While Black people represent about 13% of the population of the U.S., we represent upwards of 40% of people caged in jails, prisons, and youth detention.

• 1 in 3 Black men, and 1 in 2 Black transgender women, experience incarceration at some point in their lifetime.
• Black women continue to be incarcerated at twice the rate of white women, and represent the fastest growing prison and jail populations. In some states, decreases in the population of people in men’s prisons have been overshadowed by increases in populations in prisons for women.
• 1 in 2 Black women have an incarcerated loved one, and 1 in 9 children have an incarcerated parent.
  

The incarceration rate of LGBTQ people is three times that of the general population, and 42% of people in women’s prisons and jails identify as lesbian, bisexual, or as having had a same sex relationship prior to incarceration.

People labeled with mental health disabilities and substance use, dependence, or addiction (noting that people often experience these conditions simultaneously), as well as people with physical disabilities, are overrepresented in carceral spaces. Official data indicates that 85% of youth in detention and 30-50% of adults in jails and prisons are disabled. Disability justice advocates emphasize that these figures likely represent an underestimate, as there is no truly accurate count of the total number of disabed people or people who experience substance dependence who are currently incarcerated.

Everyone who comes into contact with the criminal punishment system is deeply harmed—and imprisoned disabled people experience exacerbated harms. Disabled incarcerated people are routinely subjected to all manner of abuse, neglect, and isolation, including physical and sexual abuse by guards, prison employees, and other incarcerated people, being doused with chemical sprays, shocked with electronic stun guns and restraint chairs, and strapped for hours and days to chairs or beds, and being held in solitary confinement for months and years at a time, creating and exacerbating existing mental health conditions and physical disabilities. This leads to higher rates of suicide and deaths among incarcerated disabled people, though the number of casualties is unclear in part because jails and prisons do not keep consistent or accurate records of deaths in custody. Additionally, incarcerated people who experience substance dependence are routinely denied medically assisted withdrawal, causing severe suffering and, in all too many cases, death.

The rate at which the U.S. imprisons its people and the staggering percentage of incarcerated people who are Black and disabled reflect a deep historical legacy of criminalizing Black and disabled people during slavery and in its aftermath as a means of controlling our bodies, labor, reproduction, and resistance.

They are also the products of our contemporary societal orientation toward criminalization, containment, and control as default responses to every harm, conflict, and need, and as the primary responses to conditions created by structural social, political, and economic oppression. The use of imprisonment and carceral control as responses to everything from homelessness, poverty, and participation in survival economies, to disability and substance dependence, to self-defense and self-managed care, to exercises of sexual, reproductive, medical, and gender autonomy, has devastating effects on criminalized and imprisoned people, their families, and their communities.

Criminalized and incarcerated people have served as leaders in movements for Black liberation for centuries, challenging conditions of Black people and offering visions of liberation behind and beyond prison walls. We are inspired by and accountable to the leadership of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated Black people, and support their resistance to conditions of confinement and demands for freedom.

Solitary Confinement

Prisons, jails, and detention centers across the country often fail to provide necessary medical screenings for mental disability or substance dependency. They also fail to provide appropriate substance abuse treatment, including medically assisted withdrawal, as well as quality and timely medical treatment for HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C, dental treatment, and treatment for diabetes, cancer, respiratory conditions, and gender affirming care. Routine practices of sterilization, forced abortion or denial of abortions, denial of appropriate prenatal care, elder abuse, medical experimentation on imprisoned people, and denial of medically necessary care and hospice care violate incarcerated people’s rights and dignity.

Although shackling of pregnant people is widely regarded as an assault on human dignity, as well as an unsafe medical practice, incarcerated people who are pregnant are still routinely shackled during pregnancy and childbirth. Restraining pregnant people at any time increases potential for physical harm from an accidental trip or fall. This also poses a risk of serious harm to the fetus, increasing the potential for miscarriage. During labor, delivery, and postpartum recovery, shackling can interfere with appropriate medical care, and be detrimental to the health of both the parent and newborn child. Despite the fact that shackling pregnant people is degrading, unnecessary, and a violation of human rights, only 22 states and the District of Columbia currently prohibit the practice by law.

Additionally, conditions inside prisons and detention centers, including overcrowding, widespread pest infestations, mold, unsanitary conditions, expired, rotten, and low quality and low nutritional value food, intermittent and contaminated water supplies, and intermittent electricity pose significant health risks.

Incarcerated people are often charged fees (ranging from $2 to $100 annually in Texas) to obtain medical care. A survey of over 1000 LGBTQ prisoners found that the vast majority (83%) of respondents reported being required to pay a fee to see a doctor, preventing 43% of respondents from seeking medical care when they needed it. Additionally, more than half of respondents were denied some medical care they requested. Similarly, a 2011 national survey of transgender people found that 12% of people who had been in jails or prisons reported denial of routine health care and 30% of Black transgender respondents reported denial of hormones while incarcerated.

Over half (55%) of men and three quarters (73%) of women incarcerated in state prisons have a mental health condition, and the number of people with mental health needs in prisons, jails, and youth detention continues to rise. Yet prisons, jails, and immigration and youth detention facilities across the country do not offer adequate mental health treatment—just 1 in 3 people in state prison and 1 in 6 people in jail have received treatment for their condition since being incarcerated. They also fail to protect people with unmet mental health needs from physical and sexual abuse by staff members.

The state is under an obligation to provide necessary medical treatment, including mental health treatment, to incarcerated people, which is essential to ensuring healthier communities both behind and beyond prison walls. This doesn’t mean that incarceration is the way to provide health care. Incarceration is increasingly being proffered as the “solution” to unmet mental health needs: there is a growing trend toward provision of mental health services through specialized “mental health jails” or in regular jail facilities like the Cook County jail in Chicago. Obtaining necessary medical treatment should not require incarceration, and ultimately jails are not appropriate sites for mental health treatment. Quality community-based mental health services should be freely provided and easily accessed through multiple modalities in communities to meet mental health needs in non-coercive or violent settings. Additionally, incarcerated people should also not be punished through disciplinary measures, up to and including segregation, for refusal to take medication.

Prison Education

Inadequate or complete denial of education to people serving both long- and short-term sentences is pervasive across the prison system. Numerous reports have demonstrated a direct correlation between increased levels of educational attainment and decreased likelihood of returning to confinement. Greater overall consistency is needed in the quality and accessibility of educational programming in prisons, as well as a standardized means through which people may continue to pursue formal education both inside and outside of prison.

Privatization

Some police and security forces, prisons, jails, and immigration detention facilities, and virtually all services inside prisons, including canteen, phone services, and commissary, have been privatized, placing incarcerated people at the mercy of corporations bent on profiting off of caged Black people. A 2014 Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General report found that private prisons had a 28 percent higher rate of assaults and were more likely to endanger incarcerated people’s security and rights.

A 2019 report from the Office of Inspector General on ICE oversight of contracted detention facilities found that the agency routinely waives its own standards, leading to “egregious violations of detention standards.”

Communication

Incarcerated people are denied communication with the outside world and loved ones through strict and often arbitrary rules and regulations governing conjugal, telephone, mail, video, and in person visitation, as well as regular surveillance and censorship by prison officials and third parties. Additionally, d/Deaf incarcerated people are often denied use of sign languages (on the pretext of prohibiting “gang signs”), hearing aids or hearing aid batteries, and cochlear implants, effectively rendering them unable to communicate inside or outside prisons. 

Thanks to privatization of phones used by incarcerated people, the cost of contact with the outside world is prohibitively expensive, costing upwards of $1 a minute.

Families of Incarcerated People

The impacts of punishment ripple through families and communities. A Pew Charitable Trusts report found that 1 in 9 Black children have an incarcerated parent. A family with an imprisoned parent earned, on average, 22% less per year than it did the previous year. 

Children with imprisoned parents are much more likely to be expelled from school than their peers—23% of students with imprisoned parents are expelled, versus just 4% of the general student population. 

Communities suffering from high rates of imprisonment also frequently experience the consequences of destabilized neighborhoods and families, including poor physical and mental health outcomes, struggles to keep families afloat financially, and disintegration of family and other social bonds. 

These burdens fall particularly hard on women, who carry the financial burden of bail, fees, and fines, for both themselves and incarcerated loved ones, the costs of visiting family members incarcerated in distant locations, and of financially and emotionally supporting incarcerated loved ones, and the social and political isolation of living with an incarcerated family member.