Incarceration rates are not the entire story of the criminal justice system. For reformers seeking to rationalize our criminal justice policies, the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) has created a significant new tool for analyzing the complicated issue of developing proposals for reform.
PPI’s “Correctional Control: Incarceration and Supervision by State” issued on June 1, is the first report to aggregate data on all types of correctional control nationwide. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/50statepie.html
The scope of correction control includes federal prisons, 50 state prison systems, thousands of county and local jails, juvenile incarceration, civil commitment, Indian country jails, parole and, most importantly, probation.
According to PPI, “the criminal justice system’s reach in this country is far more expansive than usually assumed.” The national average is 2,111 people under correctional control per 100,000 (pht) residents. California’s rate is 1,582 pht. Georgia is over double the California rate, and Maine has the lowest rate at 858 pht.
The report has identified a tremendous variation between states that is largely driven by differing uses of probation. Fifty-six percent of the people under correctional control in America are on probation. Georgia has 78 percent of the people under its control on probation, while Nevada has 31 percent. Parole (conditional release from prison) makes up 11 percent of the total.
With this new tool, policy makers and reformers can identify the disproportionate use of any given criminal justice policy tool by comparing their local system to other states. For example, Georgia’s probation population pht residents is “greater than every other states’ total rates of correctional control,” according to the PPI press release issued in conjunction with the report.
Of particular concern to the PPI is the need to assess whether the community supervision mechanisms of probation and parole are being used as alternatives to incarceration or “as a net-widener that unnecessarily expands the criminal justice system’s reach to low-level crimes.”
Use of this tool can aid in the objective valuation of existing criminal justice policy mechanisms and identify areas of potential reform.
PPI’s “Correctional Control: Incarceration and Supervision by State” issued on June 1, is the first report to aggregate data on all types of correctional control nationwide. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/50statepie.html
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Boatwright
