(Co-authored with Chase Montagnet & Jasmine Heiss for the Vera Institute.)

The COVID-19 pandemic transformed daily life in the United States and brought the dehumanizing and life-shortening nature of incarceration further into the light. Jails and prisons have been, and continue to be, devastated by a virus that spreads in close quarters. Many of the largest outbreaks of COVID-19 have been tied to prisons and large jails: 3,336 cases at a crowded state prison in California’s Central Valley, and 3,216 cases at the county jail in Houston, Texas. Smaller facilities have had bad outbreaks too: 229 cases at a jail meant to hold 365 people in Cascade County, Montana—the first outbreak in the region. In March 2020, scientists and experts sounded the alarm about the risk of COVID-19 outbreaks in jails and prisons. Advocates called for releases from jails and prisons as a public health and racial justice measure. But no level of government took adequate mitigation measures, if they made any effort at all. Many correctional officers, apparently fearing for their health, left their jobs to return to the safety of their homes; for example, after large outbreaks, around onethird of the jobs are vacant at Arkansas’s two largest prisons. Incarcerated people, by definition, do not have this freedom to protect themselves, although some took matters into their own hands. As one man who escaped a federal prison told reporters, “I signed up for a jail sentence, not a death sentence.”

New data collected by Vera and detailed in this report reveals that as the year wore on, the United States saw an unprecedented drop in total incarceration. The historic changes in prison and jail populations triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic came during a national wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations and accompanying demands to change the criminal legal system in the United States. As a result, there was far more pressure on officials to release people from prison and jail in 2020 than in prior years. Local jails drove the initial decline, although prisons also made modest reductions. From summer to fall 2020, prison populations declined further, but jails began to refill, showing the fragility of population reductions. Jails in rural counties saw the biggest initial drops, but still incarcerate people at double the rate of urban and suburban areas. Despite the historic drop in the number of people incarcerated, the United States still incarcerates a large share of its population. The decrease was neither substantial nor sustained enough to be considered an adequate response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

For more information, read the report or fact sheet. If you would like to view most of the source data used in the report download this file.