The number of people in U.S. jails and prisons fell substantially in 2020: by 25 percent and 15 percent, respectively. But according to a new report from the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), those drops were largely due to pandemic-related bottlenecks in the criminal justice system, which drove a 40 percent drop in prison admissions even as releases from prisons fell. And the total number of people confined in jails and prisons was still nearly 2 million, meaning that the United States still had an appallingly high incarceration rate.
The PPI report debunks several influential misconceptions about the causes of mass incarceration in the United States. It notes that the war on drugs does not play as big a role as commonly thought, that the distinction between "violent" and "nonviolent" crimes is misleading, and that detainees in jails, most of whom have not been convicted, are often overlooked, even though they account for nearly half of people behind bars. A fuller understanding of the factors driving these numbers shows that many frequently proposed reforms are inadequate if the goal is an incarceration rate more in line with those of other liberal democracies.
