Students and teachers are heading back to the classroom. In addition to math, science, and language arts, many will also focus on the criminal legal system and mass incarceration. Unfortunately for them, the carceral system operates like a black box, making it hard to study what’s happening inside the walls of prisons and jails. Fortunately, we have made it our business to make the data that does exist as accessible and understandable as possible through these curated mass incarceration teaching resources.

To better support the work of students and teachers, we’ve curated mass incarceration teaching resources, including a list of publications and tools they can use to better study the carceral system and that can serve as launchpads for further research.

To start any lesson on mass incarceration, you have to understand the U.S. doesn’t have one criminal legal system; instead, it has thousands of federal, state, local, and tribal systems that incarcerate a combined population of nearly 2 million people.

Our flagship report, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie, puts these pieces together to give the “big picture” of mass incarceration by explaining not only the scale of our carceral system but also the policy choices that have driven its expansion. It provides the most comprehensive picture of how many people are locked up in the U.S., in what types of facilities, and why. In addition to showing how many people are behind bars on any given day in the U.S., it goes on to bust 10 of the most persistent myths about prisons, jails, crime, and more.

No lesson about mass incarceration in America is complete without covering the stark racial disparities inherent in the system. Black people, for example, not only have higher incarceration rates than white people but are also more likely to receive harsher sentences, including life without parole and the death penalty.

To help teachers and students understand these disparities better, we produced a dataset containing over 100 state-specific graphics showing the number of people in state prisons and jails by race, ethnicity, and sex. Our data from mass incarceration resources compares Black and white imprisonment rates by state, finding that every state locks up Black people at a rate at least double that of white people — and, on average, at six times the rate of white residents.

Read the full article about mass incarceration teaching resources at Prison Policy Initiative.