What’s New
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Updated data and charts: Incarceration stats by race, ethnicity, and gender for all 50 states and D.C. New data visualizations and updated tables show the national landscape of persistent racial disparity in state prisons and local jails.
September 27: Briefings
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Memo to Kansas City, Mo.: Time to rethink your plan to build a new jail At the request of Decarcerate KC, we reviewed the city’s plans to build a new jail and found the community doesn’t actually need more jail beds and most people currently in its custody are there for minor offenses.
September 21: Prison Policy Initiative Blog
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Seeking shelter from mass incarceration: Fighting criminalization with Housing First Providing unconditional housing with embedded services can reduce chronic homelessness, reduce incarceration, and improve quality of life – especially for people experiencing substance use disorder and mental illness.
September 11: Briefings
Featured resource
Advocacy Toolkit
For more than two decades, we've combined compelling writing, striking visuals, and deep dives into data and public records to expose the harms of mass incarceration in America. We've learned a lot in this time. In our advocacy toolkit we've shared some of the resources, tips, and best practices we've picked up along the way. Our hope is that these guides help advocates in their efforts to address mass incarceration in their area.
Mass incarceration, state by state
Learn about the national prison crisis and how we can begin to turn the tide on mass incarceration. Then, drill down to your state. Be sure to also check out our pages focused on D.C., and the incarceration of Native people.
If our work is new to you, you might want to check out our 2021-2022 annual report.
Recommended Reading:
50 state incarceration profiles
All of our recent reports about prison/jail growth, racial disparities, and more, re-organized by state.
The rapid & unregulated growth of e-messaging in prisons
It can strengthen connections, but instead has been used to sap money from incarcerated people.
Incarceration and supervision by states
Probation and parole are the leading forms of mass punishment in America.
Prison Gerrymandering Project
We are leading the movement to protect our democracy from the Census Bureau's prison miscount.