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According to a recent New York Times article, New York City officials have just allocated $130 million over four years to expand public health services at almost every step of the criminal justice process. This is an important part of the state’s effort to reduce the growing number of incarcerated people with mental health and substance abuse problems in New York City’s jails. The new plan will shift emphasis from punishment for minor crimes to treatment and the changes include tripling the size of both pretrial diversion programs and the amount of resources devoted to easing the transition from jail back into society.

Today the Education from the Inside Out Coalition launched thevideo diaries project as part of acampaign to ban the box in higher education. The ten-week series is a fictional dramatization of the real life challenges individuals with criminal convictions face when applying to colleges and universities. Through the project, viewers will witness the struggles and […]

In March 2014, the Prison Policy Initiative released a graphic visually clarifying the amount of people incarcerated within systems of federal, state, local, and other types of confinement in America. These various systems hold over 2.4 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 2,259 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails, and 79 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories. The briefing reveals fascinating statistics on the enormous churn in and out of American prisons and jails, on the amount of people incarcerated for drug-related crimes, on the vast number of children behind bars for minor offenses, and on immigration-related detentions. The sources behind the graphic are multiple, but they include the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

The Editorial Board at the New York Timespublished an editorial on September 21st, 2014, pointing to the obstacles individuals with criminal records face in being admitted to higher education programs. The editorial states: “There is a widely overlooked obstacle to higher education that confronts at least 70 million Americans who have criminal records – often […]

As James Kilgore reveals in a recent article in Counterpunch, “The Persistence of Mass Incarceration,” despite growing optimism over the past four years that mass incarceration was on the decline, the 2013 Bureau of Justice annual statistics report revealed that incarceration numbers (for state and federal prisons combined) have in fact risen for the first time since 2009–a rise of about .3%. Importantly, the report details that the number of people in federal facilities actually declined for the first time since 1980 with 1,900 fewer prisoners in 2013 than in 2012; however, the increase of 6,300 individuals (0.5%) incarcerated in state facilities contributed to the overall rise. In Massachusetts specifically, the number of men imprisoned also fell from 2012 to 2013, while the number of women imprisoned remained consistent.