From Vera Institute of Justice:
The Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) today announced a new, updated version of its Incarceration Trends website, which now includes analysis of more than five decades of local jail and state prison data at the national, state, and county levels. The updated site brings many of the data points current to spring 2021 and represents the most comprehensive look to date at the growth of mass incarceration across states, counties, and urban-to-rural geographies.
“The Incarceration Trends project underscores that the harms of mass incarceration have been inflicted unequally across the United States,” said Jasmine Heiss, project director, In Our Backyards, at the Vera Institute of Justice. “Even after an unprecedented decline, the human and social cost of incarceration in the United States remains catastrophic. Black, Native, and Latinx people and poor people of all races and ethnicities are disproportionately criminalized and incarcerated. These trends are most pronounced in the nation’s rural counties.”
The nation’s biggest cities once had the highest rates of incarceration, but over the past several decades, jail incarceration and state prison admissions have declined in major metro areas as they rose precipitously in smaller cities and rural communities. Today in the United States, approximately two out of three people in local jails have not been convicted of a crime—many are being detained in civil matters, such as people incarcerated pretrial for immigration cases or those who can’t pay child support or fines and fees. The updated analysis presented in Incarceration Trends highlights that the disproportionate criminalization and incarceration of Black people and other people of color is also most pronounced in rural counties, as is the rise of women’s incarceration.
The newly visualized data also features the rebound in jail incarceration after an unprecedented 14 percent drop in incarceration in the first half of 2020 (bringing the total incarcerated population from 2.1 million to 1.8 million people) in response to the spread of COVID-19. As of spring 2021, state prison decarceration had stalled and jail populations continued to trend upward. Read the full report Continue reading >>>
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