There is no clear indication or definitive number of just how many men, women, and children are imprisoned in the United States – figures vary and are inconstant, because “the data collectors that keep track of (prisoners) is fragmented,” according to a new Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) study.
This, according to PPI, “makes it hard to get the big picture” for policy makers and others who are new to the criminal justice system.
The PPI figures come from:
• The Census of State and Federal Correctional Facilities
• The Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement
• The Census of Jail Facilities, and Jails of Indian Country
• Military prisons
• Immigration detention facilities
• Civil commitment centers in addition, to other places of confinement in U.S. territories.
According to PPI’s study published in March, there are 2.4 million people incarcerated in the United States.
“The enormous churn in and out of our confinement facilities underscores how naïve it is to conceive of prisons as separate from the rest of our society,” said PPI.
The study explains that “jail churn is particularly high because at any given moment most of the 722,000 people in local jails have not been convicted and are in jail because they are either too poor to make bail and are being held before trial, or because they’ve just been arrested and will make bail in the next few hours or days.”
PPI said there are “disparate systems of confinement in this country. The study found there are 1,719 state prisons in the U.S., 102 federal prisons, 2,259 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails and 79 Indian Country jails.
“Now that we can, for the first time, see the big picture of how many people are locked up in the United States in the various types of facilities, we can see that something needs to change,” said PPI.
“The United States locks up more people per capita than any other nation. But grappling with why requires us to first consider the many types of correctional facilities and the reasons that people are confined there,” the report says.
The study reveals how drug categories for the incarcerated “carry an important caveat.” One example of this is the 15,000 children confined “whose most serious offense wasn’t anything that most people would consider a crime.”
PPI reported that nearly 12,000 children are locked up for “technical violations” of the conditions of their probation or parole, which has no association with a new offense.
Viewing incarceration by taking a whole-pie approach, PPI says, can provide Americans who are ready to take “a fresh look at the criminal justice system — the tools they need to demand meaningful changes to how we do justice.” www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie.html
