• Over 10 million arrests are made each year, many accompanied by physical, sexual, and verbal violence and abuse, irrevocably changing the course of millions of lives. 

• Over 73 million people, or 1 in 3 people in the U.S., currently have a criminal record.

Black people represent 13% of the population but a quarter of arrests annually, and 28% of people arrested multiple times in 2017. One in 3 Black men can expect to be arrested before they’re even 23 years old.

People arrested 3 or more times in a year are disproportionately Black, low-income, unemployed, and have unmet health needs:

• 42% were Black.

• half reported incomes less than $10,000, and were four times more likely to be unemployed.

• over half reported substance dependence in the past year.

• people with unmet mental health needs were three times more likely to experience multiple arrests.

• people who experienced multiple arrests were also 3 times more likely not to have health insurance, and 11 times more likely to be living with HIV.

The vast majority of people who experienced multiple arrests (88%) are arrested for nonviolent offenses.

Black people also make up over 40% of the 2.3 million people currently incarcerated in cages, and are 5 times more likely to be incarcerated than white people. 

1 in 3 Black men and 1 in 2 Black trans women report experiencing incarceration in their lifetime. 

Black women and girls represent the fastest growing prison and jail populations, outpacing the rate of growth of the incarcerated men’s population by 50% over the past four decades, and a significant proportion of the over 5 million people currently on probation and parole.

Skyrocketing investment in policing, criminalization, and incarceration has also driven growing poverty and homelessness, school and clinic closures, diminishing quality and resources for public education, and cuts to community-based mental health and social services, driving more and more Black people into the maw of the criminal punishment system.

There is NO EVIDENCE that this massive spending on incarceration reduces harm or violence or keeps communities safer — instead, it has devastated generations of Black people and communities. Black communities are flooded with police and surveillance, while simultaneously being denied protection from harm and experiencing massive divestment, neglect, and organized abandonment.

A substantial body of research confirms that jobs, education, housing, and universal access to comprehensive holistic health care make communities stronger and keep them safer.

Investments in voluntary, patient-centered, community-based mental health care and substance dependence treatment, universally accessible education, including universal pre-K, living wage jobs, childcare and other family supports, transportation, quality and affordable housing, and social institutions and benefits are far more successful in reducing violence and harm than police or prisons, while improving life outcomes for all. 

We are also increasingly recognizing that criminalization is not an effective prevention strategy or response to violence. It often produces more violence, and is increasingly leading to criminalization of survivors of violence.

Prevention and community-based programs rooted in transformation are far more likely to produce lasting change and reduce violence in our communities.

FEDERAL INVESTMENTS IN POLICING AND PUNISHMENT.

A series of laws passed in the 1990s continue to incentivize spending on policing and prisons and legislate punitive responses to public health crises. One such law, the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (VCCLEA or the ‘94 Crime Bill):

• Authorized $10 billion in subsidies to expand state prisons;

• Established a system to compensate states for incarcerating migrants;

• Established the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), which has invested over $14 billion in local law enforcement agencies since 1994; and

• incentivized states through grant funding to establish school policing programs and security technology ($1 billion), and ensure that people convicted of crimes be required to serve 85% of their sentences (“truth in sentencing”) ($680 million).

At the time of its passage, the ‘94 Crime Bill authorized an additional $30.2 billion over six years to increase law enforcement and prison infrastructure. As a result, the number of law enforcement officers across the country increased by 28%, including increases in the number of police in schools.

• established the “three-strikes” rule at the federal level;

• allowed 13 year olds to be tried as adults;

• created dozens of new federal offenses, including 60 new federal death penalty eligible offenses;

• enhanced penalties for drug offenses; and

• created new and increased penalties for immigration offenses.

The bill also gave the Department of Justice the authority to investigate patterns and practices of law enforcement misconduct. However, this authority has been exercised with respect to only a tiny fraction of law enforcement agencies across the country, and has been consistently underfunded and limited by political priorities. The current federal administration declared its intention to virtually eliminate its oversight of local law enforcement agencies through such investigations.

While law enforcement falls primarily within state and local jurisdiction, the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grants (JAG) program, enacted in 2005, is the primary source of federal funding to state and local law enforcement agencies. The JAG program enables the federal government to make grants to states and units of local government to provide additional personnel, equipment supplies, contractual support training, technical assistance, and information systems to law enforcement, prosecution, courts, jails and detention centers, drug treatment and enforcement, planning, evaluation and technology improvement programs, crime victim and witness programs, prevention and education programs, and mental health programs and related law enforcement, jail and prison programs, including behavioral programs and crisis intervention teams.

Total funding distributed through JAG averages about $435 million a year, not including $2 billion appropriated in 2009. In 2019, these funds included $20 million for Project Safe Neighborhoods, a program led by local U.S. Attorneys’ Offices that increased federal enforcement and prosecution of gun and gang crimes through federal-local task forces.

In 2015, the COPS office established by the ‘94 crime bill gave $163 million to police departments across the country. In 2020 – before COVID19 and the CARES Act which provided for an additional $850 million to law enforcement – it was slated to give away half a billion, including:

• Approximately $400 million for hiring and rehiring entry-level career law enforcement officers in order to preserve jobs and increase policing capacity.

• Up to $50 million for the School Violence Prevention Program (SVPP), which provides funding to put police in schools. This program continues despite consistent calls for removal of police from schools from students and parents calling for increased investment in supportive services for young people instead.

• Up to $35 million for the Anti-Heroin Task Force (AHTF) Program, which targets the public health problem of opioid use.

• Up to $13 million for the COPS Anti-Methamphetamine Program (CAMP), which continues to present policing as the solution to the public health problem of methamphetamine use.

• Up to $5.6 million for Community Policing Development (CPD). Funding for “community policing” continues despite the lack of a clear and consistent definition and the absence of evidence that “community policing” reduces police profiling, discriminatory enforcement, or violence.

These funds do not include the estimated $6 billion worth of surplus military equipment that has gone to local law enforcement, 20 college campuses, and over 20 school districts through the Department of Defense’s (DOD) 1033 Program. Additionally, between 2001 and 2011, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) alone gave over $34 billion in direct grants to state and local law enforcement, as well as other first responders. Additional funds are allocated through the State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance account in the Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies (CRS) Appropriations Act.

Investment in policing at the federal level has also increased dramatically through skyrocketing spending on federal law enforcement agencies, including Customs and Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, the federal government has spent an estimated $324 billion on the agencies that carry out immigration enforcement. The number of U.S. Border Patrol agents nearly doubled, and the number of ICE agents devoted to enforcement tripled.

The annual budget of the U.S. Border Patrol has increased more than ten fold since 1993, from $363 million to more than $4.1 billion. Border Patrol and ICE budgets have more than doubled since 2003. Much of ICE’s current $7.6billion budget is spent on incarcerating immigrants in detention. The 2019 budget featured $400 million to the DEA, continuing a trend of increasing funding since 2017.

These funds are distributed to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies with little or no oversight, particularly in the wake of the DOJ’s abdication of its oversight powers.

There are no public accountability mechanisms for agencies receiving federal funding for law enforcement.