Mass Incarceration Resource Library

A report by Common Cause that discusses how money in politics, felony disenfranchisement and prison gerrymandering fuel mass incarceration and undermine democracy.

A report by the Prison Policy Initiative that summarizes the weak relationship between incarceration and crime reduction, and highlights proven strategies for improving public safety that are more effective and less expensive than incarceration.

This report by the Prison Policy Initiative provides another metric for understanding where your state falls within the national landscape of mass incarceration. Our state-specific breakdowns (below) suggest where state advocates and policymakers might start when developing proposals for meaningful justice reform.

The Sentencing Project compiles state-level criminal justice data from a variety of sources.

An argument by Peoples Policy Project and LEAP for incarcerated voter enfranchisement.

This report by the Prison Policy Initiative offers some much needed clarity by piecing together this country’s disparate systems of confinement.

This report by The Sentencing Project is intended to update and expand previous work on the scope and distribution of felony disenfranchisement in the United States. The numbers presented here represent a best assessment of the state of felony disenfranchisement as of the November 2016 election.

This Report by The Sentencing Project examines how Felony disenfranchisement rates vary by state, as states institute a wide range of disenfranchisement policies.

This Law Review Article, by Prison Policy Initiative’s Peter Wagner, is a highly-readable introduction to the problem of prison-based gerrymandering and its remedies.

This website page is the Prison Policy Initiative’s Prison Gerrymandering Project explanation of what Prison Gerrymandering is and why it is a problem.

This report by the ACLU finds that mass incarceration provides a gigantic windfall for one special interest group — the private prison industry — even as current incarceration levels harm the country as a whole.

This report by In the Public interest discusses the use of prison bed occupancy guarantee clauses in prison privatization contracts and explore how bed occupancy guarantees undermine criminal justice policy and democratic, accountable government.

This report by the Prison Policy Initiative, in this first-of-its-kind report, finds that the system of mass incarceration costs the government and families of justice-involved people at least $182 billion every year.

This report by the Prison Policy Initiative explores high phone rates and fees in prisons and jails.

This report by the National Consumer Law Center, highlights how private companies are profiting from financial extractions taken from vulnerable individuals based on their exposure to the criminal legal system. As the report documents, the corrections industry operates largely without consumer regulation or government enforcement—even as companies often take advantage of the threat of criminal consequences and consumers’ lack of knowledge about their rights.