(NewsNation) — Even after several states passed reforms to reduce the nation’s jail population, little has changed since 2017, an updated study found.
The Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit think tank, released updated data earlier this month that showed minimal movement on states’ reliance on excessive jailing in the last six years.
In its research, a follow-up to a 2017 state-by-state study of local jail populations, the Prison Policy Initiative found there are still too many people confined in local jails and that “the reasons for their confinement do not justify the overwhelming costs of our nation’s reliance on excessive jailing.”
The update stated that one in three people being held behind bars is in a local jail, and people cycle through local jails more than seven million times each year.
Most are released in a few hours or days after their arrest, but others are held for months or years, often because “they are too poor to make bail,” the study noted.
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, less than a third of the nearly 663,000 people in jails on a given day have been convicted and are likely serving short sentences of less than a year, most often for misdemeanors.
These numbers are not too far off from where the nation was less than a decade ago.
“We still see the same trends playing out: too many people are confined in local jails, and the reasons for their confinement do not justify the overwhelming costs of our nation’s reliance on excessive jailing,” the advocacy group wrote.
This has occurred despite efforts to reduce jail populations.
In at least 28 states and the District of Columbia, more than 10% of the jail population is being held on behalf of a state or federal authority, whose per diem payments give jailers a financial incentive to hold many in detention, the group said.
In its 2017 report, the group found Louisiana was a major culprit when it came to outsourcing the construction and operation of state prisons to individual county sheriffs.
The most recent data showed it hasn’t gotten much better in Louisiana, and since 2022, Kentucky and Mississippi have joined it as “worst offenders.” In all three states, at least one-third of the state prison population is actually held in local jails, the report stated.
The report details how widespread jailing harms already marginalized groups of people, including low-income and Black people and people with health, mental illness or housing problems.
“Our recommendations from 2017 remain just as relevant today, and can help state and local officials move away from using jails as catch-all responses to problems that disproportionately impact poor and marginalized communities,” the group stated.
The group recommends that states should reclassify criminal offenses and how offenses are treated, help people successfully navigate the criminal legal system to more positive outcomes, change policies that criminalize poverty or that create financial incentives for unnecessarily punitive policies and address the trend of renting jail space.
