01/22/2023
The United States incarcerates more people than any other country, peaking in 2008 with more than 2.3 million people behind bars. Today, America’s criminal justice system incarcerates black Americans at a rate six times higher and LatinX individuals at a rate three times higher than whites. There is also a growing number of incarcerated women—1.2 million, the majority mothers of children, in prison for mainly nonviolent crimes.
Every year, more than $81 billion is poured into the corrections industry, diverting funds from the social and economic development of communities most affected by crime and violence. For example, over the past two decades, state and local spending on corrections increased by 44 percent, while spending on higher education fell by 28 percent.
The results are stark: depressed high school graduation rates, deepening poverty within families broken apart by incarceration, and millions of people unable to obtain jobs or housing because of felony convictions. These by-products of incarceration are themselves drivers of crime, violence, and inequality.
The Opportunity
After decades of tough-on-crime rhetoric from political leaders, strategic organizing has shifted the narrative spurring a new recognition of and bipartisan consensus on the need for change. Although the bipartisan consensus doesn’t fully recognize the inhumanity and institutional violence within the criminal justice system, there is now a widely shared view that the current system is untenable: costly, ineffective, and a waste of human potential.
Since we launched this program in 2014, the overall prison and jail population has dropped by seven percent, with some states such as California, New Jersey, and New York dropping their prison populations by more than 30 percent. Even conservative states such as Louisiana and Oklahoma have passed measures that downgrade penalties for drug and other offenses and funnel prison savings to community-based rehabilitation, substance abuse, and mental health programs.
