By Britt Skaathun ,Francesca Maviglia,Anh Vo,Allison McBride,Sarah Seymour,Sebastian Mendez,Gregg Gonsalves,Leo Beletsky

Policing, corrections, and other carceral institutions are under scrutiny for driving health harms, while receiving disproportionate resources at the expense of prevention and other services. Amidst renewed interest in structural determinants of health, roles of race and class in shaping government investment priorities are poorly understood.

Methods: Based on the Social Conflict Model, we assessed relationships between city racial/ economic profiles measured by the Index of Concentration at the Extremes (ICE) and budgetary priorities measured by the novel Carceral Resource Index (CRI), contrasting investments in carceral systems with funding for health and social support across the 50 most populous cities in the United States (U.S.). Bivariate correlations, and unadjusted and adjusted polynomial regression models were used to assess the relationship between budgetary investments and population concentration at extremes in terms of income, racial/ethnic composition, and education, controlling for other demographic characteristics.

Results: In our sample, median CRI was -0.59 (IQR -0.64, -0.45), with only seven cities exhibiting positive CRI values. This indicates that most large U.S. cities spend more on carceral systems than on health and supportive services, combined. Adjusted polynomial models showed a convex relationship between the CRI and ICE-Education, and ICE-Race(White vs. Black)+Income, with quadratic terms that were positive and significant at p<0.05. After controlling for age, the strongest prioritization of carceral systems was observed in cities where the proportion of low-income Black residents approached or exceeded that of high-income white residents.

Conclusions: Municipal prioritization of carceral investments over health and social support is pervasive in the U.S and exacerbated by racial and economic disparities. The CRI offers new opportunities to understand the role of government investments as a structural determinant of health and safety. Longitudinal research is warranted to examine the relationship between budget priorities, structural racism, and health outcomes.

PLOS ONE 17(12): 2022.

Edited by Rui Abrunhosa Gonçalves

This book provides international perspectives on corrections, correctional treatment, and penitentiary laws. Although its focus is on African and South American countries, the information provided can be easily expanded to North America and Europe. The chapters present legal frameworks and applied research on prisons and their potential to deter crime and reduce recidivism rates. The book puts the human rights agenda at the forefront and is a useful resource for those who work in corrections, including prison, education, and probation officers.

London: InTechOpen, 2023. 146p.

Edited by Kristen M. Budd, David C. Lane, Glenn W. Muschert, and Jason A. Smith

The year 2023 marks 50 years of mass incarceration in the United States. This timely volume highlights and addresses pressing social problems associated with the US’s heavy reliance on mass imprisonment. In an atmosphere of charged political debate, including ""tough on crime"" rhetoric, the editors bring together scholars and experts in the criminal justice field to provide the most up-to-date science on mass incarceration and its ramifications on justice-impacted people and our communities. This book offers practical solutions for advocates, policy and lawmakers, and the wider public for addressing mass incarceration and its effects to create a more just, fair and safer society.

Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press, 2023. 128p.

By Ujjwal Kumar Singh

From the general editor’s introduction: “….The essays are also intended to be fairly detailed and empirical in emphasis, so as to stand in regard to the introduction in something of the relationship of evidence to interpretation. The project is directed both at specific problems and at a number of fundamental debates on the nature of discourse; and yet it is not intended primarily to generate new theory but rather to make its contribution by approaching questions from a new direction. Part of the dissatisfaction which lies behind the project is with Eurocentric terminology. This is not because we deny the possibility of there being any universal terms, nor because we think all knowledge produced by Europeans essentially the same and equally corrupted by power. It is because we are impressed by the need to avoid all essentialism, and by the importance, both intellectually and in practical situations, of an appreciation of difference. It is because we are uncertain how large categories may properly be constructed. Similar concerns are expressed in various ways in many disciplines, and constitute a crisis of interpretation…”

Delhi. Oxford University Press. 1998. 313p.

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By Andrea Pitzer

FROM THE COVER; “A Smithsonian Magazine Best History Book Of The Year” For more than one hundred years, at least one concentration camp has existed somewhere on earth. First used as battlefield strategy, camps have evolved with each passing decade, in the scope of their effects and the savage practicality with which governments have employed them. Even in the twenty-first century, as we continue to reckon with the magnitude and horror of the Holocaust, history tells us we have broken our solemn promise of "never again." Beginning with 1890s Cuba, Andrea Pitzer pinpoints the histories of concentration camps around the world and across decades. From the Philippines and Southern Africa to the Soviet Gulag and detention in China and North Korea during the Cold War, camp systems have long been used as tools for civilian relocation and political repression. Through telling the stories of individual prisoners swept into detention across the past century, One Long Night shows how camps became brutal and dehumanizing sites that claimed the lives of millions. Featuring a new afterword that places US border detention and family separation within the context of this dark history, One Long Night exposes our collective failure and its continued toll.”

New York, Back Bay Books. Little, Brown And Company. 2017. 494p.

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By Annie Samuelli

FROM THE PREFACE: “From 1949 to 1961, I was one of a large community of women held in the political prisons of Communist Romania, all harshly convicted, not for their misdeeds but for what they actually represented. Since the advent of Communism, citizens who upheld faith, justice and the principles of democracy-from former prime ministers to simple peasants and confused members of the working class-now were convicted of treasonable activities on just those grounds. The elementary freedoms of opinion, speech, movement, religion and charity, hemmed in by arbitrary government decrees, had been virtually abolished, any transgression being paid for by long imprisonment. Persecution was directed as much against the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, ostensibly the chief targets of class warfare, as against any person, irrespective of origin, who consciously or not expressed criticism or the slightest opposition to the regime. For instance, spouses, parents, children are likewise incriminated as accessories after the fact, and whole families went to prison for having failed to denounce or for having harboured a fugitive from justice for his political beliefs or for violating one of the all-embracing Communist laws.

Thus the women's prisons were filled with representatives from all ranks of society, from the intellectual down to the illiterate. As I shared their lives day by day, night by night for twelve years, I had the opportunity of studying them closely, and it is mainly on them that this book is based.”

Washington, D.C.. Robert B. Luce, Inc. 1967. 241p.

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By Oleg V. Khlevniuk. Translated by Vadim A. Staklo. With editorial assistance and commentary by David J. Nordlander. Foreword by Robert Conquest

FROM THE FOREWORD: “Although it is sometimes suggested that the Gulag was in some way derived from an older Russia, one has only to read about Dostoevsky's experiences as a political prisoner in The House of the Dead to find many differences. By the early twentieth century a number of Russian people--far fewer of them in any case than in Soviet times--were either in prison or in "exile." The latter penalty, whose victims included Lenin and Stalin, simply meant forced residence at some distant village, with a monetary allowance, sometimes with wives, but with no barbed wire or penal labor. The Gulag is only one example of how the Soviet regime represented a huge decline in civilization in Russia. But it is a revealing one. Areas of the Stalinist experience still remain obscure…”

NY. Yale University Press. 2004. 449p.

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By Karlo Stajner. Translated By Joel Agee. With An Introduction By Danilo Kis

AUTHOR'S NOTE: “I was born Karl Steiner on January 15, 1902, in Vienna. After moving to Zagreb, the capital of the Yugoslav Republic of Croatia, in 1922, I adopted the Serbo-Croation spelling of my name, Karlo Stajner. In 1932, I emigrated to the Soviet Union, where I remained until 1956. Because of my Austrian origin, I was accused of being a Nazi agent and condemned to ten years at hard labor; a second ten-year term was later added to my sentence. After my release from prison in 1956, I returned to Yugoslavia and continued calling myself by my Serbo-Croatian name: Karlo Stajner. K.S.”

NY. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1988. 408p.

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By Cairine Petrie

FROM THE FOREWORD: “During the last two decades in the United Kingdom, we have increasingly locked up children who are difficult or delinquent. This study explores the uses and consequences of custody for young people. Cairine Petrie compares a number of boys held in a unit of maximum security with a similar number of delinquents resident in an open training school. The book also provides interesting insights into the workings of the Scottish List D schools which, unlike institutions for young offenders in England and Wales, still remain the responsibility of the central authorities. South of the border since 1969, persistent delinquents have been sheltered in community homes and are in the care of the local authorities. Those who cling to the myth that effective reformatory schools have been swept away by permissive legislation will gain little comfort from this book.”

London. Saxon House. 1980.

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By Debra Smith

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “After being anti-privatisation (and I am still very concerned about how much of all this is real and will last) I am coming to a positive view of this private prison. In the short term it is certainly better for the prisoners in the long term I don't know what safeguards are there that it is maintained. But it is a 20-year business plan and contract so if I'm still here in 2017 I guess I' be able to make a judgement.' Ididn't make it to 2017 - in September 2004 I received a letter terminating my contract: services no longer required…..”

Adelaide, Aus. Ginninderra Press. 2008. 129p.

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Edited by Beverly R. Fletcher, Lynda Dixon Shaver, and Dreama G. Moon. Foreword by George Henderson. Illustrations By Lisa J. Billy

FROM THE FOREWORD: “Perhaps nothing captures the debilitating effects of sexism more vividly than an in-depth study of women incarcerated in our correctional institutions. Beneath the statistics lie a human tragedy of a magnitude most people cannot fully comprehend: a disproportionate number of women are wasting away in nonrehabilitative institutions that perpetuate rather than correct criminal behaviors. The editors and contributors to this book capture cogent slices of life of some of the role players in the prison drama. And they do so with the sensitive touch of social surgeons who carefully lift and examine one layer of human behavior and then another. But they do not stop there. They also examine some of the attitudes, beliefs, and values of incarcerated women and their keepers (prison staff). The total work is an insightful glimpse of a neglected subculture.”

Westport, CT. Praeger. 1993. 202p.

By S. Rebecca Neusteter, Ram Subramanian, Jennifer Trone, Mawia Khogali, and Cindy Reed

Police in America arrest millions of people each year, and the likelihood that arrest will lead to jail incarceration has increased steadily. Ending mass incarceration and repairing its extensive collateral consequences thus must begin by focusing on the front end of the system: police work. Recognizing the roughly 18,000 police agencies around the country as gatekeepers of the system, this report explores the factors driving mass enforcement, particularly of low-level offenses; what police agencies could do instead with the right community investment, national and local leadership, and officer training, incentives, and support; and policies that could shift the policing paradigm away from the reflexive use of enforcement, which unnecessarily criminalizes people and leads directly to the jailhouse door.

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2019. 76p.

by Solitary Watch and the Unlock the Box Campaign

The watchdog group Solitary Watch and the advocacy coalition Unlock the Box released a groundbreaking joint report showing that at least 122,840 people are locked daily in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons and jails for 22 or more hours a day. Calculating Torture is the first report to combine the use of solitary in local and federal jails in addition to state and federal prisons. It is based on analysis of data recently released by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) as well as by state prison systems that did not report to BJS, and data from a survey of local jails conducted by the Vera Institute of Justice.

These report numbers come closer than have any previously published figures in accounting for the total number of people in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons and jails. Previous counts have largely focused on prisons, failing to include jails. In some cases, earlier data also omitted some states, and/or counted only those individuals held in solitary confinement for more than two weeks. For these reasons, previous reports have offered an incomplete picture of how extensively the discredited practice is used and the number of people it affects.

Solitary Watch and the Unlock the Box Campaign, 2023. 16p.

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 Christopher Lowenkamp

Using data from over 1 million people booked into a jail in Kentucky between 2009 and 2018, this study investigates the relationship between pretrial detention and failure to appear, rearrest, and sentencing outcomes. The author’s analysis indicates that there is no deterrent effect of pretrial detention, as incarcerating people prior to their trial does not result in better pretrial outcomes in terms of failure to appear or rearrest. The author also concludes that the costs of pretrial detention do not translate to increased public safety.

Kentucky. Arnold Ventures. March 2022. 8p.

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 Evelyn F. McCoy, Paige Thompson, Travis Reginal, and Natalie Lima

Jail incarceration continues to be a main driver of the mass incarceration crisis in the United States and to negatively affect individuals, families, and communities. Racial disparities in local jail populations are significant, particularly to the detriment of Black communities. Involvement in the criminal legal system, even when brief, can have severe consequences, including barriers to sustaining employment and securing stable housing, poor physical and mental health stemming from chronic stress and limited access to adequate health care, and disruptions to family relationships and social support networks.

To address these issues, Philadelphia implemented a multipronged reform plan supported by the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) to reduce its jail population and associated racial and ethnic disparities. Since 2015, Philadelphia has significantly reduced its jail population through these SJC efforts, which included closing a jail facility, launching a strategy across decision points in the criminal legal system, strengthening collaboration and cross-agency partnerships, launching a formal committee to represent community members’ perspectives, and analyzing data to identify racial and ethnic disparities across decision points. This report describes Philadelphia’s major SJC strategies, documents how it navigated challenges and advanced tangible reform efforts, and explores the perceived impacts of these strategies on its efforts to engage community members, reduce local jail use, and implement system reforms that advance equity. Lessons learned include that it is possible to significantly reduce jail populations in large cities with comprehensive, cross-agency collaboration; that such jail population reductions do not necessarily mean racial and ethnic disparities will also decrease; that reform fatigue is a reality for long-term initiatives like the SJC and can make it difficult for stakeholders to sustain efforts; and that meaningful community engagement is challenging and requires educating stakeholders and community members.

Urban Institute. 2023. 36p.

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,