The case for reforming incarceration in Rhode Island
Rhode Island, with one of the lowest incarceration rates in the United States, would rank 27th in the world.
The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any independent democracy on earth - worse, every individual state incarcerates more people per capita than most nations, finds a new report from the Prison Policy Initiative. States of Incarceration: The Global Context (following on editions from 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2021) shows that when it comes to locking up their residents, none of the United State’s peer countries come close. While many in the United States have come to accept the nation’s high incarceration rate as a fact of life, by looking at these numbers through a global lens, the report shows the country to be an outlier, driven by the failure to truly respond to issues such as homelessness, poverty, mental health needs, and addiction.
Key findings from this year’s report include:
The states of the United States continue to be global leaders in mass incarceration, with nine states registering the highest incarceration rates on the planet, aside from El Salvador, which has been "run as a police state" in recent years.
Rhode Island, with one of the lowest incarceration rates in the United States, would rank 27th in the world, with a rate on par with South Africa. Every state in the country continues to lock people up at over twice the rate of most of our closest international allies.
The report includes an interactive graphic showing the incarceration rates for individual states and all countries of the world. The report also includes 50 graphics showing how states compare to the United States’s closest allies on incarceration.
The report shows that lower incarceration rates are not only possible; in most other countries, they are a reality.
I spoke with Wanda Bertram, a Communications Strategist with the Prison Policy Initiative.
Steve Ahlquist: I read over your report and thought it was interesting that Rhode Island incarcerates at a lower rate than the United States but at a higher rate compared to almost every other country in the world.
Wanda Bertram: I'm glad you took an interest in it. We're a national organization, so we focus only a little on any one state. But I'm happy to talk about Rhode Island.
Steve Ahlquist: The data suggests an obvious problem: Rhode Island incarcerates too many people. What can we do to get a grip on that?
Wanda Bertram: When it comes to reducing the state's use of incarceration, there's what we in the criminal legal reform world call the front end and the back end.
The front end is the stuff having to do with sentencing and criminal procedure, that is, what happens to people when they've been charged and what happens pretrial.
On the back end, there are questions about when those who have been sentenced and are serving a sentence about the options for them to go home early if they've been sentenced to a long period. What are the state's options for parole? What are their options for compassionate medical release? What are the options for good time sentence reductions, that is, options to earn time off their sentence, and stuff like that?
In most states, these issues are ripe for reform, so I'll pick a couple and talk about them. The first thing is pretrial reform. I don't know how Rhode Island does this, but in most states, after someone is arraigned or charged, they spend their time pretrial locked up, unless they can afford to pay bail. Now, as many people have pointed out, that's an extremely inequitable system that allows higher-income people to go free while people who are lower-income and can't pay their bail are often stuck in jail.
For reasons that we've written about elsewhere, it's an illogical system because it puts the onus for guaranteeing pretrial safety on bail bond companies who generally don't do a very good job at that. What we and many other organizations have been arguing for is sensible pretrial reform, something like what Illinois passed last year, which abolishes cash bail and replaces it with a system that determines pretrial incarceration based on the seriousness of the offense so that people who are charged with lower-level offenses, like folks who arere charged with violating their probation or their parole, are not stuck in jail before their trial. I don't know the specifics about Rhode Island, but in many states, people can be stuck in jail, pre-trial, for months.
Steve Ahlquist: We have that issue here, and we have made several attempts to reform that, but they've never come up for a vote within the committees, never mind the full House or Senate.
Wanda Bertram: Am I right that Rhode Island's jails are state facilities and not run by counties?
Steve Ahlquist: We don't have a county system of government in Rhode Island. We only have four counties, and we're too small to do that. Almost all our systems are at the state or municipality level. We don't have city or town jails per se, just temporary holding facilities. Everybody goes to the Adult Correctional Institutions (ACI), which is more or less centrally located.
Wanda Bertram: There may not be all of the same issues in Rhode Island that there are in states with county-controlled local jails. There are all sorts of issues that stem from profit-seeking sheriffs and things like that. That may not be as much of an issue in Rhode Island, but pretrial reform is still an urgent, problem.
Steve Ahlquist: That's what confuses me about Rhode Island. We don't necessarily have the same economic pressures to incarcerate because we only have one private prison, and it generally caters to federal agencies like ICE.
But there is a very strong correctional officer union here, supported by the AFL-CIO, and they exercise an inordinate amount of power at the General Assembly. There's also the police and the Attorney General. It's odd because we pay a lot, in terms of cash, for this system and I don't know that we're getting value for it - never mind that we're ruining lives.
Wanda Bertram: That's the case in a lot of places - harsh criminal justice policies are kept in place because of strong correctional officer and police unions. Hopefully, the fact that other progressive states, (I'm guessing Rhode Island considers itself a progressive state even though I don't know that much about it) states like Illinois and places like Washington D.C. and New York City have embraced bail and pretrial reform is enough to give reform efforts in other states more momentum.
Steve Ahlquist: Can I ask about the pushback that happens in some of those states? It seems that as soon as bail reform was passed the pushback began, and some places have rolled it back slightly or even completely. What do we do in the face of that? That's the “evidence” opponents bring up as a reason to not do bail reform here.
Wanda Bertram: My understanding, and I lived in New York for a couple of years, is that after bail reform passed, certain right-wing and centrist lawmakers immediately began pushing to roll it back. There was a big push by those lawmakers to show that bail reform had somehow caused crime, or that people who were being released without bail were absconding and weren't showing up for their court dates. Regrettably, there were strong forces in New York that succeeded in rolling back bail reform.
But on the other hand, there was also some compelling journalism. The Albany Times Union did a really good piece where they dug up all of the records showing crime levels. They requested public records about people's outcomes on pretrial release and found that bail reform had made no difference to public safety. If anything, bail reform improved public safety.1
Having the data out there can help because a lot of the pushback against bail reform is purely opportunistic. It's lawmakers trying to score points by appearing to be tough on crime.
To move on from the pretrial issue, sentencing reform is a big deal. Sentencing is not our focus, so I can't speak as much to that, even though sentencing reform could do a lot to reduce the prison population. Something we have written a bit more about is parole. Rhode Island, to my understanding, has not abolished parole, which some states have done, but it's very difficult to get parole in Rhode Island. We released a report in 2018 where we graded every state on their parole system. We graded the states based on the amount of transparency the parole board has to the public, how clear the procedures are, why they're denying parole, and why they're granting parole.
We looked for more transparency. We looked for things like how many people in the prison system are allowed to prepare for their parole hearings, how frequent parole hearings are, and on what basis the parole board can deny release because there are some factors that we think shouldn't play a role in the parole process.
We graded every state and we gave Rhode Island an F. Now we gave most states an F, but the point is that there is a lot that states can do to improve these systems. It's important because, in a lot of states, you have a prison population that's full of people who have been doing time since the early 2000s, 1990s, and earlier. It's becoming an issue in prisons where the prison population is getting older. The cost of incarcerating people and the cost of caring for them is skyrocketing. I don't know much about politics where you are, but in many states, compassionate release is a compelling argument for improving parole processes, which focuses on terminally ill people.
The argument is that these people already spent many years in prison and probably no longer pose any threat to society and we're about to take on a massive healthcare cost burden. Whereas, if we were to release them, we could get rid of the cost burden that has to do with incarceration and get people set up in nursing homes or with their families.
There are also systems called Good Time where people can earn time off their sentences. I have a table of all the state's good time programs, and I don't believe that Rhode Island has one of the more generous ones.
It's ironic. The states with the best good time programs are usually in the South. Arkansas, Alabama, and Texas have pretty good ones, but I was talking to reporters in Minnesota and Michigan, and those states have nothing.
Steve Ahlquist: That's interesting.
Wanda Bertram: I think it's interesting too. I think the reason for this is that states with more liberal attitudes towards incarceration and punishment think that they can get it down to a science where they're like, "We're going to sentence people based on a rigid sentencing grid. They're going to get out at a predetermined date, and we're going to remove all implicit bias from the equation by taking out the possibility of discretion."
Those are the states that tend to have abolished parole, and they're the states that tend to do less on good time because, maybe, the more you individualize people's sentence lengths, the more there's the possibility for unfairness. But I think that's counterproductive when it comes to trying to reduce the prison population and bring down a state's incarceration rate because to do that you want to give people the opportunity to show that they're ready to go home.
I could go off about the other aspects of this. There's a lot of energy put into drug law reform, but you have states right now that are passing extremely harsh penalties for people who are found to possess fentanyl. Folks who possess fentanyl often don't know that they're possessing it, and yet you can still be charged with 10 years or more in prison.
Steve Ahlquist: We're doing pretty well with that in Rhode Island. We are one of the first states to allow for safe injection sites, for instance.
Wanda Bertram: Oh, that's great. That puts Rhode Island ahead of a lot of other places. Politics are different in every place. Maybe the case in Rhode Island is that it's easier to pass and sustain reforms that have to do with what I was calling the front end instead of the back end.
There's still so much that can be done when it comes to changing how the criminal legal system treats defendants. There are diversion programs and pretrial reforms, as I said.
States of Incarceration only talks about incarceration. It's a combination of jail, prison, tribal facilities, federal prisons, and every kind of incarceration you can think of. We have another report that's not as recent, where we showed the incarceration rates of every state and also the probation and parole rates, so you can get a handle on where Rhode Island stands compared to other states.
Steve Ahlquist: Thank you!
Wanda Bertram: It was great to talk to you, Steve.
[For more on probation and parole problems, see: Excessive, unjust, and expensive: Fixing Connecticut's probation and parole problems. Though the piece is directed at Connecticut’s legislature, it contains ideas that can be brought to Rhode Island.]