted, “The dramatic increase in bookings is probably due [in part to] the increased availability of beds with the opening of the new jail.” Simply put, if you build it, they will fill it.

Box office bombs (the “contemporary” argument)

Often, the promise of a shiny new jail with updated facilities leads to over-budget projects that sap taxpayer money far into the future. These projects, focused on building jails with “all the bells and whistles,” often collide with soaring construction costs. This can sometimes lead to facilities that are too costly to staff and maintain or even too costly to complete. As a result, projects can wind up half-finished or sitting empty for years at taxpayer expense.

Despite voters rejecting an $88 million bond initiative to fund a new jail in 2004, by 2008, Thurston County, Washington, accepted a bid for “the cutting-edge $45 million Accountability and Restitution Center (ARC) jail complex,” a building some have referred to as the “Taj Mahal design of Jail, Law and Justice Centers.” Finished in 2010, the jail sat empty for 6 years, costing the taxpayers roughly $430,000 annually, largely because the county did not budget for the additional staff needed to run it. Just three years later, the county would approve a $19-25 million jail expansion featuring a 40-bed “‘flex unit’ with cells that could be used in different ways as needs change” plus a shell for future expansion.

In Wayne County, Michigan, construction began on a “state-of-the-art” $300 million, 2,192-bed jail in 2011. The design included innovations that some claimed would bolster security, largely by further restricting movement. By 2013, the project was already $91 million over budget due to ballooning construction costs, forcing it to be abandoned and leading to the indictment of three Wayne County Officials for lying about the project’s cost. The jail sat incomplete and empty for years, costing the taxpayers around $1 million per month just to maintain.

Though not a jail, Thomson Prison in Illinois shares a similar story. Built in 2001 for $145 million, this new high-tech maximum-security prison sat empty at the taxpayers’ expense for 11 years due to state budgetary restraints impacting the ability to staff it before finally being sold to the federal government⁴ in 2012.

As these examples illustrate, officials often claim that a new “modern” jail will solve a jurisdiction’s problems. While the drumbeat here is safety or security, these projects almost invariably also include millions for expanding bed space to incarcerate more people. Moreover, while huge amounts of money are poured into building bigger, better, and newer buildings, the massive costs associated with staffing and operating these monstrosities, and the fact that existing prisons and jails around the country are dangerously understaffed as it is, can result in costly projects that can’t be staffed even if they are completed. These monuments to incarceration can sit empty for years, draining the public coffer.

Promises, promises (the “compassionate” argument)

Increasingly, counties cite the need to be compliant with ADA requirements or the idea that jails should be providers of mental health services or substance use treatment as reasons to expand. This “compassionate” argument repackages incarceration as care and can mean taking money away from health services in the community. This is particularly problematic when jails fail to deliver on these promises, as they regularly do.

McLean County, Illinois’ 2015 jail needs assessment called for more space for housing people with mental health needs. In response, the county spent $43.5 million to build a new jail with a “Community Crisis Stabilization Facility” in 2017. A few short years later, however, people with mental health concerns are once again being held in the booking area (a practice the new jail was supposed to end) and are being held at jails outside of the county, unable to “benefit” from McLean’s new $43.5 million carceral alternative to community-based crisis intervention.

Broome County, New York, similarly promised to provide better medical care as part of its argument to secure $6.8 million to expand its jail in 2015. ⁵ But once the new jail was built, there was little effort to deliver on this promise: Broome County maintained the same dubious medical provider, Correctional Medical Care (CMC), that had been sued multiple times for medical negligence ⁶ from 2010 all the way until 2022. Many of these claims involved jail deaths. CMC’s practices were so bad that the New York State Commission on Corrections’ Medical Review Board chastised the company for “egregious lapses in medical care” in their 2018 “Problematic Jails” report. More incarcerated people died in the five years after ground broke on jail expansion than in the five years before, during CMC’s contract tenure with Broome County. ⁷

People interested in improving the lives of incarcerated people are often swayed by “compassionate” arguments. But they should never lose sight of the fact that incarceration itself is inherently harmful to physical and mental health, leaving many with a PTSD-like condition called Post-Incarceration Syndrome, which can even trigger drug use. At best, jail as a place of treatment is ineffectual. At worst, these bad policies drain funding from community-based support systems that can address challenges before a crisis results in incarceration. Jail is a place of trauma, not healing.

Change — The other “C”

While these three C’s are often used to argue for jail construction, advocates can and should confront their local officials with real solutions for reducing jail populations and providing mental health and substance use care.

• Reduce pretrial detention: Nationwide, 83% of people in jails have not been convicted of a crime. One of the most effective ways to bring down jail populations is to reform the way court systems treat people accused of crimes. Policies ranging from citation and release to ending cash-based pretrial detention can massively reduce jail capacity needs without raising taxes, incarcerating more people, or jeopardizing public safety.
• Focus on community-based care: Jail was never intended to be a provider of social services. As the Justice LA Coalition successfully argued in opposition to a $2 billion mental health-focused jail in 2019, true compassion comes not in the trauma of a cell but in funding for community-based care and support for those with addiction issues or mental health needs.
• Reduce total jail capacity: If jail construction absolutely cannot be avoided (as in the case of places under court orders to update or build a new facility), it should be contained so that it does not expand the capacity of the current jail to incarcerate or invest in new carceral technologies. If there’s no way to avoid building a new jail, advocates can at least work on making sure the new one doesn’t expand the number of people behind bars.

Conclusion

Though common arguments in favor of jail expansion are compelling at first glance, investing in jail construction is not a solution to social problems but rather doubling down on policies that caused these problems to begin with that can burden a community for decades to come. Ultimately, many of these arguments can be answered by asking pointed questions, revising policies, and being responsive to the community’s actual needs.

Oregon shouldn’t go backwards on drug decriminalization

Oregon is in danger of repealing one of the most important criminal legal system reforms of recent years: here’s why the state should keep Measure 110 intact.

by Sarah Staudt, February 15, 2024

In 2020, Oregon adopted Measure 110, a transformational change to the way drug possession and addiction were treated by the criminal legal system. Instead of incarceration and criminal charges, Measure 110 ensured that possession of small amounts of drugs was responded to with a ticket and referral to services. Since its passage, more than $302 million has been invested in addiction services and social supports, and more people are going to treatment.

Despite the successes of Measure 110, however, Oregon legislators are threatening to recriminalize drug use in Oregon. The bill, HB 4002-1, would make possession of small amounts of controlled substances a criminal offense once again, reversing a revolutionary reform and returning to the failed policies of the War on Drugs.

Reversing Measure 110 would be harmful to thousands of Oregonians, and would be a failure of leadership. Legislators claim they are responding to an increase in homelessness and public drug use — but recriminalization will only make those problems worse. Instead of resurrecting policies that didn’t work the first time, the Oregon Legislature should invest in proven strategies to prevent and treat addiction, reduce homelessness, and improve public safety, and should invest in treatment and housing, not incarceration.

Measure 110 is working

There’s no evidence Measure 110 is responsible for crime, overdoses, homelessness, or increased drug use. Although COVID-19 made assessing the impact of Measure 110 more difficult, early indicators suggest that the law is achieving its goals: reducing arrests while increasing access to care. Jails and incarceration often strand people without treatment, but the referrals to community-based care created by Measure 110 offer a lasting pathway to health and better quality of life. Here are just some of the successes of Measure 110:

• The Oregon Health Authority reported a 298% increase in people seeking screening for substance use disorders.
• More than 370,000 naloxone doses have been distributed since 2022, and community organizations report more than 7,500 opioid overdose reversals since 2020.
• Although overdose rates have increased around the country as more fentanyl has entered the drug supply, Oregon’s increase in overdoses has been similar to other states’ and actually less than neighboring Washington’s. A peer-reviewed study comparing overdose rates in Oregon with the rest of the country after the law went into effect found no link between Measure 110 and increased overdose rates.
• There is no evidence that drug use rates in Oregon have increased. A cross-sectional survey of people who use drugs across eight counties in Oregon found that most had been using drugs for years; only 1.5% reported having started after Measure 110 went into effect.
• There has been no increase in 911 calls in Oregon cities after Measure 110.
• Measure 110 saves Oregonians millions. Oregon is expected to save $37 million between 2023-2025 if Measure 110 continues. This is because it costs up to $35,217 to arrest, adjudicate, incarcerate, and supervise a person taken into custody for a drug misdemeanor — and upwards of $60,000 for a felony. In contrast, treatment costs an average of $9,000 per person. The money saved by Measure 110 goes directly to state funding for addiction and recovery services.
• There is no evidence that Measure 110 was associated with a rise in crime. In fact, crime in Oregon was 14% lower in 2023 than it was in 2020.

All of this has been achieved while Measure 110 also served one of its primary intentions — reducing total arrests. Arrests for possession of a controlled substance dropped 67% after Measure 110 went into effect, meaning that thousands of people have avoided the lifelong barriers caused by arrests and convictions. And although there has been an increase in homelessness in the past few years in Oregon, implementation of Measure 110 also lines up with the lifting of eviction protections in place during the pandemic — a much more likely culprit for increased numbers of people without shelter.

Recriminalization will make Oregon’s problems worse

Recriminalization of drug possession will put Oregon on a path backwards and will damage the lives and livelihoods of its residents — particularly of Black Oregonians.

First, recriminalization will overburden already stretched systems, increasing harm and costing lives. Oregon’s criminal legal system, particularly its public defense system, is massively underfunded and understaffed. Recriminalization will overwhelm the courts with thousands of new cases that they do not have the capacity to adjudicate. This is likely to strand more people in Oregon’s jails — which are already seeing record deaths among people in custody. Jails are particularly dangerous places for the people with substance use disorders who will be most affected by recriminalization; increasing jail populations is likely to exacerbate these existing health problems, costing more lives.

The effects of recriminalization will fall hardest on Black Oregonians, increasing racial disparities. Unfortunately, even under Measure 110, it is clear that Black Oregonians with substance use disorders are much more heavily policed than their white counterparts. Black people have been disproportionately issued citations under Measure 110 — 4.6% of citations went to Black people, who are only 2.3% of Oregon’s population. Portland’s police department has the fifth highest arrest rate disparities in the country, arresting Black people at a rate 4.3 times that of white people. And while proponents of recriminalization claim that diversion programs will still be available, the reality is that Black people are more often excluded from diversion programs than white people are, making them more likely to remain trapped in the criminal legal system.

Forced treatment isn’t the solution

The recriminalization bill focuses on forced substance use treatment as a “solution” to substance use disorders. But forced treatment is a false promise. There are many reasons why people with substance use disorders don’t seek treatment, including problems with lack of access, cost, excessive requirements for getting into and staying in treatment, and having more pressing concerns like needing food, employment, housing, or medical treatment. Addressing those underlying problems — and increasing the availability of voluntary treatment overall — is the best way to get more people into the treatment they need.

Forced treatment is also not effective. A systematic review of studies found no evidence that compelling people to attend substance use treatment leads to improved outcomes. Instead, it can cause harm: people who are forced into treatment can end up at higher risk of overdose. Because forced treatment imposes sudden, enforced abstinence, it can lower people’s drug tolerance — leading to a higher risk of overdose if they relapse. A recent analysis of mandatory abstinence treatment programs found that people who were mandated to attend these programs were 3.7 times more likely to have experienced an overdose in the past 6-12 months.

Oregon should invest in proven solutions

There’s no denying that Oregon, like the rest of the country, is experiencing serious problems with homelessness, substance use disorders, and overdose. To address these problems, Oregon should invest in effective, compassionate solutions, instead of defaulting to criminalization.

The first thing Oregon should do is invest in more housing, focusing on proven housing-first strategies, and strategies that reduce evictions. Investing in housing does not just solve homelessness — it also addresses substance use itself. Evictions are associated with higher rates of death from drug use, and higher rates of public drug use. Making sure people can have and keep housing improves their quality of life, and the quality of life of all Oregonians.

Oregon should also invest in more voluntary treatment beds. Detox centers in Portland are turning away half the people who come to them because of lack of capacity. Overall, Oregon has only a 50% treatment capacity to meet the need. Mandating more treatment won’t fix this problem — indeed, it will make the treatment shortage worse. Instead, Oregon needs to heavily invest in more voluntary drug treatment and crisis centers to meet the needs of its residents.

Conclusion

Oregon is poised to undo one of the most important criminal legal system improvements of the 21st century. Instead of reverting to the mistakes of the past, Oregon lawmakers should act with courage to pursue solutions that work, and reject the pressure to try to arrest their way out of substance use and homelessness. Measure 110 is working to make Oregonians safer and healthier; Oregon’s leaders should stand up for their state’s innovative and successful reforms, and avoid the tired rhetoric and policies of mass criminalization.