By Penal Reform International and Thailand Institute of Justice

Global Prison Trends 2022 is Penal Reform International’s annual flagship report, published with the Thailand Institute of Justice, identifying the key trends and challenges in prison systems worldwide.

Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, despite repeated calls to reduce prison populations since the onset of the crisis, the global prison population has reached an all-time high. Global Prison Trends 2022 exposes that, rather than a decrease in prison numbers, many governments are instead increasing prison capacity, with a significant expansion in the global prison estate in the past year.

London: PRI and Thailand Institute of Justice 2022. 64p.

By UNODC, WHO, UNAIDS, UNDP, PRI

Transgender people often experience multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination, including in criminal justice systems. Evidence indicates that such marginalisation, criminalisation and discrimination can lead to greater vulnerability to and risk of long-term mental and physical health issues, including increased risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, and experience of sexual assault.

This technical brief sets out guiding principles and targeted interventions aimed at supporting countries in reducing the risk of HIV infection and transmission among, and ensuring adequate and accessible health care for, transgender people deprived of liberty by State authorities in prisons and other closed settings. Policymakers and prison authorities should understand the needs of transgender people and incorporate the proposed evidence- and human rights-based interventions and international standards into their prison policies and strategies, applying them to all people in prison.

Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2022. 12p.

By Ireland Department of Justice

The Programme for Government 2020: Our Shared future contains a broad range of policies and proposals that represent a coherent approach to enhancing and sustaining a more just and safe society. In September 2020, the Department of Justice established a working group including the Head of Criminal Justice Policy, the Director-General of the Irish Prison Service and the Director of the Probation Service to take forward the Government’s commitment to review policy options for prison and penal reform. The review considered commitments and ongoing developments across the justice sector and beyond, including those outlined in the Youth Justice Strategy 2021 - 2027, the Probation Service Strategy 2021-2024, the Irish Prison Service Strategic Plan 2019-2022, the Joint Irish Prison Service and Probation Service Strategic Plan 2018-2020, the Joint Action Plan on the Management of Offenders 2019-2021 and the Social Enterprise and Employment Strategy 2021 – 2023. The on-going work in relation to the Criminal Justice Sectoral Strategy and work on developing a Community Safety Policy was also taken into account.

Dublin: Ireland Department of Justice, 2022. 71p.

By Nicole D. Porter

Between 2000 and 2022, 21 states partially closed or fully closed at least one correctional facility and reduced correctional capacity in the United States by 81,444 prison beds, according to The Sentencing Project’s analysis of state records. …Key to successful prison closure efforts has been the reuse of former correctional facilities for purposes beneficial to communities. A community reinvestment approach redirects funds states spend on prisons to rebuild the social capital and local infrastructure – quality schools, community centers, and healthcare facilities – in high-incarceration neighborhoods. Such an approach acknowledges the collateral impacts of mass incarceration on many overly policed neighborhoods where persons lived prior to their sentencing. Repurposing closed prison facilities helps address how out of step the United States’ scale of incarceration is with the rest of the world and the unacceptable racial bias that dominates criminal legal practices.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2022. 28p.

By Mackenzie Buday and Ashley Nellis

Private prisons incarcerated 99,754 American residents in 2020, representing 8% of the total state and federal prison population. Since 2000, the number of people housed in private prisons has increased 14%. Harmful crime policies of the 1980s and beyond fueled a rapid expansion in the nation’s prison population. The resulting burden on the public sector led to the modern emergence of for-profit prisons in many states and the federal system. Of the 1.2 million people in federal and state prisons, 8%, or 99,754 people, were in private prisons as of year-end 2020.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2022. 3p.

By The Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform and Columbia University Justice Lab

New York State sends more people to prison for parole rules violations than any other state in the country. In 2019, 40 percent of the people sent to New York prisons were incarcerated not for a new felony conviction, but for parole violations such as not reporting to a parole officer, living at an unapproved residence, missing curfew, or failing drug or alcohol tests. Black and Latinx people are significantly more likely than white people to be incarcerated for parole violations. The fiscal impact on New York state and local taxpayers is enormous. In 2019, New York’s state and local governments collectively spent $683 million to incarcerate people on parole for rules violations, without evidence that this massive expenditure of resources meaningfully contributed to public safety. New York State spent $319 million in 2019 to incarcerate people for parole rule violations in state prisons. New York counties—excluding the five counties in New York City—collectively spent more than $91 million to jail people who were accused of technical violations ƒ New York City spent $273 million to jail people accused of technical violations

New York: Columbia University, Justice Lab, 2021. 23p.

By Caitlin Curry

Scholars have sought to understand the problem of racial disproportionality in U.S. imprisonment rates for over four decades, but current research has yet to identify the specific correctional mechanisms that exacerbate racial differences in incarceration (Garland, 2013). The rate of parole revocations increased markedly in the 1990s and 2000s, contributing to the growth in imprisonment in the US. Likewise, some research also finds that the likelihood of parole revocation varies by race, but we know little about the effect of parole revocations on imprisonment disparity (Huebner and Bynum, 2008). This study uses a sample of 24 states over a twenty year period (1990-2009) to test the hypothesis that parole revocation admissions contribute to disparity in imprisonment by race. Specifically, this study employs multilevel modeling to assess the extent to which parole revocations account for race differences in prisons admissions, when controlling for individual characteristics as well as state structural factors and policies

Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, 2016. 76p.

By The Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform

Over the past few years, New York City has significantly lowered the number of people held in its jails. Recent legislative reforms to pretrial laws promise further reductions. But one population in City jails has resisted these trends and poses a major barrier to closing the jails on Rikers Island: people accused of violations of community supervision, commonly referred to as parole. On any given day, 20 percent of the New York City jail population is made up of people accused of parole violations. 89 percent are people of color. Approximately 600 people are accused of non-criminal “technical” parole violations, such as being late for curfew, testing positive for drugs, or missing an appointment with a parole officer. Another 900 people are charged with new criminal offenses but are ineligible for bail or pretrial release, no matter how low-level the offense, because parole authorities have also issued a warrant. Jailing so many people on parole warrants does little for public safety and is counterproductive to the success of people who are reentering society from prison. It is also incredibly expensive: applying figures from the New York City Comptroller, the City spends more than $400 million per year to incarcerate people accused of parole violations. These problems are not limited to Rikers. On any given day, more than 1,000 people are held in other jails across the state solely because they are accused of technical parole violations. And almost 40 percent of the people sent to state prison each year in New York are not incarcerated for new criminal convictions, but rather for these technical parole violations.

Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, 2019. 22p.

By Vincent Schiraldi and Jennifer Arzu

As state and city leaders agree that the jail complex on Rikers Island should be closed, efforts have increased at the state and city level to reduce the New York City jail population (New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice 2017a; Cuomo 2018). The population of New York City’s jails dipped below 9,000 recently for the first time in 35 years, even as crime in the city has continued to decline, allowing the City to announce the closure of one of Rikers Island’s nine jails (New York City Office of the Mayor 2017; Schiraldi 2018). But as the number of persons incarcerated pretrial for misdemeanors, non-violent and violent felonies, as well as the city sentenced population, have declined by double-digits over the past four years, only one population in the jail has increased, also by double digits: persons held in city jails for state parole violations (New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice 2017b; New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services 2018). This brief will examine this issue in greater detail, focusing primarily on the impact it is having on the New York City jail population at this critical time. We will conclude with recommendations to reduce unnecessary incarceration of persons on parole and to shrink the overall parole population by incentivizing good behavior on parole, referring whenever possible to other jurisdictions that have successfully enacted parole reforms.

New York: Columbia University, Justice Lab, 2018. 14p.

By The Southern Poverty Law Center

The detention of immigrants has skyrocketed in the United States. On a given day in August 2019, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) held over 55,000 people in detention – a massive increase from five years ago when ICE held fewer than 30,000 people. Unsurprisingly, the United States has the largest immigration incarceration system in the world. What’s more, the federal government spends more on immigration enforcement than for all principal federal law enforcement agencies combined, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General. As of April 2019, Florida had the sixth-largest population of people detained by ICE in the United States, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. On a daily basis, ICE currently detains more than 2,000 noncitizens in the state, mostly in South Florida, which is home to four immigration prisons: Krome Service Processing Center (Krome), owned by ICE; Broward Transitional Center (Broward), operated by GEO Group, a Boca Raton-based for-profit prison corporation; and two county jails, Glades County Detention Center (Glades) and Monroe County Detention Center (Monroe). Despite the fact that immigrants are detained on civil violations, their detention is indistinguishable from the conditions found in jails or prisons where people are serving criminal sentences. The nation’s immigration detention centers are little more than immigrant prisons, where detained people endure harsh – even dangerous – conditions. And reports of recent deaths have only heightened concerns.

Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2017. 104p.

By The American Civil Liberties Union

Today, the United States has just 5% of the world’s population but nearly 25% of the world’s prisoners. But it has not always been this way. Thanks to the “War on Drugs,” irrationally harsh sentencing regimes, and a refusal to consider evidence-based alternatives, the U.S. prison population grew by more than 700% between 1970 and 2009—far outpacing both population growth and crime rates.1 In the past decade, the growing criminalization of immigration has further contributed to this mass incarceration crisis. According to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) now refers more cases for federal criminal prosecution than the FBI.2 Nationwide, more than half of all federal criminal prosecutions initiated in fiscal year 2013 were for unlawfully crossing the border into the United States—an act that has traditionally been treated as a civil offense resulting in deportation, rather than as a criminal act resulting in incarceration in a federal prison.3 This is dramatically changing who enters the federal prison system.4 The tipping point came in 2009, when more people entered federal prison for immigration offenses than for violent, weapons, and property offenses combined—and the number has continued to rise each year since.5 The criminalization of immigration also enriches the private prison industry. Once prosecuted, noncitizen federal prisoners are mostly segregated into thirteen “Criminal Alien Requirement” (CAR) prisons. The CAR prisons are unusual in three respects: they are some of the only

New York: ACLU,, 2014. 104p.

By Southern Poverty Law Center, National Immigration Project Of The National Lawyers Guild. And Adelante Alabama Worker Center

The findings of this study demonstrate that the immigrant detention system is already rife with civil rights violations and poor conditions that call into question the DHS's commitment to the due process rights and safety of detainees. Many of these detainees have lived here for years; others recently fled violence in their home countries to seek refuge in the United States.This report is the result of a seven-month investigation of six detention centers in the South, a region where tens of thousands of people are locked up for months, sometimes even years, as they await hearings or deportation.operated by private companies and three by county sheriffs. All are paid by the DHS on a per diem basis. The report is based on tours of each facility and more than 300 in-person interviews with detainees. They represent more than 5 percent of the average daily population of the detention centers studied. From facility to facility, their stories are remarkably similar accounts of abuse, neglect and rights denied – symptoms of an immigrant detention system where the failures of the nation's immigration system intersect with the failures of its prison system

Southern Poverty Law Center National Immigration Project Of The National Lawyers Guild Adelante Alabama Worker Center. 116P.

By Hanna Love, Samantha Harvell, Chloe Warnberg and Julia Durnan

This brief examines how former youth prisons can be repurposed into new, sustainable assets for neighborhood revitalization, job creation, and social services. Drawing from qualitative interviews with stakeholders involved in youth prison repurposing efforts across the country, it highlights innovative examples of repurposing in six communities and provides an overview of lessons learned and key considerations for transforming former youth prisons. Findings indicate that although youth prison repurposing is not without its challenges, it offers a unique opportunity to leverage unused state land to inspire lasting investments within communities and produce tangible benefits for residents both socially and economically.

Washington, DC: The Urban Institute, 2018. 24p.

By National Council for Behavioral Health and Vital Strategies

This toolkit provides correctional administrators and health care providers recommendations and tools for implementing medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in correctional settings. It provides examples from the field that can be widely applied and adapted for programs that serve justice-involved individuals. It was developed by the National Council for Behavioral Health, Vital Strategies, and faculty from Johns Hopkins University, with support from CDC and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

2020. 312p.

Edited by J. Mark Eddy and Julie Poehlmann-Tynan

The second edition of this handbook examines family life, health, and educational issues that often arise for the millions of children in the United States whose parents are in prison or jail. It details how these youth are more likely to exhibit behavior problems such as aggression, substance abuse, learning difficulties, mental health concerns, and physical health issues. It also examines resilience and how children and families thrive even in the face of multiple challenges related to parental incarceration. Chapters integrate diverse; interdisciplinary; and rapidly expanding literature and synthesizes rigorous scholarship to address the needs of children from multiple perspectives, including child welfare; education; health care; mental health; law enforcement; corrections; and law. The handbook concludes with a chapter that explores new directions in research, policy, and practice to improve the life chances of children with incarcerated parents.

Cham: Springer, 2019. 386p.

By Rachel Taylor

The long-standing Quaker involvement in criminal justice and human rights issues at the national, regional and international levels has led to increasing concern about the under-considered and growing problem of women in prison and the situation of babies and children of imprisoned mothers. In particular, there is a need to give attention to the situation of women and girls (female juveniles under 18 years of age) in pre-trial detention and imprisonment following trial, including in probation hostels or similar facilities in which they are required to reside whether instead of prison or in the transition back to the community, and the babies and children of imprisoned women, both those in prison with their mothers and those outside the institution. The purpose of doing this is to identify the key issues which arise for such women and girls, and their children, and to gather information and ideas on ways in which these issues have, or could be, addressed better.

Geneva, SWIT: Quaker United Nations Office, 2004. 99p.

By Karina Biondi and John F. Collins

The Primeiro Comando do Capital (PCC) is a Sao Paulo prison gang that since the 1990s has expanded into the most powerful criminal network in Brazil. Karina Biondi's rich ethnography of the PCC is uniquely informed by her insider-outsider status. Prior to his acquittal, Biondi's husband was incarcerated in a PCC-dominated prison for several years. During the period of Biondi's intense and intimate visits with her husband and her extensive fieldwork in prisons and on the streets of Sao Paulo, the PCC effectively controlled more than 90 percent of Sao Paulo's 147 prison facilities.

Available for the first time in English, Biondi's riveting portrait of the PCC illuminates how the organization operates inside and outside of prison, creatively elaborating on a decentered, non-hierarchical, and far-reaching command system. This system challenges both the police forces against which the PCC has declared war and the methods and analytic concepts traditionally employed by social scientists concerned with crime, incarceration, and policing. Biondi posits that the PCC embodies a "politics of transcendence," a group identity that is braided together with, but also autonomous from, its decentralized parts. Biondi also situates the PCC in relation to redemocratization and rampant socioeconomic inequality in Brazil, as well as to counter-state movements, crime, and punishment in the Americas.

Chapel, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 194p.

By DLA Piper

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was declared. Overnight, prisons became a key public health concern for governments. Prisons – particularly overcrowded facilities and those with poor sanitation, hygiene and ventilation – are known to act as a source of infection, amplification and spread of infectious diseases. Urgent action was required to limit the transmission of COVID-19 to prisoners, staff and the broader community. Recognizing the challenge and potential serious health risks, governments globally took swift action to decongest their prison systems through releasing prisoners and limiting new admissions. This report analyses the approach to decongesting prison systems adopted by governments in 53 jurisdictions across Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, North and Central America. The results of those 53 jurisdictional analyses have been summarized into key findings set out in Part 2 of this report and in an infographic at Annexure A.

London: DLA Piper, 2020. 52p.

By Penal Reform International

As the COVID-19 pandemic affects more people in an ever increasing list of countries, PRI has published a briefing note, Coronavirus: Healthcare and human rights of people in prison. With the fast-evolving situation, there is legitimate concern at a further spread of the virus to places of detention. The difficulties in containing a large outbreak in detention facilities are clear. People in prison and the personnel who work with them are in close proximity and in many cases in overcrowded, cramped conditions with little fresh air. People in detention also have common demographic characteristics with generally poorer health than the rest of the population, often with underlying health conditions. Hygiene standards are often below that found in the community and sometimes security or infrastructural factors reduce opportunities to wash hands or access to hand sanitizer – the key prevention measures recommended by the World Health Organization.

Our briefing outlines the key measures that criminal justice systems, including prisons and courts, have taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19 – and the impact of these in light of the UN Nelson Mandela Rules and other key standards. Action needs to be taken now and immediately, given the risk people in prison are exposed to, including prison staff. Such action should be guided by international standards and the values of: Do no harm, equality, transparency, humanity.

London: Penal Reform International, 2020. 13p

By Alexander Söderholm

The disruption caused by COVID-19 has exposed the health inequities faced by marginalised communities globally, particularly those deprived of their liberty in prison settings. As a result of the extreme risks posed by COVID-19 to these individuals, international organisations, civil society organisations (CSOs), and community advocates have called for urgent criminal justice system and prison reforms. Calls have been made to address chronic overcrowding in prisons, the suspension of arrests and incarceration of people for minor or non-violent offences, and the urgent roll-out of life-saving health and harm reduction measures for people who use drugs in custodial facilities and the community. While it is the state’s legal obligation to provide adequate care to people deprived of their liberty, COVID-19 has shed light on how many states have reneged on this responsibility. As aptly expressed by a group of researchers, ‘we cannot forget that prison health is public health by definition’. While many states heeded the call to release people in prison, few have taken substantial steps toward addressing the structural issues exposed by COVID-19 within their criminal justice systems. Meanwhile, others have not fulfilled their promises to carry out measures such as early release programmes to reduce overcrowding in prisons. As such, the briefing paper seeks to shed light on the experiences of people involved with the criminal justice system prior to, during and after incarceration, with a focus on four case study countries: Colombia, Ireland, Indonesia and Kenya.

London: International Drug Policy Consortium, 2021. 25p.