Research roundup: Youth incarceration can cause lasting damage to mental health

Young people with mental health conditions are often criminalized, yet detaining youth can lead to new or worsened mental health problems. In turn, youth incarceration leads to worse outcomes in adulthood, including depression, suicidality, and deeper criminal legal system involvement.

by Emily Widra, November 12, 2026

Advocates, researchers, and other experts have long argued that incarceration of youth has serious and far-reaching consequences for children and young people, their families, and their communities, while not making communities any safer. The separate juvenile legal system was created because the nation recognized that children shouldn’t be treated like adults.¹ Despite the widely-accepted understanding that children must be treated differently, too often the U.S. still defaults to criminalizing and confining children for a wide variety of behaviors. And while states have scaled back their use of confinement for youth, partly in response to its obvious harms and counterproductive results, some lawmakers seem determined to return to the extreme measures of the past, abandoning successful reforms in favor of 1990s-style “tough on youth crime” approaches.² In this briefing, we highlight and summarize research from the past three decades to remind policymakers of the many known problems with confinement when it comes to youth mental health.

Youth ConfinementSee the full picture the incarceration of kids

Most of the relevant research was published during the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the rates of locking up children were skyrocketing. While much of that work has not been updated in more than a decade, those studies still provide crucial insights into the mental health of confined youth. Along with newer research, these studies show that many children enter youth prisons with histories of trauma and existing mental health disorders only to have their mental health deteriorate further while locked up. Then, they are eventually released back into communities without adequate care or support — leading many to be criminalized again as adults.

Ultimately, these studies underscore how much of the criminalization of youth is rooted in unmet mental and behavioral health needs, for which youth confinement and incarceration are not the answer: the conditions of confinement are not suitable for mental health treatment. This review of the existing research loosely follows the chronological order of youth contact with the juvenile legal system, from before police contact to the juvenile courts, and then through confinement, release, and adulthood. The evidence throughout this progression calls attention to the critical need to address childhood mental health and mitigate contact with the legal system early and consistently throughout childhood and adolescence.

Trauma and mental health issues are widespread among children entering detention

Kids experiencing mental health issues or who have witnessed violence are overrepresented in youth confinement facilities: prior experiences of trauma and existing mental health conditions are risk factors for involvement in the juvenile legal system. This is partly a reflection of the shortage of accessible, high-quality community-based services and supports for youth. For many families, confinement is seen as the only option when mental health services are unavailable: in a 1991 National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) survey, more than one third of parents of children with mental illness reported that their children were placed in the juvenile legal system “because mental health services were unavailable in the community.” This problem persists today: In 2025, more than 650,000 adolescents in the U.S. had major depressive disorder and felt they had an unmet mental health need. But 43% of them did not know how or where to get treatment and over half did not think treatment would help them. Even before entering these facilities, then, many children are facing serious mental health challenges that are only made worse by confinement.

Two out of every three children³ in youth confinement meets the criteria for at least one mental health disorder, while only one in every five children in the U.S. meets these criteria.⁴ In an international analysis of studies on confined youth and mental health,⁵ researchers found that compared to all youth, detained adolescents have higher rates of psychotic illness, major depression, ADHD, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And it’s possible that the rates of mental health conditions among confined youth are on the rise: in Ohio, the Department of Youth Services reported that the percentage of youth in juvenile facilities who need mental health treatment grew from 67% in 2019 to 78% in 2025.

Among confined youth with mental health conditions, the vast majority (80%) actually meet criteria for multiple mental health diagnoses, which, in and of itself, puts them at higher risk for arrest and legal system involvement. Clearly, mental health needs for confined youth are significantly complicated by co-occurring conditions, including substance use disorders, and inadequate access to treatment in the community.

Criminalizing mental health disorders among children

The significant overlap between juvenile legal system involvement and mental health conditions points to the tension between the criminalization and medicalization of children’s behavior. For children and adolescents, a number of symptoms of mental health conditions – like mood disorders (depression or anxiety) and PTSD – may be expressed as anger, irritability, hostility, property damage, and even physical aggression. Many children in confinement are also diagnosed with “disruptive” behavioral disorders like conduct disorder or oppositional defiant disorder. Such diagnoses are reliant on a number of criteria including difficulty regulating emotions, behaviors, and impulses, as well as the violation of “basic rights of others” and “social norms.” Diagnostic criteria for conduct disorder, for example, include examples of “aggression to people,” a symptom that describes a number of behaviors that also drive legal system involvement like physical fights, possession of weapons, stealing, destruction of property, absence from school (“truancy”), and more. These behaviors frequently provoke intervention from police or school resource officers, who “rely on their police training and skills, rather than evidence-based practices” for responding to children with mental health concerns: police are responsible for nearly 9 out of every 10 referrals to juvenile court. In other words, symptoms of children’s mental and behavioral health problems are often treated as criminal or “delinquent” behaviors that merit court intervention and punishment, instead of mental health treatment and other community-based support services.

“Disruptive disorders” (such as conduct disorder and oppositional defiant disorder) drive a lot of the criminalization of youth – and the racial disparities in the juvenile system. In 2006, the most common mental health conditions among youth in the juvenile legal system were these “disruptive disorders,” with over 46% of confined youth meeting the criteria. A more recent international meta-analysis supports these older findings, reporting that the prevalence rate of any lifetime conduct disorder diagnosis was much higher among those confined as children (nearly two-thirds) compared to the general population of adolescents (approximately 10% in the U.S.). Black and Hispanic or Latino youth are disproportionately diagnosed with “disruptive disorders” (driven in part by bias) and subsequently experience poorer health outcomes than white youth with conduct disorder diagnoses. These same children, particularly Black children, are also overrepresented in the juvenile legal system: while 14% of all youth under 18 in the U.S. are Black, 47% of boys and 39% of girls in juvenile facilities are Black.

The tension between criminalizing and medicalizing youth behavior, particularly with behavioral disorders, certainly complicates the robust correlations between mental health disorders and juvenile legal system involvement. In most available research, the data do not allow a causal analysis, meaning researchers frequently cannot identify whether mental health disorders drive juvenile legal system involvement or juvenile legal system involvement leads to mental health disorders. But it is clear that youth with mental health conditions are overrepresented in youth confinement, and the conditions of confinement are unlikely to improve their mental health.

Rates of depression and suicide spike when children are locked up in adult facilities

Nearly 2,500 confined youth are incarcerated in adult jails and prisons, where they face significant safety risks⁶ and have less access to age-appropriate services and supports.⁷ The greatly elevated risk of depression and suicide among youth in adult facilities is frequently attributed to exposure to violence and vulnerability to physical and sexual victimization. In addition, the environment of adult facilities – with few age-appropriate programming options, limited treatment access, and few social opportunities for youth – can aggravate existing mental health issues. A number of studies illustrate the detrimental impact of confinement in adult carceral facilities on children’s mental health:

• Rates of youth depression surge in adult correctional facilities: Among confined youth in Michigan, the likelihood of experiencing depression for youth confined in adult facilities was at least 20 times that of non-incarcerated youth and youth in juvenile facilities. Even children with fewer risk factors faced higher odds of depression when incarcerated in adult facilities than those in juvenile facilities, indicating that the incarceration of children in adult prisons itself contributes to the increased risk of depression.
• Children die by suicide in adult jails at an unacceptable rate: Every year since 2010, an average of three children have died in adult jails; two out of three by suicide. Children in adult jails are 36 times more likely to die by suicide in an adult jail than in a juvenile facility.
• Incarcerating youth in adult facilities is linked to worse overall mental health in young adulthood: People who were incarcerated in adult facilities as children had poorer average mental health in young adulthood, and longer periods of incarceration in adult facilities were associated with even more symptoms of mental health conditions, when compared to young adults who were confined in juvenile facilities or not confined at all as children. Because the researchers controlled for a number of variables including parental factors, housing, substance use, school experiences, and more, these findings strongly suggest that children incarcerated in an adult facility suffer from worse mental health in early adulthood because of that time spent in adult jail or prison.

Keeping children out of adult facilities is important for reasons beyond mental health as well: compared to adult facilities, juvenile facility staff are more likely to receive training in trauma-informed care and adolescent development and juvenile facilities tend to offer more programming opportunities. Accordingly, incarcerating youth in adult facilities is linked to higher rates of recidivism.

Solitary confinement is linked to self-harm and suicide among children

At any age, the stress caused by time spent in solitary confinement can lead to severe and permanent psychological damage. People in solitary confinement are more likely to develop psychiatric disorders than those who are housed in non-solitary units. This holds true for youth held in solitary confinement: the experience of isolation is frightening, traumatizing, and stressful, and can interfere with and damage crucial social, psychological, and neurological developmental processes. The consequences of solitary confinement – which is often used as a “protective measure” for youth in adult facilities – can be serious and even deadly:

• Solitary confinement is associated with youth self-harm: Across all acts of self-harm in the New York City adult jail system from 2010 to 2012, the two strongest predictors of self-harm were solitary confinement and being under 19 years of age.
• Youth solitary confinement appears linked to suicide: In a study of 100 suicide deaths in juvenile facilities from 1995 to 1999, 50% of suicide deaths occured when youth were confined to their rooms, and only 17% of those who died were on “suicide precaution status” at the time of their deaths.

As Solitary Watch reports, it is difficult to know exactly how many kids are currently experiencing isolation due to limited data and reporting on children in solitary confinement, but a 2010 report by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention found that 35% of children in juvenile justice facilities have experienced solitary confinement. Given the extreme risks associated with isolation for children, any solitary confinement is too much.

Juvenile facilities – like jails and prisons – are unable to meet the needs of children with mental health conditions

Youth are frequently stuck in juvenile facilities because mental health care is not available in the community: a 2026 Congressional report found that 75 juvenile facilities across 25 states were confining children who could be eligible for release to mental health care programs outside the facility, but remained incarcerated because the care they needed was not yet available. But the reality is that while juvenile facilities are more likely to provide rehabilitation-oriented services and programming than adult jails and prisons, confining children in these facilities is not a good solution to a dearth of community-based mental health or substance use services.

Alarmingly, recent data about access to mental health treatment while in juvenile facilities is extremely limited. One state-specific study from the early 2000s found that a startlingly small proportion of children with mental health diagnoses receive mental health treatment: only 23% of children with a mental health diagnosis received any treatment in one Maryland juvenile facility. The 2022 Census of Juvenile Residential Facilities does not include any data on treatment availability, but shows that less than 70% of juvenile residential facilities evaluate all youth for mental health needs, with only 46% conducting those evaluations within 24 hours of admission. In 2020, nearly 1 in 10 juvenile facilities that conducted mental health evaluations (9.4%) did not have onsite mental health treatment available.⁸

The consequences of childhood incarceration persist into adulthood

Any time spent in confinement as a child can lead to elevated risk of mental health disorders in adolescence and young adulthood, higher rates of depression and suicidality in adulthood, and heightened risk for PTSD. In a longitudinal study beginning in the late 1990s, researchers found that more than 30% of youth confined in Cook County, Illinois, had one or more psychiatric disorders with “impairment” (as measured by the diagnosis-specific criteria), and rates were even higher when including children with psychiatric disorders without impairment. The researchers found that the conditions persisted long after release from the juvenile facility: 64% of boys and 35% of girls with a psychiatric disorder during their detention still had a disorder 15 years later. Repeated childhood confinement or incarceration is associated with increased mental health problems: in a study of thousands of youth admitted to a single juvenile facility from 2007 to 2017, symptoms of depression, anxiety, physical health issues, and suicidality increased across repeat admissions to juvenile facilities.⁹ Research shows particularly troubling relationships between youth incarceration and adulthood experiences of depression, suicidality, and PTSD.

Incarceration of youth tied to adulthood depression and suicidal ideation

In three studies using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) survey data,¹⁰ researchers found compelling evidence that childhood incarceration is associated with adulthood depression and suicidal ideation. Notably, even short stints of incarceration have long-term effects: for young people (adolescents and young adults under 25 years), the odds of experiencing depressive symptoms in adulthood are 41% higher for those incarcerated for any amount of time less than one month, compared to those never incarcerated. The effects are much worse for youth incarcerated for longer periods and at younger ages. For youth incarcerated for longer than one year, the odds of experiencing adulthood depression is 318% higher – and the odds of adulthood suicidal ideation 134% higher – compared to those never incarcerated. The second study finds that incarceration at younger ages is associated with substantially worse adult mental health outcomes: 38% of people first incarcerated before age 14 reported adulthood depression, compared to 24% of those first incarcerated between age 14 and 32. Similarly, the prevalence of adult suicidal ideation among those first incarcerated before age 14 is more than double (28%) that of those first incarcerated between 14 and 32 (10%). The third of the studies using Add Health data supports the findings from the first two: compared to those who had never been arrested, people arrested before age 25 experienced more depressive symptoms and higher rates of suicidal thoughts during adolescence and more depressive symptoms in adulthood (ages 32-42).

The strong connections between childhood, adolescent, and young adult incarceration and depression and suicidality are not one-directional. As discussed earlier, youth frequently enter confinement with pre-existing mental health conditions or with risk factors for developing mental health conditions, like poverty, lack of access to mental and medical healthcare, bullying, issues in school, substance use, and more. But what these studies show is that any treatment provided to confined children is not achieving the stated goal of promoting mental health and rehabilitation before children return to their communities.

Children frequently experience trauma during confinement and deal with symptoms of PTSD in adolescence and adulthood

The same conditions of confinement that contribute to depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions – solitary confinement, exposure to violence, and staff neglect, harassment, and abuse – are traumatizing experiences for youth in carceral settings. A survey of over 60 young adults who were confined in a juvenile facility in the year prior found that nearly all youth (97%) reported experiencing some type of abuse during their incarceration, with 14.5% of youth meeting clinical criteria for posttraumatic stress reactions. Youth who reported more frequent abuse during incarceration were more likely to experience posttraumatic stress reactions and depression, and were more likely to have subsequent criminal involvement.¹¹ Among adult women who had repeated juvenile legal system involvement in adolescence, 50% met the diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adulthood, compared to 10% of women in the U.S. overall. Some researchers suggest that the trauma people experience behind bars can lead to post-incarceration syndrome, a proposed subtype of PTSD that shares many of the same characteristics. While much of this research focuses on people incarcerated as adults, it is worth highlighting the potential of chronic, trauma-related disorders among confined children.

After release, mental health treatment remains out of reach

Research shows that confined youth often find mental health treatment inaccessible before their legal system involvement, and this remains true for children released from juvenile facilities or adult jails and prisons. Despite promises of case management, reentry support, and referrals at the time of release from juvenile facilities, many youth struggle to obtain mental health treatment after leaving these facilities:

• In New York City, researchers surveyed 177 mental health clinics that provide outpatient care for children and adolescents. Of those, nearly 86% accepted youth with juvenile legal system involvement, but nearly half of those clinics (44%) accepted justice-involved children on a conditional basis and wait times could be as long as six or more months. There are also logistical barriers, like finding a clinic close to home: the researchers mapped the home address zipcodes for over 150 children in secure juvenile detention centers in New York City in February 2023 and found that only 58% of clinics were located within their home zip codes.
• Of nearly 2,000 children followed for 20 years after their incarceration in Chicago in 1995, less than 20% received needed mental health services after release. Female, white, and/or Hispanic children were more likely to receive mental health services post-release than their Black and/or male counterparts.
• In a smaller study, researchers conducted surveys with 75 youth and their parents or guardians at the time of their first contact with juvenile court and then again one, two, and three years after that first contact. They found that at the time of the first contact with the court, three-quarters of youth met criteria for a mood, anxiety, or behavioral disorder (based on child or parent report), but only 20% of those youth were involved in mental health treatment during the follow-up interviews.

The juvenile justice system is frequently portrayed as rehabilitative and a pathway to necessary mental health and substance use treatment, despite evidence to the contrary. Children leaving juvenile facilities often do not have improved access to (or participation in) mental health treatment. Children cycle in and out of juvenile facilities, and while very little information is publicly available about access to treatment while confined, clearly, youth frequently leave these facilities without adequate follow-up mental health services in the community.

Conclusion & recommendations

Over the past 25 years, states have reduced their use of youth confinement by over 70%, due to both lower rates of lawbreaking behavior and arrests and intentional policy shifts away from criminalization and toward “informal” processes that hold them accountable without removing them from their homes and support systems.. The research presented in this briefing shows why efforts to return to higher levels of youth criminalization and punishment are deeply misguided. Instead of turning back the clock on the juvenile legal system and returning to last century’s “tough on youth crime” approaches, legislators and decisionmakers within the juvenile legal system should heed the recommendations of youth advocates and:

• Increase availability and affordability of community-based mental health services. Access to these services is essential for preventing juvenile system involvement for mental health conditions and for supporting children released from confinement
• Prevent initial contact between children and the juvenile legal system. Promote school-based programming, restorative justice processes, and wraparound support services for children at risk for legal system contact.
• Require mental health evaluations prior to disposition (sentencing). Mental health screenings and assessments can be implemented throughout the juvenile justice process, long before youth get to juvenile facilities. These evaluations can and should take place early and often, at any point(s) from arrest, before filing charges, during adjudication, before disposition, and at intake. The results of these evaluations should inform the disposition and certainly any out-of-home placement of adjudicated youth.
• Expand alternatives to incarceration for children. Diversion programs that screen and treat children referred to juvenile courts with mental health conditions provide an alternative outside the juvenile legal system, and other diversion programs like mentorship programs, family-focused therapy models, and restorative justice interventions can be fundamental resources for children and their families.
• End the practice of incarcerating children in adult jails and prisons. The practice of automatically transferring children to adult court in 28 states and D.C. should be eliminated. There is no evidence that these practices – which often disproportionately impact youth of color – work to prevent or reduce crime.
• Improve mental health services in juvenile facilities. While avoiding youth confinement should be the top priority, for those in custody, there is room to improve screenings, treatment availability, and family engagement. All children should be screened for mental health concerns soon after admission to any juvenile facility. Any mental health treatment needs to be trauma-focused and should include more than psychoeducation¹² and group therapy.
• Prioritize access to mental health treatment at reentry. Children with mental health concerns leaving these facilities need to have referrals, prescriptions, and wraparound care coordination services. These services need to be funded and staffed so that children are not languishing in facilities waiting for community-based mental health treatment spaces to open up in order to be released.
• Better data collection and dissemination. The prevalence of mental health conditions among incarcerated youth (in juvenile facilities or adult jails and prisons) is not collected and published on a regular basis. There is very little information about the access to and participation in mental health services in juvenile facilities available publicly and more data and information is necessary for transparency, but also to promote community-based alternatives.

Ultimately, children will be best served by the elimination of youth confinement and replacing those systems with fully-funded and accessible social supports and services in the community to reduce violence and promote mental health treatment.

Breaking ICE: Most bans on ICE collaboration don’t go far enough. Here’s how to make them stronger

State and local governments play a critical role in the detention and deportation machinery. Here's how advocates can make bans on 287(g) agreements more effective and place additional limits on ICE overreach.

by Aleks Kajstura, October 15, 2026

Advocates are getting states to limit the impact of federal immigrant detention policies. By and large, this has involved targeting the 287(g) program, which allows state and local law enforcement to be trained and certified or deputized to carry out immigration enforcement functions for the federal government. However, more work needs to be done to strengthen protections for communities. Progress made in recent legislative sessions shows what works — and what doesn’t — in efforts to curtail local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration agents.

Banning 287(g) agreements explicitly is an important tool in an advocate’s toolbox, but can leave many loopholes when treated as a silver bullet. That is because much of the collusion with ICE that is undertaken under 287(g) agreements can be performed under other pretenses or even informally.

Instead, advocates should seek to broaden legislation and executive action in order to avoid playing whack-a-mole as ICE tactics shift. This includes going beyond banning 287(g) agreements specifically to include any collusion with state, local, and other law enforcement agencies, or the use of certain infrastructure, to carry out ICE’s civil immigration work. These broader bans target both the letter and the spirit behind 287(g) agreements.

Hiding in Plain SightJails’ role in Trump’s deportation plan

This briefing explains how some states — including Maine, Illinois, and most recently, Massachusetts — pursued broad applicability of their bans on immigration enforcement collaboration, including targeting existing and new agreements, protecting sensitive locations (such as jails, schools, and courthouses), prohibiting housing immigration detainees in their jails, and more. We also examine the crucial role that attorneys general and governors can play in addition to legislating bans on collaboration. While this piece focuses on advocacy at the state level, there are related reforms that advocates can pursue at the city or county level as well.

Ultimately, there is a lot of potential for reform because state governments have indirect control over some federal incarceration. State and local governments control carceral facilities, law enforcement agencies, and a slew of other infrastructure that ICE relies on to conduct federal actions. That gives advocates leverage to oppose the troubling expansion of ICE detention.

Through this guide to recent law changes in several states, we hope to give advocates a roadmap for how to craft successful legislation and executive action in their state that does more than pay lip-service to banning local law enforcement collaboration with ICE, and produces real results.

Commonalities in successful legislation

There are a few provisions that make limits on ICE more effective: making the ban on collaboration applicable to a wide variety of agencies, ensuring that existing agreements are terminated or rendered unenforceable, and prohibiting civil immigration enforcement around sensitive locations, such as schools, courthouses, or hospitals.

Broad applicability

Legislation is most effective when it broadly defines the law enforcement agencies that it applies to. Each state has a variety of law enforcement agencies, and some may be more obvious than others. ICE already launders requests through multiple agencies to circumvent bans on collusion. Therefore, it is important to ensure that all types of law enforcement are covered so that ICE doesn’t simply go down the list of agencies until they find one that is willing to cooperate. Sufficiently broad legislation is not limited to state governments, but also includes local police departments, private university campus police, and often other government agencies involved in the criminal legal system, such as prosecutors.

For example, here are the definitions from Maine and Massachusetts:

Maine:

• “Law enforcement agency” means an agency in the State, including an employee or agent of the agency, charged with enforcement of state, county or municipal laws or with managing custody of detained persons in the State and includes but is not limited to municipal police departments, sheriff’s departments, the State Police, a university or college campus police department, safety department or the equivalent, the Department of Corrections and the Department of Public Safety.

Massachusetts:

• “Law enforcement agency”, (i) a state, county, municipal or district law enforcement agency, including, but not limited to: (A) a city, town or district police department; (B) the office of environmental law enforcement; (C) the University of Massachusetts police department; (D) the department of the state police; (E) the Massachusetts Port Authority police department, also known as the Port of Boston Authority police department; and (F) the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority police department; (ii) a sheriff’s department in its performance of police duties and functions; (iii) a public or private college, university or other educational institution or hospital police department; (iv) a federal law enforcement agency; or (v) a humane society police department.

The bar on types of collusion needs to be equally broad. Although New Jersey passed otherwise-broad bills, one of the new statutes contained carveouts for anyone charged with any one of a long list of offenses. Simply charging someone with one of these crimes — no conviction necessary — is enough to exempt law enforcement from the ban on information sharing. As a result, police and prosecutors can easily identify loopholes for collusion that are large enough to nullify the new protections against ICE.

What can you do?Learn how to push back if your city is working with ICE

Similarly, the bans need to address not only 287(g) agreements specifically, but any actions typically taken under such agreements. Maine’s legislation is a good example of this; it functionally bans 287(g) agreements, but does so by prohibiting a broad range of activities or use of public funds for immigration enforcement. That approach bans many kinds of activities beyond those that would fall under a 287(g) agreement. As a result, law enforcement is prohibited from engaging in even informal collusion. In contrast, banning the agreements by name unnecessarily narrows the reforms that advocates seek.

Prohibiting new agreements while nullifying existing ones

Many agencies (covering 77.2 million people or 32% of the country) have existing 287(g) agreements already in place, so it’s not enough to only ban agencies from entering into new agreements. Ideally, agreements already in place should be nullified immediately, but at the very least legislation should impose a tight deadline for termination.

Over the objections of advocates, Massachusetts’ anti-ICE collaboration law grandfathered in agreements between ICE and Massachusetts’ prisons, while banning collaboration from jails and other law enforcement agencies. When grandfathering in the Department of Corrections’ agreement, legislators argued that allowing some collaboration might deter ICE from conducting as many community sweeps. However, our recent analysis of ICE arrest data shows collaboration has not been a deterrent at all: states like New Jersey, which have tried to compromise between protections and collusion, ended up having arrest rates comparable to that of enthusiastic collaborators like Georgia. Conversely, states that refused ICE collaboration have suppressed arrest rates.

Protecting certain locations

It’s important that everyone feels they can safely go to school, attend their court dates, and seek medical attention. These are all activities that benefit not only the individual but the community and society at large. However, ICE sweeps and targeted actions at such locations undermine public safety — a fact that used to guide federal policy prohibiting ICE enforcement in these places.

In order to restore public trust in important social institutions, many states bar immigration enforcement in and around “sensitive locations,” such as courthouses, schools, or hospitals. Advocates should take full advantage of states’ jurisdiction over public spaces in order to impose some geographic limits on ICE. Restoring these common-sense limits on ICE offers an additional layer of protection that advocates fighting to limit ICE encroachment to communities should seek to add.

Restricting access to detention infrastructure

Preventing ICE from using state and local lockups to house detained immigrants is another crucial way to slow down the mass deportation machine. Even though ICE has a multibillion-dollar budget rivaling that of most nations’ militaries, they nonetheless lack a nationwide network of detention centers and jailers.

In addition to renting bed space to ICE, state and local facilities voluntarily hold people who are already in police custody until ICE can come take them. As detailed in our recent briefing on ICE arrest data, the average number of daily detainer-related arrests more than doubled since the last presidential administration, growing by 144% from 2024 to 2026. Fortunately, state and local governments have the power to put a stop to this practice, known as “detainers.”

Our analysis found that since 2025, states that prevented local law enforcement from complying with detainers saw fewer ICE arrests overall. For example, in Oregon, only a small number of ICE arrests involved law enforcement, and the rare detainer arrest was usually connected to the U.S. Marshals or Federal Bureau of Prison facilities.¹

States can strengthen these protections further by not just banning collaboration with ICE, but with other federal law enforcement agencies that have been deputized into the mass deportation agenda. ICE uses other federal agencies as stand-ins to circumvent facility bans on ICE detainees. Under this strategy, ICE and other federal agencies refer people for federal prosecution for immigration-related “crimes,”² moving them into the custody of the U.S. Marshals and thus enabling them to use contracted local jails where ICE itself is prohibited from doing so. Once those people are finished with their sentence or the prosecution is dropped, they are brought back into ICE custody. While no state law can prevent federal agencies from working together, states can prevent federal agencies from using local jails in their chain of custody.

Advocating for reform through the executive branch

Advocates should look beyond legislative reforms and push for action in the executive branch as well. Governors and attorneys general can play an effective role in curbing ICE overreach. Although narrower in scope, executive action is a good alternative if legislation is unattainable. Executive action can also move faster and is therefore useful as a stopgap measure until legislation is passed.

Attorneys General

Attorneys general are states’ top lawyers. An attorney general provides guidance to agencies tasked with implementing laws in a legal landscape that is constantly shifting in response to evolving ICE tactics. Attorneys general can therefore be a key force in curtailing ICE collaboration even without legislation.

Sometimes state laws unrelated to immigration already prohibit 287(g) agreements, and attorneys general serve an important role in highlighting their applicability for state and local police who attempt to work with ICE in ways that are inconsistent with state law. The Maryland attorney general explained the risks of constitutional violations when collaborating with ICE and highlighted ICE tactics designed to fool local law enforcement into unwitting collaboration, pointing out, for example, ICE’s habit of labeling someone as a “fugitive” even when the person is not wanted for any crime. Although the state now has legislation that explicitly bans collusion with ICE, this part of the guidance predates the recent legislative reforms in the state.

Beyond risking constitutional violations, collaboration with ICE can have mundane legal consequences, too. When local police collaborate with ICE, even insurance companies are wary of covering the increased liabilities.

Local governments rely on attorney general guidance, so attorney general involvement can have a big impact on local action. Therefore, it’s important that advocates not overlook their role in guiding local agency behavior — for better or worse. South Carolina exemplifies the impact that an attorney general can have; that state’s attorney general encouragedparticipation in ICE agreements, resulting in a jump from 3 to 15 agreements in just a few months.

Governors

Executive orders, such as those issued by governors in Virginia and Massachusetts (pre-dating the recent legislation in those states), can take the place of legislation in a pinch, but are narrowly applicable. Executive orders can only directly address things under the control of the executive branch of the state, such as state police and state-owned lands; that means city and county agencies are often out of reach of a governor’s unilateral actions.

Executive orders can also be used to ensure that the laws passed by the legislature are effective. For example, the Illinois governor issued an order creating an accountability commission tasked with documenting ICE activity in the wake of legislative reforms in order to identify any further changes needed to curb federal overreach.

Conclusion

ICE is taking advantage of state and local resources to fuel the federal crimmigration agenda. But advocates can harness states’ power to limit ICE’s overreach and keep incarceration policies under state and local control. While there are many approaches, advocates should strive for broad legislation to stop ICE from exploiting common loopholes. Advocating for legislation while simultaneously seeking gubernatorial and attorney general action leads to the quickest and most comprehensive results, putting the brakes on ICE as quickly and effectively as possible.

New report shows where 198,800 incarcerated women in the U.S. are locked up and why

The report goes in-depth on women's incarceration in local jails, ICE detention, and other forms of confinement.

October 14, 2026

A new report shines light on the nearly 200,000 women incarcerated in the U.S. on any given day, revealing what types of facilities these women are held in and on what charges. Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2026, released this morning by the Prison Policy Initiative, provides detail about state and federal prisons, local jails, immigration detention, and other types of confinement — including, for the first time, an estimate of women in involuntary commitment because of a criminal charge.

This report pulls together different data sources to give a unified picture of women’s confinement in the U.S. The report shows that, on any given day:

• 81,000 women are held in state prisons. This number represents a rapid “rebound” from the sharp decline in women’s prison populations during the Covid-19 pandemic.
• 87,000 women are in city and county jails under local jurisdiction. About 61% are there awaiting trial.
• 8,300 women and girls are held for immigration-related reasons. The number of women and girls held by ICE has jumped by 31% since 2024, while the number of unaccompanied girls detained by the Office of Refugee Resettlement has dropped sharply.
• Roughly 2,900 women are held in psychiatric or civil commitment facilities for underlying criminal charges. Although these women are held in medical facilities, ostensibly for treatment reasons, both the medical and criminal legal systems have control over their lives.

“By and large, the number of women behind bars in the U.S. is growing,” said report co-author Wendy Sawyer. “Even though the numbers haven’t gotten back to where they were before the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s alarming that women’s prison and jail populations are increasing so fast, particularly since so many are charged with low-level offenses related to poverty and drug use.”

In addition to providing big-picture statistics, Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2026 also discusses how women experience a very different criminal legal system than men do. For instance:

• Incarcerated women are far more likely than men to be held in a local jail. In particular, despite the fact that these facilities are built for short-term pretrial stays, 26% of all convicted women are serving sentences in local jails, which typically offer fewer programs and services than prisons.
• Women in the criminal legal system are more economically marginalized than men, and have greater needs related to mental and physical health, disability, and substance use. Nevertheless, they often serve their sentences in facilities designed with men in mind, with fewer programs tailored to women.
• Three-quarters of incarcerated women — as compared to two-thirds of the total correctional population — are on probation and parole. Unfortunately, rather than diverting them from jail or prison, probation often sets women up to fail with unrealistic rules and requirements, leading to their incarceration.

“Women continue to end up behind bars because of policies this country should have abandoned long ago: the war on drugs, broken windows policing, and the criminalization of poverty,” report co-author Brian Nam-Sonenstein said. “Lawmakers who want to double down on ‘tough-on-crime’ policies should ask themselves whether it is worth locking up so many women, and worth this country still accounting for one-quarter of all incarcerated women worldwide.”

The full report is available at https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2026women.html.

Cooperation with ICE doesn’t stop community arrests: New data on the results of state strategies

The Trump administration has demanded local and state collusion on immigration enforcement, and promised to pull back on community arrests in return. But our analysis of updated ICE arrest data shows that collaboration has only expanded ICE arrests, and that the mass deportation project falters in places that resist.

by Jacob Kang-Brown and Brian Nam-Sonenstein, October 6, 2026

Table of Contents

ICE detainers turn local law enforcement into volunteer jailers

ICE arrests of all kinds have grown rapidly

Resistance has blunted surges in arrests

The federal criminalization loophole

Conclusion

Data sources

Appendix tables

The Trump admini­stration has spent its second term pressuring state and local officials to collaborate with the federal government’s mass deportation campaign. The reason why is simple: the administration cannot hope to get close to their arrest and deportation goals without the help of local law enforcement. Following the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good by ICE agents in Minnesota in early 2026, the administration sent out so-called “border czar” Tom Homan to make a deal: ICE agents would redeploy elsewhere if governments gave ICE access to people held in jails or deputized police to serve as federal agents.

However, our analysis of data from the Deportation Data Project shows this was a false bargain: ICE has spent 2026 arresting people en masse at their homes, in their neighborhoods, at their jobs, and elsewhere in their communities — regardless of whether their states collaborated with or resisted Trump’s mass deportation agenda. But we also find that state policy has nonetheless made a measurable impact on the scale and type of arrests ICE has been able to make, and states that have refused to comply have made headway in blunting the surge in arrests. This is especially true when it comes to arrests from “detainers,” which ICE uses to ask local law enforcement to voluntarily assist in handing over someone already in jail instead of releasing them. Detainer-related arrests require less effort and fewer resources than ICE raids and occupations, and have been a crucial tool for ensnaring criminalized people in the administration’s project. We found that states that have refused detainers have seen fewer arrests overall. In other words, the importance of detainer arrests to ICE — and their vulnerability to state laws — makes blocking this avenue a strategic opportunity for state governments to protect people from mass deportation.

In this briefing, we update our recent analyses of ICE arrest data, examining arrests through August 2026 and revisiting the impact different state approaches are having on immigration enforcement. Ultimately, we conclude that states can better fortify against federal immigration enforcement by banning collaboration with the U.S. Marshals, stopping police using biometric and criminal records checks from sending arrestee location data to ICE, and reducing police contact with the public. To supplement this briefing, we are publishing the underlying data that highlights ICE detainer-related arrests by state, as well as data on US Marshals detention by offense in appendix tables.

ICE is using detainers to turn local law enforcement into its volunteer jailers

Shocking images of ICE agents snatching people from cars and workplaces have rightfully fueled national outrage, but a less-visible, similarly devastating offensive has taken place behind jail walls. While the Trump administration has insisted it’s focused on targeting “the worst of the worst,” in reality most people in jails facing ICE detainers are being held pretrial and have not been convicted of a crime; most who have been convicted do not have serious criminal records. Nonetheless, our analysis shows that local jails play an essential role in boosting ICE arrest numbers through their voluntary compliance with these detainer requests.

The average number of daily detainer-related arrests has more than doubled since the last presidential administration, growing by 144% from President Biden’s last year in office in 2024 to Trump’s second year in office in 2026. ⁸ Between the first and second years of Trump’s current term (covering years 2025 and 2026), the average number of people arrested via detainer on a given day grew by another 16%, with detainers resulting in 376 people arrested on an average day in the first year, and 435 people arrested on average each day in the second year.

From the Trump administration’s perspective, detainers are an important tool for rapidly ensnaring people in the deportation machinery. Detainers drastically reduce the amount of work ICE has to do to arrest people — down to essentially making a few phone calls or emails — compared to deploying agents to stalk them in the community. Detainers make identifying and locating arrest targets relatively simple: ICE analyzes data that local law enforcement routinely and voluntarily transmit to the FBI (such as names and fingerprints) to check for outstanding warrants and criminal histories, looking for a match in its own databases and issuing a detainer if it finds one. ICE could not issue detainers without this information. Finally, even though ICE has a multibillion-dollar budget rivalling that of most nations’ militaries, they still lack the nationwide network of detention centers and jailers necessary to unleash their campaign of terror on immigrant communities on their own. Detainers bridge this gap, enabling ICE to snatch up immigrants who otherwise would be beyond their reach — all without having to pay local law enforcement extra money to do their work for them.

It’s reasonable for elected officials and community members to wonder why local law enforcement would take on the uncompensated, legally dubious work of serving as ICE’s volunteer jailers. Since unauthorized immigration does not cause more crime and increased immigration enforcement doesn’t reduce crime, this volunteer police work has no public safety benefits. But there may be other ideological or financial motivations at work. Executing detainers and locking people up until ICE gets there provides an on-the-job way for police to support the Trump administration. ⁹ These colluding officers may make low-level or even bogus arrests of noncitizens, and in this way bolster federal efforts to criminalize immigrants en masse. After an arrest by local police, ICE can more easily pressure immigrants to waive claims in immigration court and accept a fast track removal from the country. And while detainers themselves don’t cost anything, there are other substantial funding opportunities available for collaborators. ¹⁰

These kinds of low-level and bogus arrests are a longstanding feature of police work that have plagued poor and marginalized people in the U.S. for decades. Most people are jailed for public order, property, or drug charges – not “violent” charges — and many more are jailed for traffic violations or missing a court date. Even though the charges are relatively minor, their consequences can be devastating and destabilizing for many people regardless of their legal status. In the context of immigration enforcement, large numbers of people now face the additional, brutal harms of deportation for arrests stemming from truly minor violations.

ICE arrests of all kinds have grown rapidly since 2024

Now that we are well into the second year of the Trump administration, we have a clearer, fuller picture of how the mass deportation campaign has unfolded. As discussed in the previous section, arrests on detainer have risen dramatically since 2024, Biden’s last year in office. But nationwide, arrests in the community (such as in workplaces, homes, and on the street) have grown the most, followed by ICE arrests from a law enforcement setting (such as outside of a jail or at a courthouse) without a detainer. ¹¹ Overall, the data show two major escalations in ICE arrests.

The first escalation came as Trump took office and surged in the summer and fall of 2025. In the community, the average number of daily ICE arrests exploded, going from 82 per day on average at the end of 2024 to an astounding 458 arrests per day on average by mid-2026 — more than five and a half times higher. Meanwhile, ICE arrests from a law enforcement location (without a detainer) grew 455%, from 53 per day in 2024 to 294 per day in 2026. (For full details, see the table below.)

The second major escalation in arrests came in early 2026. Overall, average daily arrests grew by more than 28% between the first two years of Trump’s second term: 926 people were arrested by ICE each day on average in 2025, compared to an average of 1,187 per day in 2026. Drilling into the types or contexts of these arrests, we found that:

• Arrests in the community rose by 17%: an average of 390 arrests in the community per day in the first year of Trump’s administration grew to 458 per day in the second year.
• Law enforcement arrests without a detainer leapt by 84%: an average of 160 people a day were arrested this way in the first year, compared to an average of 290 per day in the second year. These arrests could be via informal collaboration that tips off ICE agents or via formal collaboration and deputization programs like the 287(g) agreement. ¹²

Community and governmental resistance have blunted surges in arrests

While all types of arrests have surged in the last two years, state and local laws appear to account for key differences in how those arrests have played out on the ground. Following up on the analysis in our last briefing, we continue to see clear, persistent differences in arrest levels between (1) states with truly protective policies, (2) those that have tried to balance protections with enforcement, and (3) those that have gone all-in on collaborating with federal immigration enforcement. Appendix Table 1 contains the number of each type of arrest between 2024-2026 broken out by state, while Appendix Table 2 provides arrest rates.

States resisting ICE collaboration

While substantive protections have not fully stopped ICE from arresting people in the community, they have kept arrest levels of all types relatively low — especially when it comes to arrests involving law enforcement, with or without a detainer request. For example, in Oregon, only a small number of ICE arrests involve law enforcement, and the rare detainer arrest is usually connected to the U.S. Marshals or Federal Bureau of Prison facilities. ¹³ Oregon and Illinois have the strongest state policies to protect immigrants. ¹⁴

States collaborating with ICE

Unsurprisingly, some of the highest overall arrest numbers appear in states with laws that mandate collaboration and 287(g) deputization to assist in transport or transfer to ICE. States like Georgia and Florida also have mandatory immigration status checks at arrest, and rules for pretrial detention for unauthorized immigrants facing certain state charges so as to avoid release on bail before ICE can arrive. These policies have had their intended impact: the data show high levels of detainer-related ICE arrests, as well as arrests at law enforcement locations that are not connected to a detainer. Importantly, these policies have not prevented ICE arrests in the community, which occur at rates that are double those seen in Illinois and Oregon. ¹⁵

States trying to compromise between protection and collaboration

Some states like North Carolina require some law enforcement collaboration with ICE — such as immigration status queries at arrest and complying with ICE detainers — but do not go to the extremes of Florida or Georgia. Others like New Jersey make wishy-washy compromises when purporting to protect immigrants, instituting arrest charge-based carveouts (in other words, if police file paperwork a certain way, they can work with ICE and ensure transfer to ICE custody). Despite having a less enthusiastic policy around collaboration, New Jersey has arrest levels nearly comparable to Georgia’s. Notably, community arrest levels in both North Carolina and New Jersey are comparable to those of states that have gone all-in on collaboration, meaning their compromises utterly failed to keep ICE agents from stalking their neighborhoods.

ICE is still circumventing limits on collaboration via the “federal criminalization loophole”

The Trump administration continues to dodge state limits on law enforcement collaboration by using the “federal criminalization loophole.” Under this strategy, ICE and other federal agencies refer people for federal prosecution for immigration-related “crimes,” ¹⁶ moving them into the custody of the U.S. Marshals and thus enabling them to use contracted local jails even if they’re in sanctuary cities, counties, and states. Once those people are finished with their sentence or the prosecution is dropped, they are brought back into ICE custody. While no state law can prevent federal agencies from working together, states can prevent federal agencies from using local jails in their chain of custody.

Unlike detainers, local governments are paid a per diem amount to jail people for the federal criminal courts. The Marshals rely heavily on this existing infrastructure: only a small share of people in their custody are held in federal facilities, with the rest incarcerated or detained in the Marshals’ detention network composed of local jails, state prisons, and private prison facilities.

Our analysis shows that, among people held for the Marshals in July 2026, the number of people detained for federal immigration charges is up 29% compared to fiscal year 2024, while detentions for all other reasons (drugs, weapons, property or violent crime, supervision violations, etc.) have fallen by 10%. After an initial surge at the start of Trump’s second term, the percentage of people held for immigration charges fell temporarily but has rebounded in 2026.

Fortunately, states and localities can close this loophole by not just banning collaboration with ICE, but with other federal law enforcement agencies that have been deputized into the mass deportation agenda as well. This should be an urgent priority for state and local governments: new data from the U.S. Marshals show that directives to U.S. attorneys that prioritize criminalizing immigrants over all other issues are having a real impact on who is detained and incarcerated. There are now 20,000 people in federal custody who are detained primarily due to federal criminal charges for immigration — around 13,000 by the Marshals and 7,000 at the Bureau of Prisons — a nearly 14% increase since 2024. ¹⁷ (These sums do not include people with unauthorized immigration status who are prosecuted for other crimes – like fraud related to passports).

Conclusion

While even the most robust protections governments have offered to immigrants have not halted ICE arrests entirely, they have made a meaningful difference in the scale of arrests overall. The relative success of these strategies points to the importance of preventing law enforcement from joining forces with the federal government to arrest, criminalize, and detain immigrants. Simply put, ICE will struggle to execute the mass deportation campaign without the personnel and temporary detention capacity provided by state and local law enforcement. And while ICE is racing to hire more people and bring more detention centers online, they have struggled to deliver on their plans. The more states can strengthen their resistance to this co-optation of state and local law enforcement, the longer it will take ICE to catch up.

The good news is that there’s room to strengthen existing tactics aimed at preventing collaboration, and there are other ideas that have yet to be tested.

Strengthening prohibitions on law enforcement collaboration

Expanding sanctuary laws to cover federal immigration enforcement in general — and not just collaboration with ICE — is one promising avenue for lawmakers to pursue. Oregon’s sanctuary law expanded the definition of immigration enforcement in 2021 to include federal criminal prosecution “for offenses related to federal laws regarding immigration status.” ¹⁸ Advocates and litigators have sued Oregon counties with U.S. Marshals contracts for detention space in their jails, seeking to close the federal criminalization loophole. ¹⁹ This appears to be making an impact: In Oregon between February and June 2026 (the four months following the lawsuits), the number of people charged by federal prosecutors with reentering the U.S. after deportation — the most commonly charged federal criminal offense related to immigration — decreased by a third when compared to the same period in the prior year. ²⁰ During this time, neighboring Washington state and the Northern District of California saw upticks in those prosecutions. ²¹ Although state law cannot stop agents from taking someone already in federal custody to a different federal court in another state, there are limits on prosecuting someone in a place other than where they were initially arrested. ²² So far, limiting federal access to local jails appears to work.

Oregon’s approach is more effective than those seen in other states. Take, for example, New York’s recent law, which prohibits counties from making agreements to hold people for ICE: the “Local Cops, Local Crimes Act” included in the 2026 budget deal specifically authorizes detention contracts for people with federal criminal charges like illegal reentry. While some protections are arguably better than none, approaches like this in New York leave room for federal agents to exploit the criminalization loophole, rendering them far less effective than they could be.

Limiting data sharing with the federal government

The common police practice of sharing location data with the federal government as part of criminal history checks and facility transfer processes represents an underappreciated weakness in sanctuary laws; it is a form of collaboration baked into everyday police work that persists even in states that have the strongest protections. But states have the ability to regulate the federal government’s access to these records, and can govern access for non-criminal history purposes. Many states already have regulations that limit public access or statistical research projects, and could potentially add restrictions on their use in enforcing federal immigration law. Especially in more progressive states, advocates could seek to further regulate the use of identity check procedures when people are transferred from one agency to another, such as from the local police lock up to the county jail. This is important because without routine, voluntary, and extraneous data sharing by law enforcement, ICE could not issue detainer requests. There is currently no federal requirement that state and local police fingerprint everyone arrested and contribute their biometric information to the FBI database. Though we do not know of any states that have pursued this strategy to date, this kind of excessive data sharing raises privacy concerns, and limiting the federal government’s access to state and local records would likely greatly inhibit ICE’s ability to identify targets for arrest.

Reducing police contact

As we have discussed, ICE first learns of many eventual arrest targets through the policing of nonserious, low-level offenses. This is a longstanding issue that goes beyond immigration and is responsible for millions of jail bookings each year, most often involving poor people and people of color. Both for the sake of blunting ICE arrests and for the general quality of life of people in their jurisdictions, governments should more seriously consider decriminalization of many of these offenses and reducing police contact where possible.

As the Trump Administration continues to arrest and detain immigrants across the U.S. under the guise of going after “criminals,” many states and local governments have sought to protect their communities by prohibiting law enforcement collusion with ICE. Others have acted to prevent ICE detention in their communities. Many states recognize that conflating immigration and criminal legal system policy is harmful.

But more can be done to reduce police contact overall and send fewer people into the system. Armed with stronger protections, states might want to go on the offensive against ICE’s use of detainers by changing procedures for state criminal history records checks. They could also block the federal criminalization loophole by canceling contracts between their jails and the U.S. Marshals. Together, state and local governments can help create a bright line between the civil immigration system and the criminal legal system.

Data sources and methodology

Data sources

ICE arrest, detention, and detainer request data were obtained via Freedom of Information Act request and processed by the Deportation Data Project, which were then analyzed by the Prison Policy Initiative.

Data on the average number of people detained while facing criminal charges in federal courts or otherwise incarcerated by the U.S. Marshals Service come from monthly reports provided by the Department of Justice to the U.S. Congress Committee on Appropriations. A full data table and the source PDF files are available here.

Data on people facing federal criminal prosecutions for immigration-related matters (such as violations of 8 USC S 1326) are drawn from the Department of Justice Offices of the United States Attorneys’ Prosecuting Immigration Crimes Report, which covers cases through June 2026. These data include all defendants, regardless of whether the immigration charge is the most serious charge or not.

Population data used for calculating rates come from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for the United States, Regions, States, District of Columbia and Puerto Rico: April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2025 (NST-EST2025-POP).

Data corrections and processing

The Deportation Data Project has secured an ICE arrest database table through August 5, 2026. Building upon this important work, we calculated arrest rates, grouped apprehension locations by broader categories, filled in missing apprehension state data where possible, and processed data to remove any obvious duplicate records. The ICE arrest data tables do not include all immigration-related arrests: for example, they do not include Customs and Border Patrol arrests, which are especially common in some states along the U.S.-Mexico border or in places like Vermont or upstate New York. It also appears that in relatively rare cases, data entry gaps mean that people that were held on a detainer, arrested by ICE, and booked into detention may not always have an arrest record.

The Deportation Data Project identifies some records that appear to be duplicated in the arrest table, so we removed extra rows that involve a person being booked into ICE custody more than once in a single day. ICE arrest records are not always complete: in the period covered by our analysis, 7.3% were missing state information, enough to influence the analysis. ²³ We filled in 89% of missing state locations using a combination of the ICE office area responsible and the information provided about specific arrest locations, such as “apprehension city” or “event landmark” (a mix of information, but often includes names of facilities), as well as any detention stay records. ²⁴ Sometimes ICE arrests may be processed in a state that is different than where officers actually encountered the person, so these estimates may incorrectly assign ambiguous cases in regions like Northern Virginia and Washington D.C., or the Kansas City metropolitan area.

In order to process the ICE detainer request data for analysis, we removed duplicate records and included only the most recent detainer issued for each person. If there was more than one detainer recorded for a person on a single day, we prioritized the detainer that was associated with an ICE arrest, recognizable by the record having an “apprehension date.” (The alternative, the duplicate” filter provided in the Deportation Data Project’s processed version of the ICE detainers file, uses the sequence of rows in the original FOIA data table to address duplicate records; we determined that this could lead to discarding detainers that match to an arrest, and therefore prefer our method.) This helped address issues like multiple detainers for the same person — for example, one at initial booking at a municipal police department followed by a second detainer issued when the person was transferred to the county jail.

We also excluded records that did not have a valid personal identification number. This might lead to an undercount of records if someone is held on a detainer but has never had prior contact with immigration authorities, and so does not have a personal identification number used by the Department of Homeland Security. However, it solved other problems caused by spurious and duplicate records, and allowed matching records from the detainers dataset into detention and arrest data tables. It seemed clear from careful review of the dataset that some records are erroneous, and appear to be created as part of the process of trying to secure a match between booking formation and DHS records. ²⁵

In order to determine whether ICE arrests were related to detainer requests or involved local jails, state prisons, police, sheriffs or another law enforcement agency in some other way, we used a variety of data fields across the ICE detainer and the ICE arrest tables from the Deportation Data Project to make the determination. The category, “Workplaces, homes, courts, and others” is a residual, catch-all category defined in relation to our other two categories, (1) detainer-related arrests and (2) other criminal legal-related arrests.

We defined ICE detainer requests that led to an ICE arrest as those where the field “Detainer Lift Reason” was coded as “Booked into Detention.” After careful inspection, we found records for thousands of people that were in the detainer data and coded as booked into detention but did not match with any records in the ICE arrest data. Nonetheless, they matched with either stays in detention or other data that indicated the people were removed or deported from the United States. ²⁶ Inspection of the records indicated that they were clustered in time, and appeared to be connected to staffing gaps in data entry. For example, amidst a consistent surge of detainer activity in South Florida in early July 2026, there were a number of records that should have been in the ICE arrest file that were not on the day before July 4. Thus, we assume that these are legitimate records and their missingness from the ICE arrest table is accidental, likely the result of staffing issues.

We defined ICE arrests that involve law enforcement in some other way by cross-classifying the apprehension method and event landmark fields in the arrest table. ICE data entry practices do not appear consistent across field offices and have changed over time, ²⁷ and this analysis is the result of a direct, manual review of many records. We accounted for misspellings in the “event landmark field” and for the incomplete nature of coding in the “apprehension method” field. This ensured we did not undercount the connections between local law enforcement and ICE. We classified arrest “event landmarks” into the criminal legal-related category if they mentioned jails, prisons, sheriff departments, probation or parole agencies, 287(g), or similar terms, using an iterative process that checked and accounted for all variant spellings. We also classified arrest “apprehension methods” as criminal legal-related if they involved 287(g) or the so-called Criminal Alien Program, custodial arrests, the Law Enforcement Agency Response Unit, or probation or parole.

28-day rolling average: This metric helps smooth out the daily data variation into trends, and was calculated using a sum of all arrests over four weeks divided by 28 to get the average daily arrest rate in the period. For example, July 30’s number is the average number of arrests for July 3-July 30.

Amicus Brief: Court access needed to address inadequate medical care

by Aleks Kajstura, October 1, 2026

Yesterday, the Prison Policy Initiative, in partnership with the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center, filed an Amicus Curiae brief in support of Kekai Watanabe, who was injured and denied medical care while incarcerated at FDC Honolulu. Mr. Watanabe was assaulted and severely injured (suffering what was later found to be a broken tailbone). The staff nurse, however, only gave Mr. Watanabe over-the-counter painkillers. Several months passed before the facility staff allowed Mr. Watanabe to get X-rays revealing the broken tailbone—which, by that point, had splintered into the surrounding soft tissue. Then the Bureau of Prisons procrastinated on addressing the broken bone until releasing Mr. Watanabe several years later—still without ever providing treatment.

Mr. Watanabe sued the FDC Honolulu officials for violations of the Eighth Amendment (prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment), but the prison officials argued that Mr. Watanabe wasn’t allowed to sue, and his recourse was limited to filing a complaint through the Bureau of Prisons’ dysfunctional grievance system, known as the Administrative Remedy Program (ARP).

Our Amicus brief shows why incarcerated people, like Mr. Watanabe, need to retain access to the courts in order to maintain accountability for violations of medical care in prisons. For the brief, the MacArthur Justice Center did a deep-dive into the historical context of the ARP and how it was never meant to supplant access to the courts (and submitted an appendix of documents from the National Archives). And we relied on our previous research on the ARP to show that:

• Despite systemically inadequate medical care, fewer than 1% of grievances submitted through the ARP over the course of a decade result in relief.

• The ARP does not function as designed. The system is, officially, supposed to be flexible to address complaints efficiently and thereby decrease the need for incarcerated people to rely on courts to address routine issues. But in practice, the Bureau of Prisons denies complaints based on rigid enforcement of labyrinthine rules and stonewalls any progress.
• Even if the ARP rules were applied flexibly —as intended— the time limits built into the system are detached from the realities of incarceration and prevent many people from obtaining relief. The ARP starts the filing clock at the time of the relevant incident. This creates several problems:
  • For evolving injuries, like those of Mr. Watanabe, the clock begins running before the full extent of the injury is discovered.
  • Frequent transfers between facilities make it difficult to fit medical issues neatly into the confines of the ARP time limits.
  • Officials simply wait out the problem until the injured person is released, eliminating any possible remedy. In this case, for example, medical care was denied until Mr. Watanabe was released and thus was never provided. This kind of stalling is a common tactic used by medical providers in prisons.

We hope that the Supreme Court will make the right decision in this case and continue to allow incarcerated people to access the courts to seek remedies for constitutional violations when they are denied medical care. Medical care in prisons is already routinely inadequate and shutting off this safety valve would have dire consequences.

A reporter’s guide to reporting guides around incarceration

Resources for honing reporting skills, working with incarcerated writers, and framing your coverage well.

by Wanda Bertram, October 1, 2026

For journalists — both early-career and seasoned — who are reporting on issues behind bars, there are now a wealth of guides out there. Here, we curate some of the best ones by topic. We hope this is a page journalists can bookmark for referring to helpful resources.

This isn’t a comprehensive list, and we recognize that more great resources for reporters will come out over time. If you know of a resource that isn’t listed here, we welcome further suggestions in the comments.

Nuts-and-bolts guides

Here are some of the best guides for honing your reporting skills when it comes to covering issues in prisons and jails.

Getting data and records from the criminal legal system

Prisons, jails, and other criminal legal agencies are notoriously “black boxes.” These resources offer tips on what information is available publicly and how to dig up what isn’t.

• Freedom of the Press Foundation, Covering the Mass Incarceration System: Overcoming Barriers to Information — A quick read to ground your understanding of why criminal legal system data sources are so sparse, with tips for getting information via legal databases and public records requests.
• Center for Just Journalism, For the Record: A Transparency Toolkit for Criminal Legal Reporters — This very thorough resource explains what data is likely to be collected by different agencies in the criminal legal system, and where it is being published; the different types of court documents created during legal cases and tools for accessing them; and what types of information may be obtained through public records requests (and how to structure those requests).
• Our Guide to public records requests in the criminal legal system — This guide is specific to filing public records requests. While we designed it for advocates, journalists may find it useful in understanding public records laws in their state.

Investigating specific topics around incarceration

Here’s where to go for advice on investigating specific issues in the criminal legal system, from journalists and others with direct experience:

• The Marshall Project has leveraged its own investigations into a resource series called Investigate This! Most of these guides are related to specific issues, like prison staffing and heat behind bars, while a few, like their public records tip sheet, are more technical.
• The Center for Just Journalism has two in-depth topical guides. Selling Safety: A Journalist’s Guide to Covering Police Technology reviews the major questions journalists should ask about police contracts with private surveillance companies, and suggests avenues and tips for reporting. The “Child Welfare” System: What to Know and Where to Go for More curates a lot of research about child welfare agencies and their outcomes, and points reporters toward opportunities for critical coverage of these systems.
• Our own Journalist Toolkit includes our guides to specific research topics, including overcoming HIPAA-related barriers to requests for information, pushing back on prison “gag rules” for staff, and investigating prison discipline policies.
• The Poynter Institute has a number of courses on topics related to incarceration. Their Investigating Jails course covers three topics relevant to covering jails — mental illness, mistreatment, and financial injustice — discussing the substance of these topics as well as tips for reporting on them in your local jail.

Contacting and interviewing incarcerated people

People behind bars (or under correctional supervision) are invaluable, but uniquely vulnerable, sources. These resources discuss how to cultivate incarcerated sources while looking out for their safety:

• Freedom of the Press Foundation, Covering the Mass Incarceration System: Interviewing Incarcerated People — This guide offers a foundation for knowing the risks incarcerated people face in speaking with the press, how to minimize those risks, and how to prepare for common barriers to interviewing incarcerated sources.
• Prison Journalism Project, Contacting People Inside by State — A handbook for contacting people in every state prison system (and the federal system) by mail, phone, and e-messaging. While DOCs sometimes change their rules about communication abruptly, this guide is mostly up to date.
• Prison Journalism Project, A Reporter’s Glossary of Prison Jargon — Compiled by 17 incarcerated and formerly incarcerated contributors across 11 states, this is a useful index of terms you may come across when reporting on prisons and interviewing incarcerated people.

Working with incarcerated writers

We strongly encourage news outlets to engage incarcerated writers as partners in their work, and recommend the following guides for newsrooms interested in doing so.

• The Appeal, How to Work With Incarcerated Writers — This guide offers some foundational tips for publishing incarcerated writers, including tapping into local resources, forming relationships, and adapting the editing process.
• Scalawag Magazine, The Press In Prison — This free-to-download book authored by journalists inside and outside prison offers guidance for newsrooms on working with incarcerated writers, protecting them from retaliation, sourcing and paying your writers, and more.
• We published a review of state restrictions on prison journalism, including a 50-state table with links to the relevant state statutes. For more context on these legal restrictions, see the Prison Journalism Project’s Laws Around Prison Journalism.

Framing your story

For reporters who want to make sure their coverage of the criminal legal system is nuanced and balanced, and treats people in the system with respect, we also suggest the resources below.

• The Sentencing Project, 10 Crime Coverage Do’s and Don’ts — A primer on avoiding sensationalism when covering crime, and how to avoid stigmatizing framing and language that promote inaccurate views of crime.
• Interrupting Criminalization, Don’t Be a Copagandist! — This resource explains how to avoid repeating police talking points uncritically, why to avoid publishing mugshots, and more. Also see Interrupting Criminalization’s other media guides.
• The Marshall Project, What words we use — and avoid — when covering people and incarceration — Offers lessons from the Marshall Project’s reporting and suggestions for using person-first language when writing about issues in prisons and jails.
• Health In Justice Action Lab, Changing the Narrative series — This webcast designed for journalists covering drugs and drug enforcement breaks down reductive narratives about addiction, and helps reporters avoid harmful tropes.

Webinar: Exercising our right to know: Making effective public records requests

by Sarah Staudt, September 28, 2026

Every state and the federal government has transparency laws on the books that allow the public to access a huge range of government documents. The information contained in these documents can be invaluable in advocacy efforts to change the criminal legal system. Information about who’s in jail and prison, how they’re being treated, and how incarceration functions is usually just an email away.

Often, though, criminal legal system advocates feel intimidated by the records request process and don’t use this valuable tool. It doesn’t help that government agencies often stymie records requests however they can, using technical language and loopholes to avoid providing information.

On October 27, 2026, Prison Policy Initiative hosted a webinar demystifying records requests, sharing highlights from our records request toolkit, including the basics of making a request, and tips and tricks we’ve learned over decades of sending requests to jails, prisons, and other agencies that can make your requests more effective.

The webinar also included a panel with Mike Wessler, who formerly served in communications roles for a number of government agencies and has been on the receiving side of records requests. Mike is now the Prison Policy Initiative’s Communications Director, and gave his perspective on why agencies seem to work so hard to avoid giving out information, and how to get past common roadblocks to get the information you need.

Spanish language interpretation is available by selecting the “Spanish” audio track in the “Settings” menu on the webinar’s YouTube video. The American Sign Language interpreter feed for this video is available here.

Webinar resources

• Power Point slides for the webinar. These include a written summary of some of the key points of the discussion with Mike Wessler.
• Public records request toolkit — This toolkit provides tips, tricks and a wealth of state-specific information about making records requests.
• Records request examples — Four examples of records requests that illustrate how to approach a request when you have varying degrees of information about the documents you’re looking for.

Marking twenty-five years of the Prison Policy Initiative

In our new annual report, we share highlights of our work from the past year while commemorating a milestone anniversary.

by Danielle Squillante, September 25, 2026

This year marks a quarter-century since the Prison Policy Initiative was created. When the organization was founded in 2001, criminal legal reform was not a priority issue for most people, despite the nation’s ballooning prison populations. We launched this organization to change that. We wanted to help the public understand the true consequences of mass criminalization and incarceration and to win concrete policy changes that would finally end the era of mass incarceration.

As we celebrate twenty-five years since our founding, we are thrilled to share our 2025-2026 Annual Report with you. In it, we highlight how, over the last year, we continued our legacy of producing cutting-edge research that empowers advocates and lawmakers to secure policy victories. We released 8 major reports, 19 research briefings, 2 new resources in our Advocacy Toolkit, and several briefings related to our campaign to end prison gerrymandering. We also provided technical support to state and local advocates working to push back against local government collaboration with ICE, reform parole release systems, fight jail expansion, and more.

Here are a handful of accomplishments we’re particularly proud of:

• We published an in-depth report that showed, for the first time ever, how local jails are a key part of President Trump’s detention and deportation agenda, along with a guide on how people can push back on this in their local community.
• We updated our groundbreaking report, Following the Money of Mass Incarceration, with new data and graphics showing that, despite historic drops in crime, spending on the criminal legal system — especially the bloated budgets of militarized federal agencies — has grown dramatically.
• We released a two-part report on discretionary parole systems that show how these critical systems for decarceration all too often go underused and deny parole applications based on factors that are beyond a person’s control.
• We put out two publications that detail the growth of community supervision in the U.S. We published an update to our Punishment Beyond Prisons: Incarceration and Supervision by State report, which breaks down how many people are on probation and parole in each state. We also released a briefing that pieces together state-level community supervision data covering roughly the last 45 years to provide a clear view of supervision dynamics in each state, as well as how states compare to one another.
• Our Policy & Advocacy team added two new resources to our Advocacy Toolkit, and hosted webinars on protecting family communication with imprisoned loved ones and resisting carceral humanist narratives when pursuing criminal legal reforms.
• We launched our Creator-in-Residence program to empower and support creators producing videos that expose the harms of the carceral system. Our first resident, Alpha Jalloh, worked with our Communications team to produce a series of videos covering a wide range of issues across the criminal legal system, from the lasting legacy of the failed War on Drugs to the devastating impacts of maternal incarceration.

This is only a snapshot of what we produced this past year. We are proud of our accomplishments and look forward to sharing new projects with you in the year to come.

Note to President Trump: No, 2% of the population doesn’t account for all crime

Crime is more complex than the president claims. Pinning blame on a tiny subset of the population is rhetorically useful, but both crime and criminalization are widespread in the U.S.

by Wanda Bertram, September 15, 2026

President Trump has been claiming lately that 2 percent of the U.S. population accounts for all or almost all crime in the United States. When asked to back up these claims, the White House cites our research showing that 5.6 million people — about 2 percent of the population — are booked into local jails every year.

It will shock few people to hear that this claim is bogus.

Here, we explain why that is and the numerous problems with equating jail bookings with crime. We also discuss the complex social causes of crime that Trump fails to engage with, when he opts to pile blame on a small imaginary group that he says should be incarcerated or banished.

Jail bookings are not directly representative of crime

Trump seems to think that to find out who is committing crime, one can simply look at who is getting arrested. But arrests do not equate to crime. Instead, arrests reflect police decision-making around who to bring to jail. The vast majority of arrests are for low-level offenses, and many people booked in jail are never charged or have their cases dismissed days or weeks later.

Police may bring someone to jail without any intention of them facing criminal charges, like people jailed in order to “sober up,” those arrested for a suspected violation of supervision rules, or people held on material witness warrants. By the same token, many people enter the criminal legal system without ever going to jail. About 13 million people every year pass through the U.S.’s bloated, bureaucratic misdemeanor system, facing punishments like fines and fees even while many are never arrested.

It’s also true that many crimes never lead to someone spending time in jail. Many categories of crimes are underreported. Some major social harms, such as worker and tenant abuse, routinely go unresolved, and when they are addressed, it is usually outside of criminal court. Even among reported crimes, many are never solved or never even lead to an arrest, as indicated by low police clearance rates nationwide.

Crime and criminalization extend far beyond 5.6 million people

In a speech in July, Trump stated that “there’s a statistic that’s incredible. Two percent of the people create 91 percent of the crime.” He continued, “You can handle two percent of the people. We get them out. We get them out.”

It’s clear why Trump wants it to be true that a tiny slice of the population accounts for the vast majority of crime. It’s easy to “other-ize” an imagined handful of super-criminals, whom a general audience can assume have no connection to them or their families.

But the reality of mass incarceration shows us that this isn’t the case. 79 million people in this country (or almost a quarter of the national population) have a criminal record, and of those, 19 million have a felony record. Just as most people are likely to know someone who has been the victim of a crime, most people have some connection to someone who has gone to jail. In fact, as FWD.us has reported, nearly one in every two adults in the U.S. has an immediate family member who has been to prison or jail.

None of this has stopped the Trump administration, however, from acting as though crime is a simple matter that can be fixed by replacing social welfare programs and violence prevention with harsher policing.

Reductive views of crime make social problems worse

What is true about people booked in jails is that they are deeply disadvantaged. As our research from 2019 shows, people in jails are disproportionately poor, unemployed, struggling with physical and mental illness, and lacking health insurance. A smaller subset of this group, who are booked in jails multiple times a year (typically for nonviolent offenses), are even more likely to be low-income and unhoused.

Making living conditions worse for this segment of the population, and ripping away programs that gave them more stability, has unfortunately been a cornerstone of Trump’s second term. The president has axed federal grants for crime prevention programs totaling almost a billion dollars, canceled thousands of grants for mental health and substance use treatment, and decimated funding for permanent supportive housing. Meanwhile, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s sweeping cuts to Medicaid will likely reverse public safety gains and is already hurting reentry programs designed to prevent recidivism.

Under these circumstances, crime and social disorder are likely to get worse, not better. And as many states backslide into punitive “tough-on-crime” policies, like restricting good time credits and parole, it’s worth remembering that harsh punishments may in fact cause more crime. Despite Trump’s rhetoric, policies like mandatory minimums and habitual offender laws — locking people up and throwing away the key — have no demonstrable public safety benefit.

The system, not the people, is the problem

Trump may be hoping that pinning crime on a small, imaginary slice of the population will rationalize making the criminal legal system harsher and defunding sources of support. But crime is more complicated, and the policies he — and many other lawmakers — are pushing are a prescription for backsliding into the worst days of mass incarceration.

These data also highlight an inevitable conclusion: In a nation where nearly a quarter of the population has a criminal record, the problem isn’t its people. The problem is the system.

Inevitable yet ignored: Prison policies disregard the realities of menopause behind bars

Our survey of state and federal prison policies shows just how little institutional attention is paid to menopause-related healthcare and education behind bars, despite the growing population of aging incarcerated women.

by Emily Widra, September 1, 2026

With thousands of women over the age of 50 incarcerated in state and federal prisons, health changes related to menopause should be a significant part of the conversation around prison healthcare.¹ Unfortunately, while advocates and healthcare providers are discussing menopause education, advocacy, and healthcare access, incarcerated women are almost entirely left out of the picture. Their exclusion is particularly troubling because women’s incarceration has grown even more rapidly than men’s, and since 2008, the percentage of women in prison who were 50 or older has more than doubled.²

Given the serious need, what is the state of menopause care and education behind bars? To find out, we reviewed the existing research and, while we found a number of illuminating qualitative research studies about the experience of menopause during incarceration, there are almost no quantitative data regarding symptoms or medical management behind bars. So, we reviewed every state and federal prison system’s policies in search of clues regarding health or educational services that specifically address menopause. Ultimately, we found an alarming lack of institutional policies about a major and unavoidable life stage that a significant portion of incarcerated women will experience. It’s worth noting that just because we did not find any mention in a state’s publicly available policy or other materials does not necessarily mean that there are no menopause-related policies or practices in place in these facilities (and likewise, just because something is written into policy does not mean it is actually practiced in an institution). However, transparency about prison policies, healthcare, and education is crucial — especially for accountability purposes — so we take it as a bad sign that we couldn’t find much information about practices and resources for people experiencing menopause.³

Prison policies frequently ignore menopause

Because the U.S. prison system was primarily designed to incarcerate men, women’s particular healthcare needs are often ignored. Currently, there are no existing national or international standards of care for menopause in prison.⁴

Our analysis of prison policies in every state, Washington, D.C., and the federal Bureau of Prisons produced little information about menopause in department of corrections’ policies, including in policy handbooks specifically for women’s prisons. We found mentions of “menopause” in only ten states’ documentation, and of those, none spell out what medical care, education, or resources prison officials provide to people experiencing perimenopause or menopause.

Of these ten states, only five actually have information explicitly about menopause, while the remaining five states only mention it in the context of other health-related concerns.⁵ In four of these states (Alabama, Alaska, Mississippi, and Oklahoma), the language in these documents suggests that departments of corrections are simply slotting the word “menopause” into vague policy templates⁶ as though it is a preventable condition like pregnancy or a communicable disease like tuberculosis, rather than a distinct physiological inevitability⁷ for half of the global population. Ultimately, none of the documents we reviewed can serve as adequate examples of policies, practices, or recommendations to address menopause-related health concerns for incarcerated people.

Punished, delayed, and dismissed: how prisons neglect menopause

Globally, there are significant gaps in menopause care despite the direct impact this natural part of the aging process has on millions of people each year. Even outside of prison walls, women are frequently dismissed and unsupported by medical providers and face limited access to accurate information about menopause and treatment options, often exacerbated by racial, socioeconomic, and geographic disparities.

While there is little information available on the prevalence of menopausal symptoms in prison, and what menopausal care (if any) is available to the more than 15,000 women who are at least 50 years old in state and federal prisons, we can assume that they face these same — if not more insurmountable — barriers to care as women in the general public.⁸ The existing quantitative research on the subject shows that many women are experiencing serious perimenopausal and menopausal symptoms behind bars, often in combination with multiple chronic health conditions. Imprisoned older Black women — who are overrepresented in prison populations — report “menopause problems” at a higher rate than their incarcerated white peers. The most effective treatment (hormone therapy) has been historically underused, and it’s even more inaccessible for women in prison: in North Carolina prisons, for example, researchers analyzed prescribed medications and found that less than 5% of women in custody were receiving estrogen-containing medications.⁹ While limited, these quantitative studies betray an appalling lack of health and education services regarding menopause in prisons across the country.

Menstruation as misconductPrisons punish people for periods

Meanwhile, a robust body of qualitative research — that is, research focused on experiences, perceptions, and behavior rather than numbers — offers a detailed look at the experience of menopause in prison. The perimenopause and menopause symptoms incarcerated women experience¹⁰ may be the same as those experienced around the world, but the carceral context itself restricts access to common remedies like air conditioning and over-the-counter medications. The findings from these qualitative studies bring to light a number of troubling patterns:

• Lack of education and information. Women are almost entirely reliant on their peers for information about menopause¹¹ and, while peer support is important, it should not be the only avenue for information and care available to incarcerated women. In addition, without the support necessary to help people understand their symptoms, feelings of shame and stigma can and do arise, which can have serious adverse consequences for mental and physical health.
• Delayed identification and dismissal of symptoms. Incarcerated women also lack resources to determine if their symptoms (such as mood changes) are even related to menopause or, for example, a response to the trauma of incarceration. This ultimately impedes their ability to seek healthcare, which can be a long, complicated process in prison as-is. When incarcerated women do seek out medical care, they report that providers and staff dismiss their symptoms as not severe enough to require intervention, or as a ploy to get out of work or obtain medication.
• Prison context and loss of control. On a basic level, prisons restrict individual agency over one’s decisions, actions, and environment. Incarcerated people experiencing menopause describe this loss of control — as well as a lack of privacy — as an impediment to managing their symptoms because they are unable to use common remedies freely (like showers or menstrual products) and do not have full access to their usual support systems and coping skills.
• Discipline and punishment. Incarcerated women describe being punished for symptoms (or their efforts to manage those symptoms), including receiving disciplinary infractions for soiled clothing or bedding. In addition, some women shared a perception that experiencing menopause in prison is, in and of itself, part of their punishment.

Filling the gaps: Kwaneta Harris & the Menopause Project

The growing campaign for menopause research, education, advocacy, and medical care outside of prisons offers a unique opportunity to extend this work behind prison walls. Here, we highlight two significant efforts to do just that: Kwaneta Harris’ personal testimonies and the guide she created on menopause behind bars, and the Menopause Project at Impact Justice, which works to expand education and resources for both incarcerated people and correctional healthcare providers.

Kwaneta Harris, an incarcerated journalist, has shared her experience of perimenopause and menopause behind bars in mainstream media, which closely parallels the qualitative research findings on the subject. “The carceral system wasn’t built for people going through menopause,” Harris explains. “It was built to contain and control, not to care and nurture.” For example, she describes being unable to escape the heat during hot flashes in a prison without air conditioning, a lack of access to home remedies like ice packs or over-the-counter medications, and numerous accusations of being “medication-seeking” or pursuing “special treatment.” She also outlines how little treatment is available: after years without medication, prison medical workers provided her with hormone therapy for two months with no prescription refill, even though menopause symptoms persist for about seven years on average. Harris created a guide to navigating perimenopause and menopause in prison, which The Marshall Project published in July 2026. This guide provides detailed information about what menopause and perimenopause are, what symptoms to expect and when to expect them, how to advocate for medical care during incarceration, what non-medical options may be accessible for symptom relief in prison, and what kinds of medical interventions incarcerated people can pursue.

In California, the Menopause Project has created an extensive program to overcome the lack of information on menopause in prisons, producing physician guides and trainings, educational material for providers and incarcerated people, and “town halls” and workshops to empower incarcerated women to better understand and advocate for their own health. When the Project began this work with the California Correctional Health Care Services, they identified serious issues that likely exist across all U.S. prison systems, including:

• inadequate training for medical providers regarding identification, management, and treatment of menopause-related symptoms;
• an absence of tools for incarcerated people to advocate for their needs for symptom management; and
• outdated provider training opportunities and formulary guidance.

The early results from this program include a number of successes: training sessions for providers, well-attended educational sessions for incarcerated people, greater access to hormone therapy, and the creation of a formal peer support program. Preliminary data collected by the Project suggest that the program improved connections between individuals and necessary medical care, closed the knowledge gap among providers, and greater awareness of menopause and related symptoms among staff and incarcerated women. The Menopause Project is expanding beyond California — currently in Arizona and South Carolina — and other states can partner with them or follow their lead in working with incarcerated women.

Recommendations

Researchers and advocates have an opportunity to help incarcerated women better understand menopause and obtain the treatments they need. Based on the work from incarcerated advocates and the early results from the Menopause Project in California, there are a number of important steps that prisons should take, including:

• education and training for medical providers;
• specialized training for prison staff;
• education and advocacy tools for incarcerated people;
• peer support programs;
• expanding prescription formulary to include hormone therapy, antidepressants, and other updated, evidence-based treatments; and
• research and evaluation of implemented programs.

These changes need to be standardized and incorporated into correctional policies to promote equitable access to menstrual healthcare and resources, as well as promote transparency for incarcerated people, their loved ones, and the public about healthcare in carceral settings.