America tries to shrink its prison state

The bad news about reducing mass incarceration is that most of the prisoners in the US are in state prison, and many are serving sentences for violent crimes. But the good news is that reducing the federal prison population is much more straightforward: just hand out shorter sentences for drug crimes.

This chart from the Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections (a blue-ribbon commission looking into incarceration and prison reform) and the Urban Institute shows just how much of the growth in federal prisons is due to drug crimes:

The US leads the world in incarceration, but most of its prisoners are in state prison. And a majority of state prisoners are serving sentences for violent crimes. That means that while states have made some progress in recent years in reducing their prison populations, it’s going to be extremely difficult for that trend to continue indefinitely.

This infographic, from the Marshall Project, shows how hard it is to reduce the prison population substantially just by targeting nonviolent, low-level offenders:

There’s growing momentum for reducing mass incarceration in America. Both the federal government and states are beginning to take a hard look at how many people they’re sending to prison and for how long.

But how did the US get here? Why did the US prison population grow so muchover the past 40 years?

Judges are trying to better integrate empirical evidence into their courtrooms, but a newer policy — evidence-based sentencing — is coming under increasing scrutiny from civil rights advocates.

Through evidence-based sentencing, various socioeconomic and demographic factors are used to determine the length of a defendant’s sentence. These can range from more controllable factors like a defendant’s criminal record to things like the rate of violence in a defendant’s neighborhood or even a family member’s criminal record. These measures are entered into a computer program, which spits out various models that judges use to determine a sentence for a defendant.

America’s criminal justice system disproportionately hurts people of color, particularly black and Hispanic men. Supporters of criminal-justice reform tend to point to that disparity as a good reason to change the system.

But as reforms move from proposals to actual bills, the key question is how to persuade the general public that change is needed. A new study suggests that highlighting racism in the criminal justice system is not the answer, and in fact pushes white voters in the opposite direction. Even when whites believe the current laws are too harsh, they’re less likely to support changing the law if they’re reminded that the current prison population is disproportionately black.

How bad is the mass incarceration problem in the US? So bad that Sesame Street featured a muppet with a father in prison, so as to help the 2.7 million American children with an incarcerated parent understand what happened.

Incarcerated people, parents or not, face a system that subjects them to often horrific conditions, and which is beyond racist in its impact. “It reminds me of a joke,” John Oliver explained on Last Week Tonight last night. “‘Black people who commit drug offenses, they go to jail like this, whereas white people don’t go to jail at all.” Watch him walk through, in considerable detail, every problem in our corrections system from the epidemic of prison rape to the perverse incentives created by prison privatization to the alleged use of sugar to treat wounds in prison clinics:

The United States Sentencing Commission just voted to let 46,290 federal prisoners apply to get out of prison sooner. The vote applied the Sentencing Commission’s latest reductions in federal sentencing guidelines, approved in April, to people currently serving sentences in federal prison for drug crimes.

Prisoners will begin to be released on November 1, 2015.

On July 18th, the US Sentencing Commission voted to make the latest reductions in federal sentencing guidelines, which it approved in April, apply to people currently serving sentences in federal prison for drug crimes.

46,265 prisoners will be eligible to apply to have their sentences reduced. The average reduction will be about 25 months. Prisoners will begin to be released on November 1, 2015.

Between 1811 and 1979, state and federal governments built 711 prisons in the US. Between 1980 and 2004, they built 936.

This map, compiled by MapStory’s Jon Marino with data from the Prison Policy Initiative, shows the proliferation of state and federal prisons in recent decades. The white dots show the slow, steady pace of new prisons between 1811 and 1979, while the black dots show an abrupt escalation of new prisons between 1980 and 2004.

Even the most liberal state in America has a higher incarceration rate than most other countries around the world, according to a new analysis from the Prison Policy Initiative.

The high incarceration rates — and the financial costs that come with them — have been a growing concern for federal and state lawmakers in recent years, particularly as they deal with constrained budgets in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The financial burden is so high that both Democrats and Republicans in state governments have been working to relax their drug and incarceration laws over the past five years.

Before the US Sentencing Commission held today’s hearing to consider whether to make its new sentencing guidelines retroactive, it put out a report estimating how many prisoners would be affected. Those estimates were based on what the Sentencing Commission calls “full retroactivity” — i.e. having judges consider the cases of everyone who received a longer sentence for a drug crime when they were convicted than they’d get if they were sentenced today (well, as of November, when the new guidelines go into effect going forward). The Commission concluded that 51,061 people would be eligible to have a judge consider reducing their sentences.

The Department of Justice’s counterproposal of “limited retroactivity” — preemptively disqualifying certain types of offenders from even having their cases considered — would obviously apply to fewer than 51,000 people. But the Sentencing Commission has told me they don’t plan to run a separate analysis considering the impact of the DOJ proposal, unless they’re asked to by federal judges or Congress. They’re planning to vote on whether to make the new guidelines retroactive on July 18th, so they don’t have much time for further research.

The DOJ’s position, presented by US Attorney Sally Quillian Yates, is that there should be “limited retroactivity.” The Sentencing Commission’s proposal calls for federal judges to look over each case to consider whether the inmate should get a shorter sentence. (Federal judges, represented by the Judicial Conference , support this plan.) But the DOJ thinks that the following people should be explicitly prohibited from getting their sentences reduced:

The Sentencing Commission estimates about 51,000 people would qualify for reduced sentences if the changes were made fully retroactive. It’s not clear how many of those people would qualify under the DOJ’s proposed limitations.

The federal government is contemplating a rule change that could reduce the sentences of more than 51,000 current prisoners — and save $2.4 billion.

But it’s still not clear what will happen to people currently in prison who were sentenced under the old guidelines. Will the new changes apply retroactively? That’s the big question the US Sentencing Commission is now debating.

This is a particularly horrifying statistic from America’s prison state:

The chart is from the Hamilton Project, and it tracks the cumulative incarceration rate for different birth cohorts. So all the way on the left you see the likelihood of imprisonment for men born between 1945 and 1949. All the way on the right you see it for men born between 1975 and 1979. And that’s where the numbers get insane.

Congress is extremely good at doing nothing. And if lawmakers can just keep that up for six more months, that could reduce the sentences of thousands of drug offenders who are currently in federal prisons.

Here’s how that could happen.

On April 23, the Department of Justice announced a new initiative to make it easier for certain prisoners to get their sentences reduced — through what are known as “commutations.” According to Yahoo News, the administration expects this initiative will allow “hundreds, maybe thousands” of prisoners to get their sentences reduced.

Commutations aren’t the same as pardons. Pardons are for people who have already been out of prison for several years, and who have rehabilitated themselves. Commutations, by contrast, are for people who are currently serving prison terms that the president deems unfairly harsh. But they both follow the same bureaucratic process, managed by the Office of the Pardon Attorney.

On Tuesday, President Obama did something he hasn’t done very often — he reduced the sentence of a federal prisoner.

But unlike the previous times that Obama has reduced (or “commuted”) the sentences of prisoners, this wasn’t a case of racial disparity or judicial malpractice. Obama was simply correcting a typo.