Arrest, Release, Repeat: Analysis of U.S. County Jail Populations

Prison Policy Initiative Oct 11, 2019
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Analysis of U.S. County Jail Populations Giving Compass

Giving Compass’ Take:

• Prison Policy Initiative’s report on U.S. county jail populations closely examines the rate at which individuals are going in and out of the system. 

• The report provides recommendations for policies that center on addressing economic and public health issues that lead to arrests. How can donors help strengthen or encourage policies that are aimed at the root problems?

• Read about how mass incarceration harms U.S. health. 

Police and jails are supposed to protect the public from serious public safety threats, but what do they actually do? Until now, attempts to answer this question have been missing the most basic data points: how many individuals cycle through local jails every year and who these individuals are.

A new report from the Prison Policy Initiative, Arrest, Release, Repeat, fills this troubling gap in the data. Building on its popular annual snapshot of the U.S. county jail population, the Prison Policy Initiative finds that:

  • At least 4.9 million people are arrested and booked in jail every year.
  • At least 1 in 4 people who go to jail in a given year will return to jail over the course of a year.
  • At least 428,000 people will go to jail three or more times over the course of a year – the first national estimate of a population often referred to as “frequent utilizers.”
  • 49% of people with multiple arrests in the past year had annual incomes below $10,000, compared to 36% of people arrested only once and 21% of people with no arrests.
  • Despite making up only 13% of the general population, Black men and women account for 21% of people who were arrested just once and 28% of people arrested multiple times.
  • People with multiple arrests are much more likely than the general public to suffer from substance use disorders and other illnesses, and much less likely to have access to health care.
  • The vast majority of people with multiple arrests are jailed for nonviolent offenses such as drug possession, theft or trespassing.

In a series of policy recommendations, the report explains how counties can choose to stop continuously jailing their most vulnerable residents and instead solve the economic and public health problems that often lead to arrest.

Read the full article about analysis of arrests and releases in the U.S. by Wanda Bertram at Prison Policy Initiative.

Interested in learning more about Criminal Justice? Other readers at Giving Compass found the following articles helpful for impact giving related to Criminal Justice.

  • This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
    Click here for more.
    COVID-19 and Mass Decarceration

    Giving Compass' Take: • Deanna Van Buren and F. Javier Torres-Campos provide a bigger roadmap to coming up with solutions for mass decarceration during the COVID-19 pandemic.  • Are you ready to engage in decarceration efforts? What ongoing efforts could you support? • Read more about the dangers of COVID-19 in prisons.  With the highest incarceration rate in the world, US prisons and jails are drivers for the catastrophic outbreak of COVID-19. Because of dense living conditions, limited soap and hand sanitizer, poor access to quality healthcare, and an increasingly elderly population, the outbreaks we’ve seen so far may be just the beginning. It’s no surprise that hundreds of municipalities are already working to meet the crisis by reducing prison populations, whether by identifying those incarcerated for misdemeanors, near the end of their sentences, or with special risk (pregnant inmates, those over the age of 60, or with underlying medical conditions). But as exciting as these efforts are, this moment requires that we imagine something more than a temporary solution to this pandemic. Without a long-term plan for true decarceration, at a larger scale, and the necessary infrastructure to support both returning citizens and their communities, we will inevitably backslide and refill these institutions. We need visionary solutions crafted in collaboration with the communities most impacted. We believe that COVID-19 has amplified the desperate need for our systems to be radically reimagined. A beginner’s roadmap for those of us in positions of power and privilege: Question any impulse that prioritizes efficiency or profit at the expense of human life. Recognize and accommodate the costs of participation for community members, including things like childcare, elder care, meals, transportation, and accessible interpretation services. Compensate people for their time and intellectual and cultural capital. Remember that if a low-income resident is given a choice between attending an unpaid feedback session on a development project or going to the minimum-wage job they rely on to survive, they have no choice but to go to work. A simple solution would be to allocate resources that compensate community members for their intellectual contributions in the same way we compensate engineers for their expertise. Read the full article about COVID-19 and mass decarceration by Deanna Van Buren and F. Javier Torres-Campos at Stanford Social Innovation Review.

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