By Faride Perez Aucar

In 2020, the world experienced an unprecedented global health crisis with the spread of COVID-19 and historic uprisings for racial justice in the aftermath of the state-sanctioned murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The pandemic illuminated extreme health inequities and the many harms of incarceration, when prisons, jails, and detention centers largely failed to protect incarcerated people from illness and death. The racial justice uprisings highlighted a long history of anti-Black racism and terror in the country. They also invigorated movements towards racial justice and helped elevate long-standing calls to abolish the prison industrial complex, defund the police, and invest in communities most impacted by mass incarceration and structural racism. In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, immediately restricting access to abortion across the nation and sparking further efforts to criminalize and block access to reproductive health care. Simultaneously, conservative policymakers, fueled by misinformation and fear, began to increase “Reproductive justice is ‘the human right to own our bodies and control our future, the human right to have children, the human right to not have children, and the human right to parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.’” —SisterSong attacks on transgender people, introducing and passing unprecedented numbers of policies across the nation that threaten and harm the ability of transgender, nonbinary, and queer people to live authentically and with dignity and safety. The incoming Trump administration appears poised to launch additional federal-level attacks on both reproductive health care access and the LGBTQ+ community. These rising threats to bodily autonomy call for a recommitment to reproductive justice as a framework and a goal. As defined by SisterSong, reproductive justice is “the human right to own our bodies and control our future, the human right to have children, the human right to not have children, and the human right to parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” The reproductive justice movement and framework have always demanded that we look beyond access to abortion and contraception and firmly ground our analysis in racial justice and the right to bodily autonomy for all—including people who are incarcerated and/or disproportionately impacted by criminalization. In alignment with abolitionist movements, reproductive justice advocates have long held that incarceration in and of itself is a reproductive injustice and an affront to the right of bodily autonomy. Against a national backdrop of anti-abortion extremism culminating in the fall of Roe v. Wade and the proliferation of attacks on reproductive health care across the country, reproductive justice advocates in California have worked in recent years to expand access to care and protections for incarcerated people with major success. Nationally, women constitute the largest growing segment in the incarcerated state prison population, entering at twice the pace of men. In California, since 1980, the number of women in jail has increased by 210%, and the number of women in prison has increased by 433%, translating to about 25% of the total prison and jail population. Women make up a significant subpopulation of the incarcerated population in California: Approximately 5,793 women were incarcerated in state prisons as of 2017, and about 9,443 were incarcerated in jails as of 2015. Just over 1% of California’s prison population—or 1,617 incarcerated people—identify as nonbinary, intersex, or transgender, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR).8 According to a survey of nonbinary, transgender, and intersex individuals in California women’s prisons conducted by the California Office of the Inspector General, 24.4% of respondents identified as nonbinary, 51.2% identified as transgender, and 4.8% identified as intersex.9 Nearly all California carceral facilities continue to place transgender people, along with nonbinary and two-spirit people,10 in sex-segregated facilities based on their genital anatomy rather than their gender identity, gender expression, or where they feel most safe—despite state laws intended to change this.

San Francisco: ACLU of Northern California, 2025. 50p.

By Christi M. Smith

The fact that the United States incarcerates more of its population than the rest of the industrialized world—and that racial and ethnic minorities are overrepresented in inmate populations—is common knowledge. Yet why we continue to over- incarcerate in light of a myriad of other strategies that appropriately respond to crime remains a mystery. Alternatives to incarceration are more cost-effective, efficient and provide better outcomes for accused law violators and communities. Alternatives also save precious law enforcement and judicial resources for more serious and violent offenders. The COVID-19 pandemic presented a unique opportunity for local jail administrators and their counterparts in the judicial process to pursue alternatives, as they were forced to critically analyze the need for pretrial confinement; reconsider length of stay upon conviction; and evaluate the appropriateness of returning to jail for bail, probation or parole violations. In conjunction with experience gained from the past 21 months of the pandemic, existing research demonstrates that it is time to reduce our overreliance on carceral strategies and address the factors that contribute to crime and non-compliance with judicial interventions. These evidence-based strategies can substantially reduce jail populations and the racial and ethnic disparities therein. Key Points: 1. COVID-19 disproportionately challenged local jail administrators who, compared to their state and federal prison counterparts, receive less physical, financial and medical support to manage a dynamic and constantly shifting inmate population that moves in and out of the community. 2. To mitigate viral spread inside of the jail and out into the community, criminal justice professionals worked quickly to reduce inmate populations using a variety of alternatives to incarceration for accused and convicted law violators. These alternatives disproportionately benefited white adults and highlighted the need for targeted strategies to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in the judicial process. 3. Crime rates did not increase during the time that alternatives to incarceration were used, thereby substantiating the benefits of utilizing various alternatives to incarceration to reduce jail populations, as well as racial and ethnic disparities in jail populations. Research indicates that these alternatives are more cost-effective, efficient and fairer than traditional judicial processing

R STREET POLICY STUDY NO. 250 January 2022, 8p.

By Nazgol Ghandnoosh, Celeste Barry, and Luke Trinka

As noted in the first installment of this One in Five series, scholars have declared a “generational shift” in the lifetime likelihood of imprisonment for Black men, from a staggering one in three for those born in 1981 to a still troubling one in five for Black men born in 2001. The United States experienced a 25% decline in its prison population between 2009, its peak year, and 2021. While all major racial and ethnic groups experienced decarceration, the Black prison population has downsized the most. But with the prison population in 2021 nearly six times as large as 50 years ago and Black Americans still imprisoned at five times the rate of whites, the crisis of mass incarceration and its racial injustice remain undeniable What’s more, the progress made so far is at risk of stalling or being reversed. This third installment of the One in Five6 series examines three key causes of racial inequality from within the criminal legal system. While the consequences of these policies and issues continue to perpetuate racial and ethnic disparities, at least 50 jurisdictions around the country—including states, the federal government, and localities—have initiated promising reforms to lessen their impact.

Washington DC: The Sentencing Project, 2023. 34p