A new BJS report shows that U.S. jails reduced their populations by 25% in the first few months of the pandemic. But even then, the U.S. was still putting more people in local jails than most countries incarcerate in total. Before the pandemic, jails nationwide held almost 742,000 people on any given day, and over the course of the year, there were 10.3 million jail admissions. But by the end of June 2020, 185,000 fewer people were held in jails than in June 2019. Most of that change occurred in the first half of 2020, largely fueled by decreasing admissions and, to a lesser extent, by expedited releases due to the pandemic. In the one-year period ending June 30, 2020, there were 1.67 million fewer jail admissions – a 16% drop compared to the preceding year. Of those who were booked into jails between March 1 and June 30, 2020, 208,500 (almost 9%) received an expedited release in response to COVID-19.

We saw that when pressed, local criminal justice systems did shift toward some of the common-sense changes that reform advocates have long called for (at least temporarily): eliminating unnecessary arrests and incarceration for offenses and violations that don’t threaten public safety, and ending pretrial detention for most, if not all, defendants.

Early in the pandemic, many police departments were encouraged to use arrest as “a tool of last resort,” reducing stops, shifting to citations in lieu of arrest, and adopting other best practices. At the same time, many courts took action to reduce admissions and pretrial detention.

Of course, the Impact of COVID-19 report also reveals some disturbing jail trends during the pandemic. First, local justice systems could and should have done more to further depopulate jails, where social distancing is impossible and the flow of people in and out of facilities puts everyone around them, incarcerated or not, at greater risk. Even after reducing admissions and increasing releases, a significant number of jails were still overcrowded: average jail occupancy rate fell from 81% to 60% from 2019 to 2020, but in June 2020, 1 in 14 jails still held over 100% of their rated capacity.

The decrease in jail populations did also nothing to address the glaring racial disparities in jails. In fact, while the total jail population dropped by 25% between June 2019 and June 2020, racial disparities increased over the same period. In June of 2019, Black people were incarcerated in jails at about 3.3 times the rate of white people; a year later, the racial gap had widened so that Black people were jailed at 3.5 times the rate of white people. Moreover, the decrease in white jail incarceration outpaced the decreases among Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and multi-racial people.

Furthermore, despite its 25% decline in jail populations, the U.S. jail incarceration rate alone (that is, excluding people held in state and federal prisons) still far exceeds international norms. After cutting jail populations during the early months of the pandemic, the U.S. still locked up more people per capita in jails alone than most countries do in any type of confinement facilities. At the end of June 2020, 167 per 100,000 U.S. residents were held in local jails; that’s still well over the total incarceration rates of peer countries like the U.K., Canada, and France.

Read the full article about prisons during the pandemic by  Alexi Jones and Wendy Sawyer at Prison Policy Initiative.