Our updated analysis finds that the initial efforts to reduce jail populations have slowed, while the small drops in state prison populations are still too little to save lives.
by Emily Widra and Peter Wagner, Prison Policy Initiative, originally published August 5, 2020
Source Material
At a time when more ...
Can governments safely release hundreds or thousands of people from prison?
We offer 14 historical examples to show that, in fact, they already have.
by Peter Wagner, Prison Policy Initiative
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/04/09/large-scale-releases/
To protect the American public from COVID-19, schools have closed, non-essential stores have been shuttered, people with desk jobs ...
by Emily Widra and Peter Wagner, originally published April 10, 2020 at the Prison Policy Initiative website
Since the Prison Policy Initiative’s first coronavirus briefing at the beginning of March, the organization has been tracking how federal, state, and local officials have responded to the threat of COVID-19 in the criminal justice ...
A Prison Policy Initiative briefing
by Peter Wagner and Leah Sakala
Wait, does the United States have 1.4 million or more than 2 million people in prison? And do the 688,000 people released every year include those getting out of local jails? Frustrating questions like these abound because our systems ...
Sometime in the early morning of April 26, 2012, in his cell in a remote Pennsylvania prison, a 74-year-old jailhouse lawyer serving a life sentence hung himself. He was a quiet man who avoided taking credit for his work, so many people in and outside of prison don’t know about ...
Four states and hundreds of local governments are standing up to reject one of the most repugnant aspects of the prison industrial complex: Legislators with prisons located in their districts who claim the people incarcerated there – who cannot vote – as their “constituents,” then use their newfound political clout ...
On June 7, 2004, talks between the New York State Senate and the Assembly on how to best reform the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws broke down. Publicly, the dispute is over ideological disagreements, but an obscure Census quirk that counts prisoners as residents of the prison's legislative district may be ...
Many prison town officials are quick to claim prisoners as residents when the Census Bureau comes to town, but prisoners report that this is the only time these officials are so welcoming.
The Census Bureau counts the nation's mostly urban prisoners as if they were residents of the prison town. ...
by Peter Wagner and Rose Heyer
In September 1971, thousands of prisoners at Attica prison in rural New York State rebelled, taking control of D-yard. Sixty-three percent of the prisoners were Black or Latino, but at that time there were no Blacks and only one Latino as guards. Seventy percent ...
California's Budget Secret: Prisoners Form Core
of Forest Fire Fighting Army
by Peter Wagner
In California, up to three quarters of
the crew members fighting California fires are prisoners. In exchange for a reduction in sentence length, 4,100 minimum security prisoners work fighting fires and on public works projects for ...
