By the Unlock the Box Campaign

There is a growing movement across the United States to end or restrict solitary confinement and to employ alternative interventions that improve safety and well-being. Fueling this surge in efforts at ending solitary is a recognition that solitary confinement is a form of torture. It inflicts terrible suffering and injury—physical, psychological, emotional, and social—on individuals who have experienced it or are currently subjected to it and has severe effects on their loved ones and on the wider community. This horrific practice is in extensive use across the country, damaging or destroying untold lives. Deeply disturbed by this reality, an increasing number of campaigns led by people who have survived solitary confinement and those with loved ones in solitary now or in the past have helped spur legislative and administrative policy changes to curb the use of solitary and to promote alternatives. Between 2009 and 2022, in 45 states, 886 bills were introduced to restrict or end solitary confinement in some form; 40 states have passed at least one of these bills. In 2021 alone, 153 pieces of legislation were filed across 37 states to regulate some aspect of solitary confinement, the vast majority seeking to end at least some aspect of the practice in state prisons and jails, youth facilities, and other carceral settings. An additional 74 bills were introduced in 2022, and 16 bills were passed in 2022, namely, in New York, Kentucky, Illinois, Connecticut, Louisiana, Virginia, Hawaii, Colorado, and Maryland, with additional bills to be acted on, as of the writing of this report. Anti-solitary efforts have also contributed to the closure of entire prisons, buildings, and units used to inflict solitary, most recently with the closure of supermax prisons in New York and Connecticut

Unlock the Box Campaign, 2023. 64p.

By Damon M. Petrich, Travis C. Pratt, Cheryl Lero Jonson, and Francis T. Cullen

Beginning in the 1970s, the United States began an experiment in mass imprisonment. Supporters argued that harsh punishments such as imprisonment reduce crime by deterring inmates from reoffending. Skeptics argued that imprisonment may have a criminogenic effect. The skeptics were right. Previous narrative reviews and meta-analyses concluded that the overall effect of imprisonment is null. Based on a much larger meta-analysis of 116 studies, the current analysis shows that custodial sanctions have no effect on reoffending or slightly increase it when compared with the effects of noncustodial sanctions such as probation. This finding is robust regardless of variations in methodological rigor, types of sanctions examined, and sociodemographic characteristics of samples. All sophisticated assessments of the research have independently reached the same conclusion. The null effect of custodial compared with noncustodial sanctions is considered a “criminological fact.” Incarceration cannot be justified on the grounds it affords public safety by decreasing recidivism. Prisons are unlikely to reduce reoffending unless they can be transformed into people-changing institutions on the basis of available evidence on what works organizationally to reform offenders.

Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, Volume 50. 2021

By Human Rights Watch

“A Nightmare for Everyone: The Health Care Crisis in Pakistan’s Prisons,” documents widespread deficiencies in prison health care in Pakistan and the consequences for a total prison population of more than 88,000 people. Pakistan has one of the world’s most overcrowded prison systems, with cells designed for a maximum of 3 people holding up to 15. Severe overcrowding has compounded existing health care deficiencies, leaving inmates vulnerable to communicable diseases and unable to get medicines and treatment for even basic health needs, as well as emergencies.

Washington, DC: HRW, 2023. 63p.

By Kristen M. Budd, Ph.D. and Niki Monazzam

Twenty-seven states and the federal government incarcerated 96,370 people in private prisons in 2021, representing 8% of the total state and federal prison population. Private for-profit prisons incarcerated 96,370 American residents in 2021, representing 8% of the total state and federal prison population. Since 2000, the number of people housed in private prisons has increased 10%. 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 96,370 people, were in private prisons as of year end 2021.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2023. 3p.

By Ashley Nellis

Extreme punishments, including the death penalty and life imprisonment, are a hallmark of the United States’ harsh criminal legal system. Nationwide one of every 15 women in prison — over 6,600 women — are serving a sentence of life with parole, life without parole, or a virtual life sentence of 50 years or more. The nearly 2,000 women serving life-without-parole (LWOP) sentences can expect to die in prison. Death sentences are permitted by 27 states and the federal government, and currently 52 women sit on death row. This report presents new data on the prevalence of both of these extreme sentences imposed on women. Across the U.S. there are nearly 2,000 women serving life-without-parole (LWOP) sentences and another 52 women who have been sentenced to death. The majority have been convicted of homicide. Regarding capital punishment, women are sitting on death row in 15 states. Women are serving LWOP sentences in all but six states. Three quarters of life sentences are concentrated in 12 states and the federal system. It is notable that in all states with a high count of women serving LWOP, there is at least one woman on death row as well. Two exceptions to the overlap are Colorado and Michigan which do not have anyone serving a death sentence because it is not statutorily allowed.

Brooklyn: National Black Women's Justice Initiative, 2021,

By Ashley Nellis

Before America’s era of mass incarceration took hold in the early 1970s, the number of individuals in prison was less than 200,000. Today, it’s 1.4 million; and more than 200,000 people are serving life sentences – one out of every seven in prison. More people are sentenced to life in prison in America than there were people in prison serving any sentence in 1970. Nearly five times the number of people are now serving life sentences in the United States as were in 1984, a rate of growth that has outpaced even the sharp expansion of the overall prison population during this period. The now commonplace use of life imprisonment contradicts research on effective public safety strategies, exacerbates already extreme racial injustices in the criminal justice system, and exemplifies the egregious consequences of mass incarceration. In 2020, The Sentencing Project obtained official corrections data from all states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons to produce our 5th national census on life imprisonment.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2021. 46p.

The Monitoring Team is issuing this Special Report to advise the Court and the Parties of the continued imminent risk of harm to incarcerated individuals and staff in the New York City jails. The first few months of 2022 have revealed the jails remain unstable and unsafe for both inmates and staff. The volatility and instability in the jails is due, in no small part, to unacceptable levels of fear of harm by detainees and staff alike. Despite initial hopes that the Second Remedial Order (dkt. 398), entered in September 2021, would help the Department gain traction toward initiating reform on the most immediate issues, the Department’s attempts to implement the required remedial steps have faltered and, in some instances, regressed. These failures suggest an even more discouraging picture about the prospect for material improvements to the jails’ conditions. Furthermore, the Department’s staffing crisis continues and the New York City Mayor’s Emergency Executive Order, first issued on September 15, 2021, and still in effect (through multiple extensions) as of the filing of this report, acknowledges that, among other things, “excessive staff absenteeism among correction officers and supervising officers has contributed to a rise in unrest and disorder.” The Monitoring Team’s staffing analysis, discussed in detail below, reveals that the Department’s staff management and deployment practices are so dysfunctional that if left unaddressed, sustainable and material advancement of systemic reform will remain elusive, if not impossible, to attain. …

New York: The Independent Monitoring Team, 2022. 78p.

By James Bonta

The search for ‘what works’ in the assessment and rehabilitation of justice-involved persons dates back at least to the 1960s and an argument can be made that it is even earlier than that. However, it was probably Lipton, Martinson, and Wilks’ (1975) review of the treatment literature that catapulted ‘what works’ to the forefront of correctional research and practice. The story of their review and Robert Martinson’s popularisation of the review is well known. The conclusion from the review was that ‘these data…give us little reason to hope that we have in fact found a sure way of reducing recidivism through rehabilitation’ (Martinson, 1974, p.49). This proclamation was quickly translated into ‘nothing works’ and opened the gates to the ‘get tough’ movement. After all, it was argued, if treatment does not work then our only alternative is to punish law-breakers justly and fairly in the hope that it will deter them from further crime. The view that ‘nothing works’ did not go unchallenged. Ted Palmer (1975) was almost alone in supporting rehabilitation efforts at the time. …

Manchester: HM Inspectorate of Probation, 2023. 13p.

By Jennifer Peirce, Madeline Bailey, and Shahd Elbushra

These two research briefs summarize analysis of county jail bookings in seven rural Georgia counties (2019–2020) and five rural Washington counties (2015–2021). In both Georgia and Washington, jail incarceration rates are higher in rural counties than in urban and suburban counties. The briefs, created in partnership with the University of Georgia and Washington State University, demonstrate that jails in these rural counties are primarily holding people for minor charges. Vera calls on local actors to use citation in lieu of arrest and automatic pretrial release policies, as well as to strengthen pretrial services and avoid using jail as a penalty for failing to appear in court or for technical probation violations. The majority of jail admissions in rural counties in both Georgia and Washington were for nonviolent charges, including driving with a suspended license, penalties related to navigating criminal legal system rules (like failure to appear in court), and probation violations.

DOWNLOAD: Punitive policies are driving jail incarceration in rural Georgia

Punitive policies are driving jail incarceration in rural Georgia

DOWNLOAD: Rural Washington State Needs Criminal Legal System Reform

By Melvin Washington II

For decades, the United States has responded to social issues like mental health and substance use crises, chronic homelessness, and ongoing cycles of interpersonal violence with jail. This has disrupted the lives of millions of people—disproportionately harming Black and Indigenous people—without improving public safety. There’s a better way. Communities can instead invest in agencies and organizations that address these issues outside the criminal legal system. The proven solutions highlighted in this multimedia report look beyond jails to promote safe and thriving communities.

More than 3,000 jail facilities operate in the United States. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, those jails processed about 10 million bookings annually. Some people stayed for hours and others for months. Overall, the number of people in jail has grown exponentially over the past 40 years—from about 220,000 in 1983 to more than 750,000 in 2019. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, some jurisdictions took emergency actions to prevent the virus’s spread among incarcerated people and jail staff, which cut jail populations by an estimated 24 percent during the first half of 2020. However, these changes proved temporary; by June 2020, national jail populations were already rising. By the end of 2020, the population had rebounded by more than 50,000 people.

New York Vera Institute of Justice, 2021. 28p.

By Marta Nelson, Samuel Feineh and Maris Mapolski

One hundred years from now, we may look back at the United States’s overreliance on punishment and its progeny—mass incarceration—with the kind of abhorrence that we now hold for internment camps for Japanese Americans and Jim Crow laws. Or, if we never curb our reliance on jails and prisons for public safety, we may be in the same place then as we are today….This report posits that maintaining our system of mass incarceration will not bring people in the United States the safety and justice they deserve, while dismantling it in favor of a narrowly tailored sentencing response to unlawful behavior can produce more safety, repair harm, and reduce incarceration by close to 80 percent, according to modeling on the federal system. In this report, the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) addresses a main driver of mass incarceration: our sentencing system, or what happens to people after they have gone through the criminal legal system and are convicted of a crime

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2023. 81p.

The The U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General

  The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) initiated this limited-scope review after certain operational issues became so serious at U.S. Penitentiary (USP) Atlanta and Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) New York that, in 2021, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) significantly limited operations at the former and closed the latter. The DOJ OIG sought to assess how critical issues at BOP institutions are identified, communicated to BOP Executive Staff, and remediated. At the outset of our limited-scope review, then BOP Executive Staff told us they had been largely aware of the long-standing operational issues at USP Atlanta and MCC New York and expressed confidence in the BOP’s existing mechanisms to communicate information about operational issues. However, they also described four foundational, enterprise-wide challenges that they said limited their ability to remedy institution operational issues, specifically: • weaknesses in the BOP’s internal audit function, • delays in the BOP’s employee discipline process, • inadequacy of BOP assessments of institution staffing level needs, and • the BOP’s inability to address its aging infrastructure. In light of then BOP Executive Staff’s prior awareness of the USP Atlanta and MCC New York operational issues, we modified the scope of this review following these initial meetings to focus on these four causes and the scope of the challenges, their effects on institutional operations, and the Executive Staff’s efforts to remedy them.  

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2023. 42p.

By The Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs 

Hundreds of people held in the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ (BOP) Special Management Unit (SMU) endured years of unconstitutional and abusive conditions. Those abuses were particularly extreme during the more than three years the program was located in the United States Penitentiary in Thomson, Illinois (Thomson). Over the past 18 months, more than 40 lawyers and legal staff members from the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, Latham & Watkins LLP, Uptown People’s Law Center, and Levy Firestone Muse LLP, investigated the conditions in the SMU at Thomson. During that investigation we collected accounts of extreme physical and psychological abuse from more than 120 people. We also witnessed firsthand abusive and obstructive staff behavior, and saw with our own eyes injuries inflicted by Thomson employees. Guards regularly placed individuals in dangerous four-point restraints for hours, sometimes days, and often without food, water, or access to a toilet. Many individuals reported being beaten and sexually assaulted while in restraints. Guards fastened the restraints so tightly that they caused scars on individuals’ wrists, ankles, and stomachs. This happened so frequently that the resulting scars became known as a “Thomson Tattoo.” In addition to physical abuse, guards subjected people in the SMU to psychological trauma through the use of extended solitary confinement, referred to by the BOP euphemistically as “restrictive housing.”1 In the SMU, solitary confinement involved locking two people in a cell for up to 23 hours a day, a practice known as double-cell solitary confinement…

Washington, DC: Author, 2023. 29p.

By F. Ann Carson and  Melissa Nadel 

This report provides details on the effects of COVID-19 on state and federal prisons from March 2020 to February 2021. The report presents data related to COVID-19 tests, infections, deaths and vaccinations. It also provides statistics on admissions to and releases, including expedited releases, from state and federal prisons during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Washington, DC:  U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2022. 45p.

By Lucy Wainwright,  Sarah Senker, Krysia Canvin & Laura Sheard

The impact of COVID-19 has been exceptional, particularly on the National Health Service which has juggled COVID affected patients alongside related staff shortages and the existing (and growing) health needs of the population. In prisons too, healthcare teams have been balancing patient needs against staffing shortfalls, but with additional strains unique to the prison population. Such strains include drastic lockdown regimes and prolonged isolation, the need to consider health alongside security, known health inequalities within prisoner groups, and an ageing and ethnically diverse population (both groups disproportionately affected by COVID). The aim of this paper is to contribute to emerging research on the impact of COVID-19 on prison healthcare.

Health & Justice volume 11, Article number: 6 (2023)

By Tony Kirk, The HM Inspectorate of Probation (UK)

  The vision of HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS)’s Offender Management in Custody model is that ‘everyone in prison should have the opportunity to transform their lives by using their time in custody constructively to reduce their risk of harm and reoffending; to plan their resettlement; and to improve their prospects of becoming a safe, law-abiding and valuable member of society’. Our joint thematic inspection of OMiC pre-release found that OMiC was not working as intended. Part two of this thematic inspection focused on outcomes for prisoners after they are released. Inspectors considered how practitioners assessed, planned and reviewed the work required to support successful resettlement. We also considered the extent to which key outcomes were achieved when an individual was released from prison, including whether they secured settled accommodation and education, training and employment.  

Manchester, HM Inspectorate of Probation2023. 39p.

By Jazmin E. Palacios

For this thesis paper, the author analyzed cases from the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals and the U.S. District Courts in which inmates challenged the constitutionality of their conditions of confinement in extremely hot facilities. The author applies inductive methods and analytic procedures of grounded theory to identify legal doctrines, concepts, representations, and themes of court litigation and case law about excessive heat in correctional facilities. Through a review of constitutional law history and the analysis of federal court decisions, the author examines the constitutionality of incarcerating inmates in extremely hot facilities and offers policy guidance to prison officials on mitigation efforts in heat-related conditions of confinement. The author discusses legal precedents for questions addressing the conditions of confinement, and suggests some policy implications that consider the many prisoners who are on medications that risk severe illness and death when exposed to excessive heat, including that prison medical personnel should keep real-time records of inmates taking their medications, what their work assignments are, where they are housed, and what remedial efforts are being taken to ameliorate heat exposure. The author also suggests that inmates not taking high-risk medications but with a history of heat-related illnesses should be carefully monitored by officials to lessen sickness and reduce deaths, and notes that while things like air conditioning were previously considered a luxury, as global warming intensifies, it has increasingly become a medical necessity to avoid adverse outcomes of heat exposure.

Huntsville, TX: Sam Houston State University, 2021. 135p.

By Penal Reform International and The Thailand Institute of Justice

  This 2023 edition of Global Prison Trends by Penal Reform International (PRI) and the Thailand Institute of Justice (TIJ) is published at a time where a string of financial crises and ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are greatly affecting vulnerable people around the world. People in conflict with the law – and their families – are being hit by rising costs of living and austerity measures, as are prison systems. Our report assesses the impact of economic crisis on prisons and people detained or working in them, including in terms of food security. We also highlight the impacts of imprisonment on families who are often relied on to meet even the basic needs of their loved ones in prison. Long-standing under-resourcing of prison administrations and inadequate support for families in need are compounding this situation. Adequate resourcing and capacity of prison systems are prerequisites to protecting the human rights and basic needs of every person affected by imprisonment. The impact of prison overcrowding is central to our analysis in this year’s edition of Global Prison Trends. From healthcare and nutrition to rehabilitation and countering violence and criminal subcultures in prison, all initiatives would be more viable and effective, and human rights of all better protected, with fewer people in prison.   

London: Penal Reform International, 2023. 56p.

By Jacqueline Beard

The prison estate in England and Wales contains 120 prisons holding people who have been sentenced or are on remand awaiting trial for a range of crimes. The prison estate has a mixture of publicly and privately run institutions, some of which are newly built, while others date back to the Victorian era. As of March 2023, the total prison population in England and Wales was around 84,400 people, 96% of whom were male. The prison population has grown substantially over the past 30 years, with almost all the growth having taken place between 1995 and 2010. It reached its highest level in 2012 at around 86,600 people. During the pandemic, in 2020, the prison population dipped to its lowest level for around 13 years before rising again in each of the two most recent years. In the long term, the Government expects the prison population to increase. Among reasons for the projected increase, the Ministry of Justice cites the rise in police officer numbers and changes in sentencing policy. The most recent set of projections give a central estimate for the prison population of 94,400 by March 2025 and a range from 93,100 to 106,300 by March 2027. 

London: UK Parliament, House of Commons Library, 2023. 35p.

By Karen Heimer, Sarah E. Malone, and Stacy De Coster

Women’s rates of imprisonment and incarceration in jails grew faster than men’s rates during the prison boom in the United States. Even during the recent period of modest decline in incarceration, women’s rates have decreased less than men’s rates. The number of women in prisons and jails in the United States is now at a historic high. Yet research on mass incarceration most often ignores women’s imprisonment and confinement in jails. This review examines trends in women’s incarceration, highlighting important disparities for Black, Latina, and American Indian/Indigenous women. It contextualizes these trends in terms of the economic and social disadvantages of women prior to incarceration as well as inequalities that are created by women’s incarceration for families, communities, and women themselves. The review concludes by calling for improved data on women’s imprisonment and jail trends, particularly regarding race and ethnicity, as well as more research and theoretical development. 

  Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2023. 6:85–106