Giving Compass' Take:

• Emily Widra and Peter Wagner, at Prison Policy Initiative, explain how prisoners are suffering as initial efforts to reduce jail populations during COVID have slowed.

• How can we encourage policymakers to revisit their efforts to curb jail populations, as COVID is nowhere close to going away? How can donors support inmates and their families during the public health crisis?

• Find resources to support jail populations during the pandemic.

At a time when more new cases of the coronavirus are being reported each day, state and local governments should be redoubling their efforts to reduce the number of people in prisons and jails, where social distancing is impossible and the cycle of people in and out of the facility is constant. But our most recent analysis of data from hundreds of counties across the country shows that efforts to reduce jail populations have actually slowed — and even reversed in some places.

This trend is particularly alarming since we know it’s possible to further reduce these populations: in our previous analysis, we found that local governments initially took swift action to minimize jail populations, resulting in a median drop of more than 30% between March and May.

Some states’ prison population cuts are even less significant than they initially appear, because the states achieved those cuts partially by refusing to admit people from county jails. (At least two states, California and Oklahoma, did this.)

While refusing to admit people from jails does reduce prison density, it means that the people who would normally be admitted are still incarcerated, but in different correctional facilities that have more population turnover and therefore more chances for the virus to spread.

Prisons and jails are notoriously dangerous places during a viral outbreak, and public health professionals, corrections officials, and criminal justice reform advocates agree that decarceration will help protect both incarcerated people and the larger communities in which they live. It’s past time for U.S. prison and jail systems to meaningfully address the crisis at hand and reduce the number of people behind bars.

Read the full article about reducing jail populations by Emily Widra and Peter Wagner at Prison Policy Initiative.