Per the latest count, America had about 6,500 jails and prisons but only about 4,500 colleges and universities. The report “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2024” by the Prison Policy Initiative aimed to put the numbers into perspective.
According to the “Big Picture” section on mass incarceration, the criminal legal system collected “a lot of data, but very little is designed to help policymakers or the public understand what’s going on.”
“Can it really be true that most people in jail are legally innocent?” asked Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, the authors of the report. “How much of mass incarceration is a result of the war on drugs, or the profit motives of private prisons? Have popular reforms really triggered a crime wave?”
The report listed the top 10 myths that have driven policy for many years.
The first myth discussed the effects of private businesses profiteering from mass incarceration. The report said private enterprises did not sit at the root of mass incarceration, even though “the industry has lobbied to maintain high levels of incarceration.”
The report called private prisons “a parasite on the massive publicly-owned system.” The report also blamed private enterprises for unconscionable social costs resulting from privatized services like phone calls, medical care, and commissary that have shifted the costs of incarceration onto incarcerated persons and their families.
The second myth spoke about prisons as “factories behind fences” used to provide companies with a huge slave labor force. “Simply put, private companies using prison labor are not what stands in the way of ending mass incarceration, nor are they the source of most prison jobs,” said the report.
The report did blame correctional institutions for their overreliance of incarcerated labor for operations such as laundry and kitchen work. Such labor paid “unconscionably low wages,” and in some states, nothing at all. The practice has shifted costs of incarceration to incarcerated persons while “hiding the true cost of running prisons from most Americans.”
“There was a time that I was upholstering furniture for what amounted to one Top Ramen soup an hour,” said San Quentin resident Michael Moore about his 24 cents/hour pay. They had quotas. When we asked them for a raise, they had the same attitude as if we asked for $20 an hour. You just feel so used. They would say, ‘If you don’t like it, then quit.’ After five years, I could not get more than 50 cents an hour, and I was one of the better-paid workers.”
Countering myth number three, the idea that releasing “nonviolent drug offenders would end mass incarceration,” The report said over one million drug possession arrests each year amounted to only 360,000 persons incarcerated for them, less than 20% of total incarcerated populations. Ending mass incarceration would require changing systemic responses to more serious crimes.
Myth number four concerned the definition that violent crimes involved physical harm. Some states applied the term “violent crime” to purse-snatching, stealing drugs, and manufacturing methamphetamines. The report called the definition “one of the main barriers to meaningful criminal legal system reform” and “generally unhelpful in a policy context.”
“As we and many others have explained before, cutting incarceration rates to anything near international norms will be impossible without changing how we respond to violent crime. To start, we have to be clearer about what that loaded term really means,” the report stated.
Resident John Levin said he embraced one of the definitions of violence taught in GRIP. He said, “The definition in Marshal Rosenberg’s book ‘Non-Violent Communication’ says, ‘Violence is the tragic expression of an unmet Me.’ I really find that powerful in a sense that it broadens the definition of violence for me. It forces me to ask myself, ‘which one of my needs that cause me to act violently has not been met?’ It helps me ask myself, ‘where does this really originate from?’”
The fifth “particularly harmful myth” deemed violent or sexual criminals as incapable of rehabilitation, warranting decades or lifetimes of punishment. The report said anyone convicted of violent and sexual offenses have the lowest recidivism numbers, and persons convicted sexual assaults have “rearrest rates 20% lower than all other offense categories combined.”
Armenia Cudjo spent 25-and-a-half years on Death Row. He said rehabilitation is possible for anyone, “but only if they really want to be rehabilitated. On Death Row, they said ‘You are not here to be rehabilitated. You are here to die.”
A court overturned his sentence, gave him a new trial and a new sentence of 25-years-to-life —and an opportunity for rehabilitation. Now he takes classes with Mount Tamalpais College and nine self-help classes from denial management to life skills.
“I wanted to change my life, not just for the Board, but for myself,” Cudjo said. “I have changed from the person I was at the time of my life crimes.” He now resides in one of San Quentin’s Earned Living Units and will go to Board next year.
The sixth myth said that reforming the criminal legal system would lead to more crime came with the warning that incarcerated populations “continued to rebound toward their pre-pandemic levels — not because of rising crime, but because pandemic-related delays in the system.”
The report said studies showed progressive prosecutors as having no connection to rising homicide rates and that pretrial releases would not harm public safety. “While crime rates remain near historic lows, what has actually changed most is the public’s perception of crime, which is driven less by first-hand experience than by the false claims of reform opponents,” the report said, advising that “overall, the crime rate appears to be the lowest it’s been since 1963.”
“Many people mistakenly believe that long sentences, paired with austere and even brutal prison conditions, will have a deterrent effect on crime,” The report said about the seventh myth that harsh punishments would deter crime. The report cited two studies that long sentences would do little to deter future crime.
This coincided with the eighth myth that crime victims supported long prison sentences. The report said national survey data have shown most victims supportive of violence prevention, social investment, and alternatives to incarceration that would address the root causes of crime.
The ninth myth said some persons needed to go to jail for treatment and services. Designed for punishment, jails “have repeatedly failed to provide these services,” the report said. It listed supporting statistics: “Between 2000 and 2018, the number of people who died of intoxication while in jail increased by almost 400%; typically, these individuals died within just one day of admission.”
Similarly, staffing shortages in jails have led to many suicides by persons with mental health problems. “Jails are not safe detox facilities, nor are they capable of providing the therapeutic environment people require for long-term recovery and healing.”
The tenth myth called expanding community supervision the best way to reduce incarceration, but the report said, “The conditions imposed on those under supervision are often so restrictive that they set people up to fail.” The researchers even opposed ankle monitoring or phone apps, stating such practices usually only delayed incarceration. “The technology is unreliable, frequently leading to security breaches and false alarms, and it has created yet another path to incarceration.”
The report called for systemic change, “focusing on the policy changes that can end mass incarceration, and not just put a dent in it.” With 1.9 million incarcerated persons, “we can see that something needs to change,” the report said.
