Many sources say America locks up some 2.3 million people in its jails and prisons on any given day, but that’s not the whole story.
According to Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) research, “The Whole Pie 2015,” there are more than 2.3 million people confined in various institutions throughout the country, including 2,259 juvenile facilities, 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 3,283 local jails, and 79 Indian Country jails, as well as military prisons.
“This report offers some much needed clarity by piecing together this country’s disparate systems of confinement,” PPI reported. “And we go deeper to provide further detail on why people in the various systems of confinement are locked up.”
Two years ago PPI released a study detailing the number of people confined in various U.S. institutions. Then the numbers revealed an “enormous churn in and out of our correctional facilities.”
With some 636,000 people released from prisons each year and over 11 million people cycling in and out of local jails, according to PPI research, seemingly, not much has changed.
“We don’t talk about local jails nearly as much as we do talk about prisons at the national level,” said PPI Policy & Communications Associate Bernadette Rabuy in an interview with therealnews.com.
It was reported that jail populations are high due to the number of pretrial detainees who have not been convicted of a crime but are too poor to afford bail, or will make bail in a matter of hours or days.
“We found that actually 70 percent of the people in our local jails are unconvicted, meaning they’re legally innocent,” Rabuy told therealnews.com.
According to Rabuy, there is also an unseen number beyond the 2.3 million currently incarcerated. It is the figure counting those under state and federal correctional control.
“Once we have wrapped our minds around the ‘whole pie’ of mass incarceration, we should zoom out and note that being locked up is just one piece of the larger pie of correctional control,” PPI reported.
According to PPI’s research covering all forms of correctional control, 55 percent are on probation (3.9 million), 12 percent are on parole (850,000) and another 33 percent are locked up.
“We find that 19,000 people are in federal prison for criminal convictions of violating federal immigration laws,” PPI reported. “A separate 33,000 are civilly detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
In its research, PPI also found convictions for nonviolent drug offenses exist as a cornerstone in federal prisons. In state prisons and local jails, these offenses “play only a supporting role.”
“We know that almost half a million adults and children are locked up because their most significant offense was a drug offense,” PPI reported.
Most convictions result from defendants accepting plea bargains, PPI reported. It said some people plead guilty to offenses they may not have committed.
PPI reported almost 10,000 children incarcerated for “technical violations” stemming from parole or probation violations, not new offenses; and more than 2,000 children confined for “status” offenses.
“Looking at the big picture requires us to ask if it really makes sense to lock up 2.3 million people on any given day, giving this nation the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in the world,” PPI said.
PPI’s report can be accessed at www.prisonpolicy.org.
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