Progress and more work to do on incarceration rates
You may have heard the saying that the U.S. is the biggest incarcerator in the world. Happily, there has been some good progress. There is a long way to go, but this is important: the Prison Policy Initiative has published its 2024 report on the state of incarceration in the U.S. that ranks all of the states against the rest of the world, showing an overall U.S. incarceration rate of 608. In 2021, that rate was 664, and in 2018, it was 698. That’s a 12.8% drop in six years! Some may be quick to say, that’s not enough, we need to move bigger and faster. I agree! Yet we must not lose sight of how many people these reductions affect – this 12.8% rate drop impacts millions of Americans who did not cycle through those prison and jail cells, plus millions more in their families and communities who didn’t experience the immense destabilization of a family member or neighbor going to jail or prison. I am blown away by the incredible work of folks in the field who have made this happen.
But, as the PPI report also makes very clear, we still have a long way to go to bring incarceration anywhere into parity with our peer nations. In the meantime, we are sacrificing staggering amounts of financial and human capital to prisons and jails, while making poverty and violence worse, and hobbling our ability to solve the underlying problems that lead to crime. Only El Salvador, Cuba, and Rwanda have higher incarceration rates than the U.S.
And if you think those numbers are really driven by Texas and other punitive states, think again. Massachusetts has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States, yet the Massachusetts rate is 46% higher than China, almost twice as high as France, and almost 7x higher than Japan. Of the OECD countries, the one with the second highest rate after the U.S. is Poland (at the bottom of the PPI chart below), and Massachusetts still incarcerates people at a 20% higher rate. What will it take to become the number two OECD country when it comes to incarceration? Based on the current numbers, we will need to cut the U.S. incarceration rate by two thirds. It can be done! But it will take a lot of restructuring.
