In Spring 2021, 1.8 million people were incarcerated in the United States, VERA Incarceration Trends

Appearing here is a report on the U.S. prison population with interactive map features that are helpful for determining state-by-state comparisons, as well as some county-level data. It's well known that, per capita, our country incarcerates more of its population than any other country in the world (with one weird known exception). Racial disparities with respect to people of color are wide, especially for African Americans. 

Note: Also read "States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2021" by Emily Widra and Tiana Herring in the Prison Policy Initiative (Sept. 2021) whose report positions Texas next to other industrialized countries in the world. We here in Texas are literally off the charts!

For me, the most striking aspect of this report was that despite declining prison populations and jail incarceration since the early 2000s, this trend is dramatically offset by increases in our nation's smaller cities and rural areas that further manifest high rates of females of color incarceration. These inequities, as we know, are not only due to structural racism and implicit bias involving all the players in the school-to-prison industrial complex, but also by the profit in prisons and the jobs they create that help sustain rural areas and smaller cities.

-Angela Valenzuela

In Spring 2021, 1.8 million

people were incarcerated in the United States.

People are sent to jails and prisons more than 11 million times each year.

Updated: December 16, 2021 2:41 AM UTC

After decades of growth in incarceration across the United States, the number of people in jail and prison decreased in recent years. However, these national declines mask significant differences in jail and prison trends across counties, states, and regions. Use the map below to explore how your county compares to others along five key incarceration metrics.

Go to VERA Interactive website

Jail Incarceration by Geography

Although jail populations in the nation’s biggest cities began to decline in the early 2000s, jail incarceration has risen dramatically in smaller cities and rural areas. Today, roughly half of all people incarcerated in local jails are in smaller cities and rural communities. The smaller city and rural jail boom has been fueled, in part, by federal- and state-level policies. But mass incarceration is also a local problem, driven by the policies and operations of over 3,000 local jails and justice systems.

                                                Go to VERA Interactive website

State-level Incarceration Trends

Despite substantial decreases in incarceration in a small number of states over the last two decades―and unprecedented reductions in 2020―the story of U.S. incarceration has been one of remarkable growth. Use the charts below to see which states have seen the biggest increases in overall jail and prison incarceration.

                                                 Go to VERA Interactive website

Racial Disparities in Incarceration

People of color―and Black people in particular―are incarcerated at strikingly higher rates than white people in jails and prisons across the country. These racial disparities reflect a system that treats Black people more harshly than white people at every stage of the criminal legal process. Racial disparities in incarceration cause disproportionate economic, health, and social harms to communities of color. Use the charts below to compare incarceration rates for each racial group.

Black people are incarcerated at higher rates than white people across the rural-urban spectrum. Although urban areas still have the biggest racial disparities, they have made larger strides in reducing racial disparities over the past three decades than have rural counties and smaller cities, where total incarceration rates today are the highest.

                                              `Go to VERA Interactive website

County Comparisons

Mass incarceration is a local problem that requires local solutions. Use the table below to see how key incarceration metrics compare for different U.S. counties. For each state, the table shows the county with the highest jail incarceration rate and the highest resident population.

 

Surveillance in an Era of Pandemic and Protest: Landmark Conversation with Naomi Klein, Shoshana Zuboff & Simone Browne

Friends:

I strongly urge you to listen to this landmark conversation with "Shock Doctrine" author, Naomi Klein, Shoshana Zuboff, author of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," and Simone Browne, author of "Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness."

It's chock-full of really good, if startling, information on how our privacy is violated, abetted by our sense of resignation. For instance check out this transcript of much of what Shoshana Zuboff shared:

A novel development now is how with technology, students' homes become the new site for the playing out of the school-to-prison pipeline. Read the write-up below and listen to this very powerful and timely conversation.

-Angela Valenzuela

As this summer of pandemic and racial justice protests draws to a close, Naomi Klein will host a landmark conversation between Shoshana Zuboff, author of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," and Simone Browne, author of "Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness." The three authors will discuss how both governments and tech giants are using our moment of overlapping crises to push through discredited surveillance technologies that threaten privacy, democracy, and any hope of equality.
Early in the pandemic, Klein wrote that these forces have aligned to “advance a vision of a future in which our every move, our every word, our every relationship is trackable, traceable, and data-mineable.” For the privileged, “almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone.”
But, Zuboff warns, “We’re not necessarily locked into this deterministic narrative that too many pundits are hawking and the tech companies are salivating over — that post-Covid-19, we’re going to have comprehensive biosurveillance of all of society. ... People are worried. People are asking questions.”
Racial justice movements are also winning major victories against surveillance technologies like facial recognition. And as Browne reminds us, “surveillance is nothing new to Black folks.” In "Dark Matters," Browne traces modern surveillance practices back to the policing of Black lives under slavery, comparing the branding of slaves to present-day methods of tracking, surveilling, and commodifying people.
In this live conversation, Klein, Zuboff, and Browne will unpack the dangers of surveillance capitalism — and how we can rise to this crisis and create a fair and equitable future.
In partnership with Rutgers University–New Brunswick.
Subscribe to our channel: https://interc.pt/subscribe

#TheMiningOfTheSelf  #DigitalCommons #Unionize

Did you know that the U.S. has 2.3 million people behind bars?

Did you know that the U.S. has 2.3 million people behind bars?  Per capita, this is more than any other country in the world.  How tragic and traumatizing to the millions of families directly affected by this.  ICE alone accounts for 43,000 of these.  We as a polity need to work together to address this crisis. To get educated on these matters, PrisonPolicy.org is a good place to start.

-Angela

Data Source: For information about the data visit the data section of the report. (Graph: Peter Wagner & Wendy Sawyer, 2018)

This graph originally appeared in Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2018.

Pie chart showing the number of people locked up on a given day in the United States by facility type and the underlying offense using the newest data available in March 2018.

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 2.3 million people are confined there.

Why the separation of families is the tip of the ICEberg by Barbara Hines

Do read this troubling piece by Dr. Barbara Hines, a retired clinical professor of law at the School of Law at the University of Texas at Austin.  She comments on how immigrant detention is not a recent phenomenon. "Only now has this hidden gulag sprung into public vision," Hines reports, mentioning its "utter lack of transparency and incompetence."  

https://tinyurl.com/ya95zp5bCathy Frierson, Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire &  Semyon Samuilovich Vilensky, Gulag survivor  (Co-authors), (2010).Children of the Gulag (Yale University Press).

Hines recommends the following as policy:

"Absent exceptional circumstances, immigrants should be released to their families or into the community. Community-based alternatives are much cheaper and more effective than the costs of overdetention."

                                                                                                       -Dr. Barbara Hines 

Also read these helpful, earlier posts by Sonia Nazario, first in the July 11, 2018 issue of the New York Times titled, "Do You Care About the Rule of Law? Then Act Like It," and secondly in the June 22, 2018 issue titled, ""There’s a Better, Cheaper Way to Handle Immigration." 

Physically detaining children and families should not even exist as a policy or practice option.  Policymakers should listen closely to alternative, humane options.

For those of us in education who might be pressed to consider the underlying ideologies and ways of knowing that allow for the existence of an "American Gulag"—that is, of course, mirrored in the "school-to-prison pipeline"—we would do well to re-discover and re-think our democracy in terms of what and how we teach. 

We need to re-discover not just community, but community-based ways of knowing where a commitment to democracy equals community empowerment and public virtue.  These are the "soft skills" that not only promote survival and well-being, but also ways of knowing that are simply inconsistent and incompatible with the dehumanizing, silencing, and objectification of "the other," as we are witnessing in full display today.

Angela Valenzuela

#FamiliesBelongTogether #FamiliesTornApart #FreeTheChildren 

Commentary: Why the separation of families is the tip of the iceberg

OPINION

By Barbara Hines - Special to the American-Statesman

---

The stark images of separated children and parents in cage-like settings — and the total chaos of the vast immigration detention system — has outraged the American public. Yet, the incarceration of immigrants, including families and asylum seekers, is nothing new.

Although the immigration system is a civil system, it does not operate as such. Immigrants seeking asylum or other legal status in this country are treated as criminals but provided with less due-process protections. Currently, over 40,000 immigrants are incarcerated daily in a sprawling array of mostly for-profit private facilities.

An utter lack of transparency and incompetence have been hallmarks of detention. The disorganized reunification process of separated children is clear evidence. The focus on abducted children has highlighted problems that immigration advocates — including myself — have complained about for years. Abhorrent conditions, sexual abuse, inadequate food, lack of medical care and deaths in detention have been repeatedly documented. Although nothing in the system changes, the administration has pushed for expanded and longer detention.

Immigrants arrested in South Texas have always been held in freezing and crowded cage-like cells. Only now has this hidden gulag sprung into public vision.

Opinion: Even before family separations, Trump was cultivating hate.

In most facilities, immigrants in the so-called civil system are clothed in prison jump suits. They are transferred at will across the country from one detention center to another, even when they have legal representation. For example, separated parents were moved from Laredo, Texas, to Tacoma, Washington. Indigenous-language speakers cannot convey their legal claims or find their children. There are insufficient interpreters for this population, and phone interpretation lines are frequently broken. Attorneys must communicate with clients by leaving messages that may never be delivered. Waiting times to see clients can be up to three hours, and attorneys must share the few available visitation rooms. At the Hutto Detention Center in Taylor, where many separated mothers were incarcerated, the visitation rooms consist of see-through plastic cubicles that are not soundproof.

Despite the similarities with the prison model, immigrants are not entitled to court-appointed lawyers. This makes navigating the immigration court system nearly impossible for most immigrants.

Trump’s calls for prolonged detention for everyone should not be the model. Detention for families has traumatic consequences, as I personally know, having worked in family detention centers since 2006, when the notorious T. Don Hutto facility was run by CoreCivic, one of the largest prison companies in the country. Children and their parents were housed in jail cells in a former medium- security prison, dressed in prison uniforms, and subjected to a strict prison regime. This set-up was perfectly acceptable to CoreCivic, as it maximized its profits.

Alternatives to for-profit incarceration should not be a binary choice between the separation of parents or prolonged family detention. Under a civil system, detention should be the last alternative, not the first. An individualized assessment of flight risk and danger are the legal standards that must be applied before depriving any person of his or her liberty interest. Absent exceptional circumstances, immigrants should be released to their families or into the community. Community-based alternatives are much cheaper and more effective than the costs of overdetention.

Providing adequate funding to nonprofit organizations for universal legal representation is another cost-saving solution. Legal counsel is the primary controlling factor in appearance rates in immigration court. Ninety-seven percent of families with lawyers attend their court hearings. Immigrants who are represented by attorneys have a much higher chance of success in their cases than those forced to navigate the system on their own.

Having caught a glimpse of the inhumanity of the immigrant detention system, the American public should take a fresh look at overincarceration and urge the adoption of community-based alternatives and legal representation to allow adults and children to pursue their cases. We can do better — much better.

Hines is a retired clinical professor of law at the University of Texas School of Law.

Raise the Age: 17-Year-Olds in the Criminal Justice System

Thanks to University of Texas at Austin, Plan II undergraduate student, Annie Albrecht, whose Plan II thesis I co-supervised with McCombs School of Business professor Dr. Melissa Murphy, I am fairly up to date on this issue and am convinced that not only should 17-year-olds enter the juvenile justice—as opposed to the adult criminal justice—system, but that this is a human rights issue, as well.

The age could even be arguably higher.  No chance of that right now, it appears, so we should at least raise the age to 18.

Research on brain development, particularly the underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, finds, as reported herein, "that youth are inherently less likely to consider the outcomes of their actions, more prone to risky behavior, and more vulnerable

or susceptible to negative influences and outside pressures."  Most importantly, 17-year-olds would get treated as juvenile offenders, rather than as adult criminals, giving them access to rehabilitation.

More of us need to join efforts with Texas Appleseed, the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, the ACLU, Texans Care for Children, Right on Crime, and Senator Harold Dutton who championed this legislation during the last legislative session that Sen. John Whitmire opposed.  It is unfortunate that this bill didn't pass last legislative session.  Hopefully, it will pass next session.

Also, take a close look at this research brief for more detailed information.  

-Angela Valenzuela

 

Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote by Michelle Alexander

This is piece by Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, in The Nation is a must-read. She argues persuasively that the Clinton administration did more harm to the Black community than Reagan ever did.

-Angela

 Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote

From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted—and Hillary Clinton supported—decimated black America.

By Michelle Alexander

February 10, 2016

Hillary and Bill Clinton in 1992. (Reuters Pictures)

 

Hillary Clinton loves black people. And black people love Hillary—or so it seems. Black politicians have lined up in droves to endorse her, eager to prove their loyalty to the Clintons in the hopes that their faithfulness will be remembered and rewarded. Black pastors are opening their church doors, and the Clintons are making themselves comfortably at home once again, engaging effortlessly in all the usual rituals associated with “courting the black vote,” a pursuit that typically begins and ends with Democratic politicians making black people feel liked and taken seriously. Doing something concrete to improve the conditions under which most black people live is generally not required.

Continue reading here.

Curriculum Goes Behind Bars By Whitney Frasier

This is so incredibly moving.  I was contemplating today on how many of our youth are infantilized by a curriculum that is "dumbed-down" ostensibly for them at the same time that many of them are old enough to get tried as adults and get sent behind bars. Glad to read about this wonderful initiative that breathes life, identity, and soul into these sterile, forbidding spaces.

-Angela

San Marcos,

February 01, 2016

Curriculum Goes Behind Bars

By Whitney Frasier

When a group of California State University San Marcos (CSUSM) students started sending curriculum to a seven-student cohort in prisons throughout Southern California, they never thought their program would grow to more than 200 active students behind bars across the United States.
Homie UP, short for Homie Universidad Popular, is a program that offers American history from a Chicano/Latino perspective free of charge to incarcerated individuals. The initiative started after community members participating in a similar curriculum known as Universidad Popular, or People’s University, expressed interest in presenting the information they were learning to their incarcerated loved ones.
“The program was initially intended for those serving a life sentence, but then we received so many requests, we felt compelled to make it accessible to all incarcerated individuals regardless of sentence length,” said Flor Alvarez, a Homie UP coordinator and National Latino Research Center (NLRC) Research Assistant.
As the popularity of the program increases, the program coordinators are beginning to feel some growing pains as their staff and funding remains the same.
“We have spent countless hours creating the Homie UP curriculum and reviewing assignments— sometimes we work overnight or even on the weekends,” said Alvarez. “It’s all on a volunteer basis, so many times we pay out of pocket to send assignments. When we are fortunate, some family members will contribute stamps, paper and envelopes.”
When the program was at its infancy, all the students were of Latino decent. Now, Homie UP’s student base is very diverse and includes both male and female inmates of all ethnicities convicted of a variety of offenses. The team’s future plan is to offer an increased variety of classes, and not just from a Latino perspective.
“This project has really catapulted us into this national discussion that’s going on around incarceration,” said NLRC Research Director Arcela Nuñez-Alvárez. “Our project is very much aligned to issues that happening nationally and at the state level and locally.”
A $10,000 grant from California Humanities has allowed the team to tell the story further through a documentary titled, Homie UP: Stories of Love and Redemption. The grant supports documentary films, radio and new media productions that enhance the community’s understanding of California and its cultures, peoples and histories.
The team had a one-year turnaround time to create the film and worked with filmmaker Jennifer Myhre, as well as an advisory group consisting of CSUSM professors David Avalos, Bonnie Bade, Marisol Clark-Ibáñez and Charles “Chuck” Allen.
The hour-long documentary recently received accolades and was presented with a Silver Award by the Spotlight Documentary Film Awards in December 2015.
So far the award-winning film has hosted 10 screenings throughout California from San Diego to San Francisco. The documentary features real students who have been released from prison, and family members. Screenings are usually accompanied with an art exhibit displaying the work of Homie UP students, as well as a panel discussion about how the prison system affects the entire community.
According to Nuñez-Alvárez, there is still a lot of discussion to be had concerning families, inmates and the so-called school-to-prison pipeline, a systematic process by which students, primarily African Americans and Latinos, are pushed out of the mainstream educational system and channeled into the criminal system.
“This happens through harsh and discriminatory school discipline policies,” said Nuñez-Alvárez. “Research shows that students of color receive harsher punishments. Incidents at school tend to be the first encounter with law enforcement and thus begin the pathway to jail or prison.”
The documentary is now being used as an educational tool for the community. An expansion of the documentary, which looks at why certain populations are over represented in prisons and in jail, is already in the planning stages.
“There is finally a shift of dialogue,” said Lilian Serrano, CSUSM alumnus and NLRC research coordinator. “Everyone can talk about the numbers, but the film gives faces to mass incarceration. For every person that is in prison, there is a mother, a father, a sibling or even children. I think that is a contribution to the discussion that no one else is making and that’s what makes this project unique.”
To learn more about Homie UP or to view an upcoming screening of Homie UP: Stories of Love and Redemption contact NLRC at 760-750-3500.

Kids For Cash: Inside One of the Nation's Most Shocking Juvenile Justice...

 

This is the first of three episodes on youtube.com that you can view in sequence.

"Kids for Cash" is a must see, very disturbing documentary if you've not seen it.  Here is Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! covering it on her program. It tells the story of Pennsylvania, school-age children being summarily handcuffed and dragged out of the courtroom for truly minor infractions before bewildered, astonished parents that had been previously discouraged from getting attorneys in their children's defense.  In 2008, executive director of the Juvenile Law Center, Robert Schwartz,was able to investigate this and unearth this horrific practice of kickbacks to the tune of $2.6 million from Robert Mericle and Robert Powell, co-owners of two private, for-profit juvenile facilities.

The corrupt judge behind this scandal is named  Mark Aurthur Ciavarella, Jr.  He received a 28-year sentence in federal prison and is now doing time at the Federal Correctional Institution, Williamsburg in Salters, South Carolina. In this report, Goodman engages the voices of youth and parents left with shattered lives and indelible scars in the aftermath of this injustice.  Also see the Wikipedia article by its same title, "Kids for Cash Scandal."

It is important to bring these scandals to light so that parents and the public, in general, can not only grasp the powerful, for-profit interests that influence the adjudication of crime—with this as an extreme case (the very same interests that drive undocumented immigrant detention), but also so that they can act more wisely and intelligently on their children's behalf.  Children and parents do have rights to an attorney and an appeal whenever appearing before a judge; and they should never be so trusting.  I did a quick search and here is one site that provides a checklist of rights in the event that you or your son/daughter gets arrested.

Angela Valenzuela
c/s

Sticker Shock: Calculating the Full Price Tag for Youth Incarceration

From Dr. Ana Yañez Correa of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition.  Sticker shock indeed.  We should be paying on the front end of this school to prison pipeline with excellent schools. -Angela

Dear friends,

As you may know, the State of Texas spends $159,545 annually to incarcerate a young person in state juvenile facilities, and $62,649 annually to confine a young person in county facilities. This is in addition to the estimated billions of dollars in long-term costs nationally created by the excessive use of youth confinement, including reduced income levels, lower tax revenue, greater reliance on public assistance, higher costs to future crime victims, and increased rates of recidivism.

We encourage you to read the latest report, Sticker Shock: Calculating the Full Price Tag for Youth Incarceration, and help us spread the word about the need for juvenile justice reform in Texas by visiting JusticePolicy.org/StickerShockTX. There, you’ll find ready-made social media posts and infographics to share with friends, family, colleagues, and (most importantly) policy-makers.

You’ll also find Twitter info for many of the state’s elected leaders, so making your voice heard is as easy as the push of a button.

Texas is one of a few select states (along with Florida, Nevada, South Carolina, and West Virginia) to be highlighted during the Sticker Shock social media campaign over the month of March.

During this week (March 9 to March 15), we hope you’ll get those tweets and Facebook posts firing. We need our leaders to recognize the enormous costs we’re imposing on our young people, our taxpayers, and our communities, and acknowledge that it’s time for juvenile justice reform in Texas. We hope we can count on you to join us in that effort.

Sincerely,

Ana
Ana Yáñez-Correa, PhD.
Texas Criminal Justice Coalition | Executive Director 
Cell Phone: (512) 587-7010

Schools called prison pipeline

Official says 'disturbing schools' laws to blame

By Diane Knich | The Post and Courier
Saturday, February 20, 2010

Juvenile crime is down, but the number of young people entering the judicial system in South Carolina has increased in recent years, according to a panel at a Charleston School of Law symposium.

A law that makes "disturbing schools" a crime was intended to keep students safe, but instead it's pushing more students into the criminal justice system, said William Byars, director of the state's Department of Juvenile Justice. Other members of Friday's panel -- called "Juvenile Justice: Schools as Pipelines to Prison" -- were Robin Kimbrough-Melton, a research professor from Clemson University; Serena McDaniel, assistant solicitor from Aiken County; and Paul Garfinkel, a family court judge.

The panel was one of six at the law school's second annual Law & Society Symposium. The theme of this year's event was "Crime and Punishment."

Disturbing-schools laws were well-intentioned, Byars said, but they have "morphed and morphed until now it's a crime to be an obnoxious teenager in school."

It's important, when possible, to keep children out of the judicial system, Byars said, "because the deeper you get into it, the harder it is to get out."

McDaniel said that as a solicitor, she has three choices when a disturbing-schools case comes before her. She can prosecute, dismiss or divert it. And she dismisses about half the cases that come her way.

She only prosecutes those that are "truly criminal is nature," she said.

"If you stick 500 kids in a school, they are bound to fight once in a while," she said. And students with minor offenses, such as truancy, are sometimes sent to her for disturbing schools.

Byars said another factor pushing more students into the criminal justice system is the misuse by school administrators of on-site police officers known as school resource officers. Some administrators are turning over routine discipline matters to the officers, who have no choice but to deal with them in a legal way.

Kimbrough-Melton said students are coming into school with more difficult problems that can't be resolved through legal means. Some have severe academic problems or learning disabilities, while others have parents who are in jail or have mental health or drug problems. Some students fall behind as early as third or fourth grade, she said, and many of them are "headed for the juvenile justice system."

Byars said incarcerating young people can cost $100,000 per year. And there are many less restrictive alternatives that are also less expensive, including intensive supervision and mental health services.

Kimbrough-Melton said many students who are incarcerated are eligible for special education services, but they don't always get them. "We know a lot about what works in juvenile justice," she said, "but we don't do a lot of what works in juvenile justice."

Reach Diane Knich at dknich@postandcourier.com or 937-5401.