By: Mandy Spears

A companion report looks at historical trends in Tennessee’s incarcerated and corrections populations. Two additional reports will focus on community supervision, prison releases, and recidivism as well as pre-trial incarceration.

Key Takeaways:

• Funded almost entirely by state revenues, the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) is consistently among the state’s six largest state revenue expenses.

• Incarceration costs make up over 80% of TDOC spending.

• Since FY 1995, TDOC spending increased by an average of 4.1% per year — the same as growth in overall state revenue spending.

• TDOC houses 27% of state prisoners in local jails to manage overcrowding in state facilities, a factor in slowing the growth of the department’s budget.

Nashville, TN: The Sycamore Institute, 2019. 7p.

By: Mandy Spears

This report provides context for discussions about criminal justice reform, using historical data to reveal trends in Tennessee’s incarcerated and corrections populations. It focuses on state prisoners, who fall under the jurisdiction of the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC).

A companion report looks at the budgetary aspects of incarceration in Tennessee. Two additional reports will focus on community supervision, prison releases, and recidivism as well as pre-trial incarceration.

Key Takeaways:

• Tennessee’s state felony incarceration rate grew 68% from FY 1991-2018. Trends in state incarceration and crime rates vary significantly by offense type.

• State prisoners are disproportionately black, although the proportion of black inmates is falling. White women are the fastest growing segment of state prisoners.

• The state prisoner population is getting older, which could affect the state budget since older individuals tend to incur more medical expenses.

• In FY 2018, Tennessee housed 73% of its incarcerated felons in state prisons and 27% in local jails. The majority of state prisoners in local jails are waiting for space in a state facility.

• Average sentences and time served are getting longer for most offense types, especially drug offenders who make up a growing share of incarcerations.

Nashville, TN: The Syramore Institute, 2019. 11p.

By Bryce Tuggle

State and local leaders have implemented social distancing and “Safer at Home” policies to slow the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. However, Tennessee’s local jails and state prisons may not have the space required to minimize risks of transmission between inmates, staff, and the community. This report explains why many Tennessee jail and prison populations face increased risks from COVID-19 and how that creates additional risks for the general public. Figure 1. 46 of Tennessee’s 116 Active Local Jails Had More Inmates than Beds in February 2020 Occupancy rate is the number of inmates on February 29, 2020 divided by bed capacity. Capacity is measured as the number of beds inspected by the Tennessee Corrections Institute in the most recent quarter. Numbers over 100 indicate that the jail was operating over capacity. Source: Tennessee Department of Correction Monthly Jail Report

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The most recent available data show 60% of Tennessee’s local jails and state prisons were near, at, or over capacity at the end of February. Of 116 active jails, 46 had more inmates than beds.

• The close quarters of jails and prisons operating near, at, or over capacity make it harder to take steps public health experts recommend to slow the spread of COVID-19.

• Jails and prisons could potentially serve as reservoirs for future COVID-19 outbreaks among the general public due to the heightened infection risks for inmates, staff, and those around them.

• As TDOC and some county sheriffs take steps to combat COVID-19 in their facilities, state and local leaders may want to consider more ways to protect health while guarding public safety

Nashville: The Sycamore Institute, 2020. 9p.

By Rebecca Tublitz

After four decades of explosive growth in the number of people arrested, jailed, and imprisoned in the United States, a growing consensus about the overreach of mass incarceration and unjust systems of punishment has emerged in the 21st century. Seeking to raise national attention to the problem of overuse and misuse of incarceration in local jail systems and to catalyze innovation and reform at the local level, in 2015, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (MacArthur Foundation) launched the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC). In its eighth year, the SJC now supports a diverse network of more than 57 cities, counties, and states across the country in developing and implementing decarceration strategies and represents an ambitious effort to generate transformative change in how localities conceive of and use jail incarceration.

Data, measurement, and evaluation has been pivotal in guiding this initiative—for identifying drivers of the jail population, designing innovative decarceration strategies, monitoring progress, and evaluating and understanding performance. CUNY ISLG plays a leading role in these data collection and analysis activities across the SJC, serving as a central liaison between local jurisdictions, external researchers, technical assistance providers, and the MacArthur Foundation.

This report focuses on the role that local data has played in the SJC initiative and CUNY ISLG’s work to develop and support the SJC model of data-driven reform. The report details:

• The collection of data and how data were used by many stakeholders across the initiative;

• The build-out of CUNY ISLG’s data repository;

The development and use of standardized performance measures for reporting site progress towards reducing

• Jail populations and eliminating racial and ethnic disparities; and

• Lessons learned from working with cross-agency administrative data to drive reform and evaluate policy change.

New York: CUNY Institute for State & Local Governance —————— Safety and Justice Challenge. 2024. 36p.

By: Nacro

This is the first in a series of briefings that will examine the practical steps that can be taken to support people in contact with the criminal justice system to create better futures. The series will include practical and cost-effective steps to help prisons better prepare people for release, and provide them with the skills, training, knowledge and support they’ll need to thrive and create better lives on the outside. This briefing looks at work and wages in prison and the impact those can have on people’s ability to turn their lives around on release. It’s particularly important right now because of the cost of living crisis. We know that, for many, prison wages are all they have to get by on in prison. Wages are used to buy phone credit to keep in touch with friends and family, to buy the basic things they need, and to save for release. We want to propose a better, fairer, system that ensures that everyone can work to support themselves both during their time in prison, and on release. We believe it is a false economy to create what is for many an environment of poverty in prison, as it can lead to bullying and violence, and ultimately means that Government has to spend more on the basics for people in prison and on release as they are unable to provide them for themselves. Our solutions are set out in full below, but we believe that the main things to focus on are: Developing skills and earning qualifications: Making sure that work and education opportunities are available to everyone in prison, focusing on ensuring that people can develop the skills and qualifications that they will need on release. Jobs should be linked to qualifications and skills and based on a comprehensive understanding of the local job market so that training is preparing people for work in industries where there are employment shortages. Improved use of ROTL: It needs to become the norm that all people in prison who are eligible have genuine opportunities to be released during the day to enable them to work in the community and earn a real wage. A real working day: People should be provided with a working pattern that, as far as is possible, mimics the working day on the outside, and prison regimes and staffing profiles should prioritise this. This provides people, who are able to, in prison with the experience of working full time. It would also make setting up workshops etc in prison a more attractive proposition for outside employers who would then see that their investment would be returned in the productivity of their workforce, rather than trying to make contracts work where there is limited productive time in the working day. Fair pay so people can pay for the things they need: Establish a national pay scale for people in prison, reviewing current wages to ensure that people in prison have sufficient funds to buy the things that they need, keep in touch with friends and family and save for release Fair prices so people can pay for the things they need: In addition to establishing a national pay scale for people in prison, we must also ensure that the items that they can buy, and the phone calls that they make, are priced fairly and in line with prices in the community. Saving for release: With a national payscale and increased wages, a portion of prison wages should be saved in a ringfenced Resettlement Fund. Needs-based and administered independently, this fund would be available to people in the run up to release and post-release to support with their transition to the community. It should be flexible to be able to support with things such as a rent deposit or to fund the completion of a qualification started in prison. This fund should be considered when reviewing prison wages to ensure people are able to buy the things they need and contribute to the Fund. Priority for the best jobs in preparation for release: Introduce a system so that towards the end of an individual’s prison term they have priority for the higher paid roles with automatic saving of a portion of that wage in the resettlement fund referred to above. People should have a fair chance of getting the better paid jobs by ensuring they have every opportunity to gain enhanced status. This would help to prepare people for work once released as the higher paid jobs in prison are often the ones with more responsibility and accountability

London: Nacro, 2023. 16p.

By Independent Monitoring Boards (IMBs)

Independent Monitoring Boards (IMBs) monitor and report on the conditions and treatment of those detained in every prison in England and Wales. They have specific powers and responsibilities in order to effectively monitor the conditions and treatment of those in CSUs. Boards are notified when a prisoner is segregated, can speak to prisoners in CSUs in private, are invited to attend segregation review boards (SRBs), and can access and review all records.

This report provides an overview of outcomes for men in closed adult prisons with mental health needs who are being held in CSUs. It is based on:

• A survey completed by IMBs at over 30 closed adult men’s prisons in England for four weeks during late Autumn 2022

• A follow-up survey six months later in Spring 2023 was completed by IMBs who had previously identified segregated prisoners waiting for transfers to more appropriate secure settings.

• Findings from IMBs’ most recent annual reports.

• Several IMBs’ recent correspondence to ministers, senior HMPPS officials, and healthcare bodies raising serious concerns over the care of prisoners with mental health needs in CSUs.

Key findings

• In recent years, almost all IMBs monitoring in prisons holding adult men have repeatedly raised concerns over CSUs not being a suitable or appropriate place for prisoners with mental health needs.

• Prisoners with mental health needs were often held for prolonged and long-term periods in CSUs. IMBs found that this was mostly due to:

  • Men struggling to cope or refusing to reintegrate back onto the residential wings (referred to as ‘normal location’)

  • Lack of capacity in prison healthcare units or prisons with specialist functions

  • Delays in referral, assessment, and transfer to a secure hospital

  • There being no alternative, often because of a lack of diagnosis or men not having met the threshold for admission to a secure hospital.

• Although most IMBs understood why CSUs were deemed the most appropriate place for these men to be held out of the limited locations available in prisons, there were still widespread concerns that CSUs were the only alternative for those who were acutely unwell and in need of specialist care.

• For men who were already struggling with their mental health, their well-being and behavior often deteriorated further while being segregated for prolonged periods.

• Prisoners with mental health needs were often moved between different CSUs, healthcare units, or were returned to wings for short periods which made it harder to track the cumulative time some prisoners spent segregated.

IMBs, 2024. 18p.

By John Clegg, Sebastian Spitz, Adaner Usmani, and Annalena Wolcke

The literature on the prevalence and causes of punishment has been dominated by research into the United States. Yet most of the world's prisoners live elsewhere, and the United States is no longer the country with the world's highest incarceration rate. This article considers what we know about the prevalence and causes of incarceration around the world. We focus on three features of incarceration: its level, inequality, and severity. Existing comparative research offers many insights, but we identify methodological and theoretical shortcomings. Quantitative scholars are still content to draw causal inferences from correlations, partly because (like qualitative scholars) they are often limited to studying the present and the developed world. More data will allow better inferences. We close by defending the goal of building precise and generalizable theories of punishment.

Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 7, Page 211 - 231

By Christian Dippel and  Michael Poyker

Using a newly constructed complete monthly panel of private and public state prisons, we ask whether the presence of private prisons impact judges’ sentencing decisions in their state. We employ two identification strategies, a difference-in-difference strategy that compares only court-pairs that straddle state-borders, and an event study using the full data. We find that the opening of a private prison has a small but statistically significant and robust effect on sentence length, while public prisons do not. The effect is entirely driven by changes in sentencing in the first two months after prison openings. The combined evidence appears inconsistent with the hypothesis that private prisons may directly influence judges; instead a simple salience explanation may be the most plausible. 

The Journal of Law and Economics, Volume 66, Number 3, 2023. 52p

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 

By The Agenda for Youth Justice

This report is about girls and young women aged 17 to 25 years old in contact with the criminal justice system. In particular, it highlights the experiences of Black, Asian and minoritised young women, and young women with experience of the care system as both groups are overrepresented in the criminal justice system. 1 For a list of organisations and individuals Agenda and the Alliance for Youth Justice have engaged with over the course of the Young Women’s Justice Project, see Appendix 1. This is the final report of the Young Women’s Justice Project, run by Agenda and the Alliance for Youth Justice since January 2020. Based on new research, it builds on the work of the Young Women’s Justice Project literature review and two briefing papers produced during the project, with a focus on young women’s experiences of the transition from the youth to adult justice system, and young women in the criminal justice system’s experiences of violence, abuse and exploitation. 

London: Alliance for Youth Justice.2022. 68p.

By Agenda Alliance

This briefing forms part of the Young Women’s Justice Project (YWJP), run in partnership by Agenda Alliance and the Alliance for Youth Justice (AYJ) and funded by Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales. This project has provided a national platform to make the case for gender-responsive support for girls and young women aged 17-25 in contact with the criminal justice system, exemplified by our report “We’ve Not Given Up” published in March 2022.1 This supplementary briefing, “A Call to Action: Responding to Young Women’s Needs”, provides actionable recommendations to deliver change for girls and young women either in contact with – or at-risk of contact with – the criminal justice system. We have expanded upon the rich evidence base of the YWJP by convening a stakeholder discussion with women’s centres, youth/ justice practitioners, specialist “by-and-for” services,2 and young women with lived experience of the justice system, further complemented by additional desk-based research and examples of good practice.3 This research outlines specific steps to develop age- and gender-responsive support for young women, and is intended as a vital resource for funders, commissioners, practitioners, service providers, and decisionmakers to inform their practice and build sector understanding of how existing issues can be addressed.  

London: Agenda Alliance 2023. 41p.

Michael L. Walker

Marshaling ethnographic data from a county jail, this study introduces “autonomy”—a novel concept and measurement of the degree to which an actor's exchange initiations are regulated by other exchange relations. This study rearticulates mutual dependence arguments about the social order of penological living in terms of social exchange theory and offers several innovations: 1) the structural forms of exchange relations in a penal housing unit stratify “carceral autonomy” across members of a social order; 2) diminished carceral autonomy contributes to the buildup of “exchange frustration”—the mixture of discontent and sadness experienced when goals cannot be achieved due the structure of an exchange network; 3) deprivations, inefficacies, and imported cultural standards contribute to what is exchanged and with whom in a penological setting; 4) caretaking in penological housing units is as much about maintaining social order through a form of generalized exchange as it is about network members helping each other; and 5) the emotional landscape of penological living can be mapped, in part, by examining the distribution of carceral autonomy and exchange frustration.

Criminology, Volume 61, Issue 4 November 2023, Pages 1022-1044

By The American Civil Liberties of Alabama (ACLU)

In the third year of our Statehouse-to-Prison Pipeline Report, the ACLU of Alabama monitored 876 bills introduced in the 2023 legislative session. During this time, legislators failed to pass meaningful criminal legal reform policies or adequately address the humanitarian crisis in Alabama’s prisons. The state of Alabama continues to invest in harsher sentencing, overpolicing, and surveillance that (1) fuels our overcrowded prisons and (2) damages public safety. Addressing social problems exclusively through the criminal punishment system hurts us all. This report highlights the type of bills that damage our state and positive bills that we believe help our communities. Alabamians deserve a legislature that passes bills to fund our public schools, expand access to quality healthcare, and improve their lives - not a legislature focused on funneling them into overcrowded and deadly prisons

Montgomery, AL: ACLU of Alabama, 2023. 26p

By   E. Ann Carson, Lauren Beatty and Stephanie Mueller

This is the fifth report as required under the First Step Act of 2018 (FSA; P.L. 115-391). It includes data on federal prisoners for calendar year 2022 provided to BJS by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). As required by the FSA, this report details select characteristics of persons in prison, including marital, veteran, citizenship, and English-speaking status; education levels; medical conditions; and participation in treatment programs. It also includes statistics BJS is required to report at the facility level, such as the number of assaults on staff by prisoners, prisoners’ violations of rules that resulted in time credit reductions, and selected facility characteristics related to accreditation, on-site health care, remote learning, video conferencing, and costs of prisoners’ phone calls.

Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2023. 26p

By Wren Collective

 As we documented in part 1 of Death by Design, in every case that resulted in a death sentence, trial lawyers failed to uncover compelling evidence that could have convinced a district attorney to drop a death sentence or a jury to give life in prison rather than death. Attorneys failed to investigate and did not present evidence of their client’s mental illnesses and intellectual disabilities. They missed galling examples of physical and sexual abuse of their clients because they did not talk to family or witnesses. They did not prepare important experts to testify until the day that they were supposed to take the stand. The first report largely dealt with the failings of the lawyers in capital cases. This report examines why that poor representation has thrived, and the ways that the judges overseeing those cases have enabled it to continue that way. First, judges seemingly ignore the excessive caseloads that many attorneys have, even though they are in charge of appointing lawyers to cases. Second, there is an inherent conflict of interest when judges are in control of both the appointments and the purse strings of a case because it means the attorney’s livelihood is dependent on pleasing the judge. If judges value quick resolution of cases over dedicated representation, a lawyer may feel, consciously or not, pressure to hurry the case along and ask for too little time and money, at the expense of the client. We have heard numerous examples of this occurring, especially when it comes to hiring experts and mitigation specialists, who are tasked with investigating a client’s life history for the punishment phase of trial. Third, the judges in Harris County have never established meaningful training requirements for lawyers, or any requirements at all for the mitigation specialists. Therefore, many people perform their work without the training they need in mental health, trauma, or even interviewing skills. In the end, we recommend a total overhaul to the system of capital representation for poor defendants, with either the public defender absorbing those cases or the judges establishing a new, freestanding capital public defender that is independent from judicial oversight. Such systems exist across the country and have been enormously effective in providing constitutionally compliant representation to individuals facing the ultimate punishment. Harris County should follow suit.    

Austin, TX?: Wren Collective, 2023. 18p.

By Wren Collective

 When he was just 4 years old, Christopher Jackson was sexually abused by a teen boy he lived with—abuse that continued until he turned 9. His grandmother, who took him in afterward, regularly beat him until he passed out. Jeffery Prevost was sexually assaulted when he was a child. His mother physically abused him, at one point firing a gun at him. Mabry Landor, who suffers from bipolar disorder, was sexually and physically abused by his brothers. Roosevelt Smith and Joseph Jean had an IQ of 69; they are both intellectually disabled, and thus, ineligible for the death penalty. Each of these men went to trial in Harris County facing the death penalty. In every case, defense counsel failed to present this evidence, and juries sentenced all these men to death. Sixty years ago, in Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling that would ultimately ensure every person facing the possibility of having their liberty stripped away would get an attorney if they could not afford one.1 Nowhere is that right more important than in a capital murder case, where the potential sentence is death and where almost every person in this country who is charged with a capital crime is poor. That right, however, has been elusive in death penalty cases in Harris County, Texas, the death penalty capital of the nation and the world.2 Over the last few decades, news outlets have run periodic stories about death penalty lawyers in Harris County with too-high caseloads who have missed critical filing deadlines or who did minimal work on their client’s case. On the 60th anniversary of Gideon, the Wren Collective investigated whether these stories were isolated examples of flawed representation or whether the representation reflected problems that exist throughout the system of capital defense. We interviewed judges, trial and postconviction attorneys, and mitigation specialists.3 We reviewed caseloads, jail visits, and billing records. We read postconviction pleadings from the majority of Harris County capital cases that ended with death sentences in the last two decades. We focused primarily on those cases where individuals are still on death row, but also looked at a few whose sentences have been overturned. In total, we examined 28 cases.4 Our findings are documented in this report. They are difficult to read.5 The system is utterly broken.   

Austin, TX?: Wren Collective, 2023. 40p.

By Matthew Ohara

Reflecting on INQUEST’s groundbreaking work, this report outlines how it has remained true to its roots; working alongside bereaved people, exposing the violence and neglect of the state and its institutions and failing systems of investigation and accountability. Without INQUEST this would go unchallenged.

United Kingdom, London. INQUEST. 2023. 72pg

By Matt Cracknell

The Offender Rehabilitation Act (ORA) 2014 has extended post-release supervision to all individuals serving short sentences in England and Wales – a cohort who previously faced neglect within the criminal justice system. This empirical study uses a case study approach to explore the resettlement experiences of individuals subject to this new legislation, understanding how individuals circulate and re-cycle between a range of services and agencies in the community, further illuminating upon the reality of repeat ‘revolving door’ imprisonment. Drawing upon Cohen's ‘net widening’ analogy, this article posits that collectively the array of services involved in an individual's resettlement form a ‘resettlement net’, which segregates individuals in the community through control and surveillance functions, extending the carceral boundary of the prison firmly into the community. Welfare-orientated organisations become compelled to ‘braid’ welfare responses alongside penal functions in order to operate within the resettlement net. This article also explores some of the difficulties that individuals experience as they navigate the resettlement net, including informal forms of exclusion, and the wear and tear of the net, which undermines the rhetoric of care envisioned by this legislation, and drives individuals deeper into the mesh of carceral control.

United Kingdom, Middlesex University. Punishment and Society, Volume 25, Issue 1. 2021, 18pg

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