County jails across America have released an average of 32% of their inmates amid the coronavirus pandemic, with some county facilities letting out more than half of those in custody, according to a criminal justice think tank tracking releases.
“In the last two months, local governments across the U.S. have drastically reduced their jail populations to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The typical jail has reduced its population by more than 30%,” the Prison Policy Initiative wrote in a new report.
Clackamas County, Oregon, topped the list of largest-known population reductions in large jails. Clackamas released 63% of inmates, followed by 58% in Faulkner County, Arkansas, and 57% in Bergen County, New Jersey. The Public Policy Initiative studied daily population data from 607 jails collected by the New York University Public Safety Lab.
“The strategies jails are using to reduce their populations vary by location, but they add up to big changes,” the think tank report reads. “In some counties, police are issuing citations in lieu of arrests, prosecutors are declining to charge people for ‘low-level offenses,’ courts are reducing the amounts of cash bail, and jail administrators are releasing people detained pretrial or those serving short sentences for ‘nonviolent offenses.'”
The more than 3,000 county jails nationwide hold people awaiting trial and others being held on shorter-term sentences that do not require going to a state prison for longer detention periods. Nationally, detainees at county jails make up one-third of the entire incarcerated population, with the other two-thirds held at state and federal prisons.
However, the organization found state prisons are releasing inmates at dramatically lower rates, averaging at 5% nationwide. North Dakota leads the country with 19% of inmates in state prisons let out since March, followed by Hawaii, Vermont, and Rhode Island. State prison detainees in Wyoming, Nebraska, Indiana, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Arizona stand the lowest chance of being released. Across those six states, 2% and fewer of detainees have been released.
The U.S. incarcerated population is higher than any other country, with 2.3 million detainees documented across America’s 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,134 local jails, 218 immigration detention facilities, and 90 Indian county jails.
Afghanistan, Turkey, Iran, Myanmar, and South Sudan lead the world in prison reduction rates between 20% and 33%.
