Mass Incarceration’s Complex Statistics

Since 2007, the overall prison population has declined by roughly 1 percent each year. Such a statistic might suggest that the problem of mass incarceration in America is improving. But that belies a complicated truth about the way this nation puts people behind bars.

A new report from the Vera Institute of Justice looks at how incarceration has been measured in the past, and puts forward a new method of evaluation, one that looks at four key indicators: prison admissions, jail admissions, pretrial jail populations, and sentenced jail populations. In order to truly understand the severity and causality of the country’s approach to criminal justice, the report says it is vital to dig into the relationship between local jails and prisons. While federal imprisonment contributes to the issue of mass incarceration, Vera’s study examines local and state incarceration where, they say, data is more readily available and reform efforts are possible more often than they are at the federal level.