The criminal justice system in the US is presented not by one solid institution, but by a variety of federal, state, local and tribal systems. This inconsistency makes the whole structure and its decision-making process look obscure to the citizens. Thus, the comparative analysis of incarceration statistics of the US between 2020 and 2022 can help in outlining the main trends of national confinement system.
After looking through the pie charts of 2022, the most surprising trend there is the number of non-convicted people who are held in jails (Sawyer & Wagner, 2022). In comparison with previous statistics of Sawyer & Wagner (2020), the number of people presumed innocent who are held in prisons rose from 64% in 2020 to 67% in 2022. Although, the overall number of imprisoned dropped from 746,000 to 658,000 accordingly. Thus, a large share of people is held behind the bars of local jails unreasonably. In addition, the main reason of incarceration for people who are on probation or parole is technical violation of the conditions, unrelated to commission of a crime. This trend is constant through the reviewed period.
Therefore, the “whole pie” data allows us to see the injustice in the disparate confinement systems of the US, which is proved by the examples above. The overall trend the Mass Incarceration statistics present is that justice resources are mostly focused on policing and confining more vulnerable communities, often without a solid cause. This data can be useful in order to improve the US correctional policy in terms of identifying the most frequent factors of incarcerations and the ways of eliminating them (Hickson et al., 2022). In the future, this might help to reduce the number of imprisonment cases at the system level, since even a short-time confinement of a single person is harmful for the whole community.
References
Hickson, A., Purbey, R., Dean, L., Gallo, J. J., Thorpe, R. J., Pollack Porter, K., & Chandran, A. (2022). A consequence of mass incarceration: county-level association between jail incarceration rates and poor mental health days. Health & Justice, 10(1), 1-8.
Sawyer, W., & Wagner, P. (2020). Mass incarceration: The whole pie 2020. Prison Policy Initiative. Web.
Sawyer, W., & Wagner, P. (2022). Mass incarceration: The whole pie 2022. Prison Policy Initiative. Web.