Report: Pennsylvania and U.S. straddle two visions for crime and punishment
By Christina Lengyel | The Center Square
(The Center Square) – As Pennsylvania grapples with ways to better care for and rehabilitate the tens of thousands of people held in its prison system, a sweeping report shows the nation at a crossroads and taxpayers holding a $182 billion price tag for incarceration.
The Prison Policy Initiative, or PPI, is a nonpartisan organization that advocates for criminal justice reform. In its recent view of the ‘Whole Pie’ of mass incarceration, the PPI pulled together data from the thousands of disparate local, state, and federal agencies responsible for the incarcerated in America.
“This data tells the story of states taking two divergent paths,” said Wendy Sawyer, Research Director of the PPI. “The first path works to reduce the number of people behind bars, recognizing that every person who is locked up represents the failure of overly-punitive policies. The other path doubles down on the misguided policies that created the nation’s mass incarceration crisis by locking more people up, destroying lives, and making communities less safe.”
Pennsylvania falls somewhere in the middle. Though the overall prison population dropped by 6,842 people between 2019 and 2023 to 85% of its previous numbers, the trajectory from 2021 to 2023 was one of adding to that population. This trend reflects the shift seen across the country, in which numbers declined due to the COVID-19 pandemic and have since begun to creep up.
By 2023, nine states reduced their prison populations by at least 20% of their 2019 numbers. Neighboring New Jersey dropped by a comparatively massive 37%. New York’s population of incarcerated people declined by 25% overall, but like Pennsylvania, its numbers have begun to trend back upward. Only 10 states continued to decrease their numbers in 2021 through 2023.
Still, some states showed a stronger appetite than others for what the initiative refers to as “old, ineffective ‘tough on crime’” policies. Nine states accounted for 77% of prison population growth from 2021 to 2023, with Texas, Florida, and Georgia leading the pack.
In a recent article published by The Center Square, two separate figures were given about the number of people incarcerated in Pennsylvania. The first, nearly 40,000, represented those under the care of the state’s Department of Corrections. The second figure was the state’s incarceration rate of 589 per 100,000 people, which signifies over 76,000 of the state’s 13 million-person population.
Broken down by the initiative, Pennsylvania has about 37,910 people under state corrections’ care; 31,303 people in county jails; 1,002 children in juvenile detention; 55 people in civil commitment; 359 people in forensic psychiatric institutions; and 5,726 people in federal prison.
The commonwealth’s incarceration rate hovers near the national rate, which currently sits at 614 per 100,000 people per the initiative and 541 per 100,000 per the World Prison Brief – both estimates well above any other modern democracy and fifth highest globally.
El Salvador, home to the “mega prison” to which the Trump administration has begun sending deportees, has the highest of all countries, at 1,659 people per 100,000 per the WPB.
Churn is a factor that’s very hard to capture in these numbers. At any given time, people leave local jails who may be released without charges or who committed minor offenses and can be released on their own recognizance, and those who have made bail. In Pennsylvania, at least 170,000 people go to jail annually.
The vast majority of people in local jails have not been convicted of a crime. Many never will be. In the United States, all people, regardless of citizenship, are presumed innocent until proven guilty, but that doesn’t mean they are automatically released from custody once charges are filed.
Rather, most are subject to the bail system, which in Pennsylvania averages over $20,000, with a median of about $5,000. At a 10% bail bondsman rate, even an innocent person must be able to access hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to regain their freedom. Critics say the system favors those with disposable income while keeping low-income and people of color disproportionately incarcerated.
Some Pennsylvania legislators, like Sen. Sharif Street, D-Philadelphia, have sought to end cash bail, following the example of other states like California and New Jersey. In 2018, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office stopped requesting cash bail for a wide range of offenses without any impact on court appearances.
Advocates for bail reform say that at best, keeping people in pretrial incarceration is a massive expense to the taxpayers. The state pays upwards of $40,000 per prisoner per year, regardless of whether they’re convicted of a crime.
With national trends toward increased incarceration and a massive jump in federal detainees as the Trump administration unleashes new deportation policies, bright spots for prison reform advocates are few.
“The story of policymaking in the last couple of years has been more one of regression,” said Sawyer.
The lead researcher did see one space of encouragement.
“People are becoming aware of how many older people are incarcerated and have been incarcerated for decades and how silly it is to keep them locked up in the name of public safety at least.”
Initiatives to that end have seen bipartisan support and are awaiting legislative action in the commonwealth.
