By Nicola Carr

The crisis in prisons in England and Wales has been brought sharply into focus. On 16 October 2023, the Justice Secretary announced measures aimed at reducing pressure on the prisons, caused in part by a record high of 88,225 people in custody (Chalk, 2023). As if this is not cause enough for concern, forecasts indicate that the population is due to rise even higher in the coming years with predictions that by March 2027 the population may rise to anywhere between 93,100 and 106,300 people (MoJ, 2023). It is clear from the Ministry's explanation of its forecasts the government's own policies (as well as the post-coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) backlog of cases in the courts) are a central driver of prison population growth. In recent decades, almost every government policy relating to crime and justice has ratcheted up systemic pressure resulting in more people spending longer in prison. This includes longer sentences for certain offences and changes to mechanisms for prisoner release. Not to mention of course the people who remain imprisoned under the egregious Indeterminate Public Protection (IPP) sentence, which although abolished in 2012, has still left approximately 3000 people languishing in prison. While the Conservative party has been in power for over 12 years, this punitive policy direction has a longer lineage, IPPs were introduced in 2003 by a Labour Home Secretary, who has since regretted the injustice.

United Kingdom, Probation Journal Volume 70, Issue 4. 2023, 4pg

By Lucy Lang Inspector General

The myriad manifestations of systemic racism in the complex web of social systems throughout New York State and America writ large are well-documented. Criminal justice systems in particular are rife with racial inequities at every stage, from initial contact to arrest, trial, and sentence, and through re-entry and beyond, which are themselves inextricably connected to devastating racial disparities in inter-related and surrounding systems including, for example, education, housing, and public health. In December 2016, The New York Times1 reported on a specific alarming instance of such disparities—those in the allocation of behavioral infraction tickets2 and the attendant punishment by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) to incarcerated individuals in the year 2015.3 Following publication of the New York Times findings, the then governor directed that the New York State Inspector General “investigate the allegations of racial disparities in discipline in State prisons” and recommend solutions.4 After an initial review, the Inspector General recommended that DOCCS engage the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) 5 , a federal agency that is part of the U.S. Department of Justice, to complete a comprehensive assessment based on their extensive national expertise. The Inspector General oversaw that process and the implementation of the accepted recommendations. Over the following half-dozen years, with the cooperation of DOCCS, the Inspector General continued to monitor these trends to determine whether the NIC recommendations had the desired impact, to observe the impact of additional measures implemented by DOCCS to identify and address possible racial bias in its facilities, programs, and disciplinary actions, and  to gather more comprehensive data in hopes of conclusively identifying the root causes of the observed disparities. As part of that effort, the Inspector General conducted its own comprehensive analysis of data maintained by DOCCS on the discipline of incarcerated individuals. This analysis expanded upon the methodology used by the Times6 by covering a broader period (2015-2020), using an alternate method of tallying of incarcerated populations7, and including reports of rule violations, which are known as Misbehavior Reports, that were ultimately dismissed. 8 In addition, the Inspector General retained a professor who is an expert in statistics to review and comment on its analysis.

United States, New York State Office of the Inspector General. 2022, 175pg

By Michelle S. Phelps, H. N. Dickens, De Andre’ T. Beadle

Advocates for reform have highlighted violations of probation and parole conditions as a key driver of mass incarceration. As a 2019 Council of State Governments report declared, supervision violations are “filling prisons and burdening budgets.” Yet few scholarly accounts estimate the precise role of technical violations in fueling prison populations during the prison boom. Using national surveys of state prison populations from 1979 to 2016, the authors document that most incarcerated persons are behind bars for new sentences. On average, just one in eight people in state prisons on any given day has been locked up for a technical violation of community supervision alone. Thus, strategies to substantially reduce prison populations must look to new criminal offenses and sentence length.

United States, Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World. 2023, 3pg