Prison Overcrowding in the United States

SIGNIFICANCE: In 2000, the number of persons incarcerated in the United States was nearly six times greater than it had been in 1970; in 2008, the country's prison and jail population peaked at 2,310,300. When the incarceration rate was at its highest in 2008, 760 out of every 100,000 people in the US were imprisoned, by far the highest rate among the world's most populous countries. Although the numbers of both state and federal prisons also increased during this time span, the total numbers of prisoners greatly exceeded their intended maximum capacities. By 2021, reforms and other factors had helped ease prison overcrowding, and the incarceration rate fell to 537 inmates per 100,000 adults.

From the mid-nineteenth century through around 1980, the rate of incarceration in the United States remained fairly stable. During the early 1980s, however, the rates of incarceration rose exponentially. The largest period of growth occurred between 1980 and 1995, when the rate of imprisonment grew four times larger than the rate that had been relatively stable for more than a century. Although the numbers of correctional facilities also increased, the number of inmates was too great a burden for the prison system to bear, resulting in severe overcrowding.

The overcrowding problem is worse in some states than others. Based on a 2019 calculation of operational capacity, a statistic that determines how many prisoners an institution can safely hold, the most overcrowded prisons were concentrated in the Midwest, with Iowa (119 percent), Nebraska (115.4 percent), and Idaho (110.1 percent) the most overcrowded. However, most states' prisons were at at least 90 percent operational capacity, which still represented significant strain on their resources.

Causes of Overcrowding

The simplest explanation for the prevalence of prison overcrowding is that there are too many inmates for the available prison beds. More substantive explanations account for what societal or criminal justice system factors led to the growth in imprisonment. From the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, the prison population expanded as courts began sentencing unprecedented numbers of people convicted of less serious offenses to prison. These measures were, in part, a response to rising crime rates and public disenchantment with the criminal justice system that had begun in the 1960s and continued into the 1980s.

Rising crime rates supported the long-standing conservative argument that individualized rehabilitative treatment of offenders does not deter criminals from reoffending. As a result, a “get-tough” movement developed in which prison terms became the foremost sentencing option for the courts. Many states established mandatory sentences for repeat offenders, even for small crimes.

A second reason for the population increase followed from the first: the so-called “War on Drugs,” which prompted renewed public calls for tougher punishments. In the past, most minor drug offenders had been sentenced merely to probation and community treatment. However, from the mid-1980s through the early 1990s, increases in incarceration of drug offenders accounted for one-third of prison population growth. Although the proportion later decreased, drug offenders accounted for nearly 20 percent of the total prison population growth during the 1990s. The imprisonment of drug offenders disproportionately affected people of color, in part due to far stricter sentences for possession of crack cocaine as opposed to powder cocaine, as well as due to stricter enforcement of drug laws in communities of color.

During the 1990s, the major cause of prison population growth shifted from the rate of admissions to longer sentences for those who were incarcerated. Lengths of sentences were increased for all major crimes, such as murder, rape, drug law violations, and burglary. These longer sentences were the result not only of the courts becoming more punitive, but also the "tough-on-crime" movement in criminal justice policy.

Criminologists have found evidence suggesting that criminal justice system factors such as structured sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums, which force judges to impose sentences with fixed minimums for specific offenses, have contributed to prison overcrowding. These policies have also had an outsized impact on incarceration rates for people of color; a 2020 report by the Sentencing Project found that, even in the wake of some reforms, Black Americans were imprisoned at nearly five times the rate of White Americans. In addition, during this time, many states abolished their parole systems or limited the discretion of parole boards to decide when to release offenders. Although these systemic factors are at least indirectly the result of societal factors, they are specific policies that have contributed to increases in prison populations.

Prison Overcrowding and the Courts

Prison overcrowding has been examined in the courts as a challenge to the Eighth Amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause, with reform advocates arguing that such conditions violate prisoner rights. The majority of the courts have held that the total conditions of an institution must be examined before the collective effects of overcrowding on inmates can be understood.

The US Supreme Court has heard several cases pertaining to prison overcrowding. In Rhodes v. Chapman (1981) the court allowed the housing of two inmates in cells designed for one person. In Wilson v. Seiter (1991) the Court found that for crowding to be considered a violation of the Eighth Amendment, plaintiffs must demonstrate deliberate indifference to basic inmate needs by prison staff that does not include the mere fact of an institution’s operating above its rated capacity.

In Farmer v. Brennan (1994) the court defined deliberate indifference more specifically by holding that prison officials must be aware that the specific indifference may increase the risk of substantial harm to inmates. Despite making it more difficult to prove that Eighth Amendment violations result from prison overcrowding, nearly 9 percent of all state and federal prisons were under court orders to limit their populations in 2000. However, that figure was considerably less than the nearly 21 percent of prisons rated as overcrowded in 1990.

In 2011, the Supreme Court case Brown v. Plata marked a radical step in federal efforts to reduce prison overcrowding. The controversial ruling declared that California, long the most prominent battleground over prison issues, must allow the early release of approximately thirty-seven thousand inmates as an emergency relief measure. The close decision was made only with the swing vote of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote that overcrowding indeed constituted a violation of federal rights.

Effects of Prison Overcrowding

The most significant and far-reaching effect of prison overcrowding is cost. In 2017, the cost of housing a single federal prisoner averaged around $36,300 dollars per year, but reached far higher under special circumstances. The rise in prison populations between 1982 and 1992 was reflected in a rise in annual spending in US corrections from roughly nine billion to nearly thirty-two billion dollars—the largest increase in any area of criminal justice expenditures over that time period. According to the "True Cost of Prisons" survey by the Vera Institute of Justice, in fiscal year 2010, the total cost of prisons to taxpayers in the forty states participating in the survey was $39 billion. A 2018 report by the Vera Institute found justice systems at the local level spent $25 billion per year on jails overall.

In addition to increasing costs, prison overcrowding affects both staff and inmates negatively. Some evidence suggests that prison overcrowding has increased staff and inmate tension and contributed to more assaults on staff and greater staff turnover. The effects on inmates are less clear. Some empirical studies have suggested prison crowding is associated with increased levels of prisoner stress, anxiety, and tension. Higher numbers of prisoners place a burden on services such as prison health care, counseling, and sanitation. Accordingly, crowded prisons have been associated with poor inmate adaptation, higher levels of prison violence such as inmate assaults, and collective actions, such as rioting. One such riot, which took place in February 2017 at the Vaughn prison facility (which was notoriously overcrowded and understaffed) in Delaware, involved the taking of hostages that eventually resulted in the death of a high-ranking correctional officer. On the other hand, other studies have suggested that overcrowding has little or no negative effect on inmates, and that inmate misconduct and increases in anxiety are caused by other factors.

Proposed Solutions

Various methods have been proposed or tried in efforts to reduce prison overcrowding, one of the key concerns of prison reform. A 2013 report by the Urban Institute social policy research center surveyed many potential options, including some then under consideration by Congress, and presented its recommended courses of action. These included reducing the number of people incarcerated for drug violations, shortening mandatory sentences for other drug offenses, allowing judges more discretion in sentencing drug offenders and white-collar criminals, reducing the truth-in-sentencing requirement that inmates serve at least 85 percent of their sentence, and further reducing sentences for good behavior or enrollment in drug rehabilitation programs. Other suggested specific measures designed to reduce overcrowding include releasing elderly prisoners or certain inmates older than fifty-five years old, improving the process for transferring noncitizen inmates to their home countries, and retroactively applying the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the sentences of those convicted for crack cocaine violations to levels comparable with powdered cocaine sentences and addressed a longstanding disparity in how those crimes were prosecuted. In 2013, the Department of Justice began its Smart on Crime program, which attemped to move away from tough-on-crime sentencing, particularly in regard to drug crimes.

More general proposed solutions include providing a variety of alternatives to prison sentences, such as community supervision, rehabilitation programs, and criminal recidivism reduction programs. Most efforts emphasize the reduced costs of such measures while arguing that they can be equally effective at keeping communities safe as high imprisonment, if not more so. More radical suggestions include decriminalization of drugs and widespread use of electronic monitoring systems to track offenders granted parole or probation, though neither has seen much support. In February 2015, the MacArthur Foundation announced its Safety and Justice Challenge, a five-year, $75 million initiative to decrease local justice systems' dependence on imprisonment.

First Step Act and Other Legislation

By the late 2010s, efforts to address prison overcrowding and other related issues began to gain more momentum, and US lawmakers began to take more serious steps to find a solution. While overcrowding in prisons and the incarceration rate had already begun to fall, many activists and politicians felt that legislation was still needed to properly address the issue's root causes. In 2015, a criminal justice reform bill included many key reforms, including reducing prison time for drug offenders, and gained bipartisan support, including from President Barack Obama, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and senators and congresspeople from both parties. However, the bill ultimately failed to pass, in part due to some Republicans' unwillingness to reduce minimum sentences for federal crimes.

Despite this setback, criminal justice advocates continued to press for legislative action, and in 2018, a new bipartisan bill, the First Step Act, gained the support of President Donald Trump. The First Step Act incorporated a range of reforms, including shorter sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, reduced lengths for mandatory prison sentences, and greater freedom for judges to use their own discretion in certain cases. It also included the retroactive application of the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, which had the potential to affect thousands of Americans imprisoned for crack cocaine offenses under earlier sentencing requirements and address some longstanding racial disparities in US prisons. After it passed both the House and the Senate with overwhelming majorities, President Trump signed the First Step Act into law on December 21, 2018. This move immediately freed over 3,100 people from prison.

In January 2022, the Justice Department announced expanded eligibility for First Step Act programs; this allowed even more imprisoned people to complete their sentences early, and opened up the possibility of early freedom for thousands of people who qualified for home confinement or who met other early release conditions.

Impact of COVID-19 on Prison Overcrowding

While legislative reforms had their impact, a further reduction in prison overcrowding occurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which first emerged in China in late 2019 and spread to the US by early 2020. The SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused COVID-19 was extremely contagious, and as infections began to surge across the US in February and March 2020, many health experts raised concerns about how overcrowded prisons could serve as perfect incubators for disease. In response, many local and federal prison officials agreed to release some prisoners in order to ease overcrowding and reduce the severity of COVID-19 outbreaks in prisons and jails. As a result, the total US prison and local jail population dropped from 2.1 million in 2019 to 1.8 million in June 2020, a decrease of 14 percent. The 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests, which began in May 2020 in the aftermath of George Floyd's death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, put additional pressure on officials to address overcrowding and other injustices within jails and prisons.

However, not all of these reductions in overcrowding lasted beyond the acute first phase of the pandemic. As many states and cities reported increased crime rates beginning in late 2020, the incarceration rate in many jurisdictions began to rise again; for example, New York City saw a 70 percent reduction in its prison and jail population from 2019 to June 2020, followed by a 40 percent increase from June 2020 to March 2021. Additionally, many racial disparities persisted; while the White jail population declined 28 percent between 2019 and 2020, the Black jail population only declined 22 percent during the same period.

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