Content categorized as 'Correctional' is limited in scope to the US Correctional Industry. It does not include cross-industry topics that affect multiple United States industries or areas of study and does not reach internationally.
Prisons and jails frequently suffer from overcrowding. Even in the best of times they are, by definition, facilities where people are placed in close contact with each other on a near-constant basis. This article examines ways correctional administrators can improve outcomes for those held in facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prison systems have begun vaccine distribution for incarcerated people. A table of states that publicly report real-time vaccination data is available on our System Report page. For states that are not reporting public numbers, The COVID Prison Project has estimated the amount of incarcerated people and staff that have been vaccinated from media reports. This table is updated on a daily basis.
UCLA Law collected data on COVID-19 in prisons, jails, and immigration detention centers, as well as pandemic-related prison and jail releases, legal filings and court orders, and grassroots and community organizing efforts. The website reports the data and is updated regularly.
The coronavirus, or COVID-19, has been declared by the World Health Organization to be a global pandemic. As the number of people infected in the United States grows exponentially, we must focus on prevention and containment in the criminal and immigration legal systems. Vera and Community Oriented Correctional Health Services have created a series of fact sheets to guide actors in these systems, who have a unique and critical role to play.
Local jails in the United States experienced a large decline in their inmate populations from June 30, 2019 to June 30, 2020, which can be attributed mainly to the COVID-19 pandemic. The inmate population confined in local jails was 549,100 at the end of June 2020, down from 734,500 at the end of June 2019. The midyear 2020 inmate population was the lowest since 1996, when 518,500 inmates were confined in local jails (not shown in tables).
This briefing provides recommendations for changes that will prevent and address human rights violations of people in detention and serving sentences in the community, in the context of COVID-19.
The nation’s imprisonment rate is at its lowest level in more than two decades. The greatest decline has come among black Americans, whose imprisonment rate has decreased 34% since 2006.
There were 1,501 black prisoners for every 100,000 black adults at the end of 2018, according to a new report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), the statistical agency of the U.S. Justice Department. That was down sharply from 2,261 black inmates per 100,000 black adults at the end of 2006, according to an earlier BJS study. These statistics only count inmates sentenced to more than a year in state or federal prison. They exclude inmates held in local jails and those sentenced to shorter periods of imprisonment.
The federal prison population, which declined for the first time in decades under President Barack Obama, fell further during the administration of President Donald Trump.
Having a global pandemic steamroll its way through a state’s economy is no one’s good idea of enacting budgetary restraints. But facing reality is not optional. Texas has faced budget tightening in its corrections system before. So, legislators must address this situation in a similar fashion— by once again prioritizing finite resources while, this time, seeking to get a handle on a costly, aging prison population and reducing technical violations that undermine the entire purpose of community supervision in the first place.
