The Carceral State
and an abolitionist horizon
According to the best figures I have been able to find (and there is lots of conflicting data from different sources), it appears that the US has the second highest per capita incarceration rate in the world. What, no longer #1? That’s right, it’s been replaced by … El Salvador. The US and El Salvador are the embodiments of the carceral state.
Can the carceral state be reformed? Only minimally, as the articles below indicate. The problem isn’t bad cops or bad laws, but the basic premise of the system as a whole. “A carceral state refers to a system of governance where the use of prisons and other penal institutions is central to maintaining social order, often in conjunction with surveillance, criminalization, and a wide range of punitive measures. It's characterized by the reliance on incarceration and other forms of control as primary tools for social management.”
Does that description fit the US in 2025? Yes, but this system has a long history going back to the slave patrols and Jim Crow in the post Reconstruction era and the use of private police (the Pinkertons) against the labor movement in the Gilded Age. The system’s history is intimately tied to white supremacy and capitalist domination, with mass incarceration as its current iteration. (See The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander)
So, where do we go from here. In their book, No More Police, Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie call on us “to turn away from systems that perpetrate violence in the name of ending it toward a world where violence is the exception, and safe, well-resourced and thriving communities are the rule.” Impossible to achieve? Think of the original abolitionists in the 1840s. They established what modern-day abolitionists refer to as an abolitionist horizon and evaluated every struggle on the basis of whether it moved us closer to that horizon.
For example, the struggle to abolish the carceral state begins with efforts to: demilitarize the police and demand accountability for their actions; end incarceration for nonviolent “petty crimes”; end the use of cash bail for pre-trial detention; substitute crisis intervention teams for SWAT teams in dealing with aberrant behaviors; and so on, all the while promoting an abolitionist horizon, the abolition of the carceral state.
Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2025, by Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, March 11, 2025
Excerpts with my comments in italics below: For the full report go to:
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Can it really be true that most people in jail are legally innocent? How much of mass incarceration is a result of the war on drugs, or the profit motives of private prisons? Have popular reforms really triggered a crime wave? These essential questions are harder to answer than you might expect. The various government agencies involved in the criminal legal system collect a lot of data, but very little is designed to help policymakers or the public understand what’s going on. The uncertainty that results muddies the waters around our society’s use of incarceration, giving lawmakers and lobbyists the opportunity to advance harmful policies that do not make us safe. As criminal legal system reforms become increasingly central to political debate — and are even scapegoated to resurrect old, ineffective “tough on crime” policies — it’s more important than ever that we get the facts straight and understand the big picture.
Further complicating matters is the fact that the U.S. doesn’t have one criminal legal system; instead, we have thousands of federal, state, local, and tribal systems. Together, these systems hold nearly 2 million people in 1,566 state prisons, 98 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails, 1,277 juvenile correctional facilities, 133 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian country jails, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories — at a system-wide cost of at least $182 billion each year, and that doesn’t include lost productivity of the million+ workers who could be gainfully employed in the broader economy. (Note to Elon and DOGE: here’s a great place to save some big bucks and the savings could be passed on to the poorest Americans, a proven method of reducing “petty” cimes)
Tracking carceral growth since the early pandemic
The trends in the carceral data since 2019 — that is, since before the COVID-19 pandemic — show that many of the drops in confined populations are quickly being erased. Local, state, and federal systems continue to “rebound” from pandemic-related court slowdowns and administrative decisions about expedited releases and diversion. The total confined population is still about 13% smaller than its pre-pandemic size, but new growth across various systems suggests that the savings from reduced confinement — in terms of both financial and social costs — will not be sustained without explicitly decarceral policy changes. Compared to their pre-pandemic levels:
The average daily population in local jails is about 10% smaller than it was in 2019, after dropping by 17% in the first two years of the pandemic.
ICE detention has already exceeded its early 2020 numbers by 13%.
State prisons nationwide hold about 13% fewer people than they did at the end of 2019, after shedding almost 17% of their combined populations between 2020 and 2021. Over 2022 and 2023, however, state prisons have added more than 50,000 people, undoing about a quarter (24%) of the decarceration that was sparked by the pandemic.
Divergent state-level trends after pandemic-related population drops
When we drill down to the individual state level, it’s clear that some states have made purposeful changes to reduce their prison populations and to maintain those drops beyond the early years of the pandemic. All told, nine states each imprisoned 20% fewer people in 2023 than they did in 2019. Most dramatically, New Jersey holds 37% fewer people in state prisons than it did in 2019. And even as state prison populations grew nationwide, ten states reduced their prison populations between 2021 and 2023; collectively these states reduced their prison populations by about 10,700 people since 2021. California cut its numbers the most, by almost 5,500 people (-5%), followed by Virginia, which cut almost 3,000 (-10%). Oregon and New Jersey both reduced their prison populations by almost 7% over the same time.
In contrast, other states appear to be eagerly refilling their prisons after experiencing pandemic-related population drops. Nine states each added over 2,000 people to their prison populations over 2022 and 2023, accounting for 77% of all state prison growth nationwide over that time. Texas alone accounts for almost 31% of all that growth, Florida accounts for 13%, and Georgia 7%. Beyond “rebounding” to near-2019 levels, seven states actually imprisoned more people in 2023 than they did before the pandemic. (Question: Are Texas, Florida and Georgia experiencing a significant increase in crime post COVID lockdown? Or is this a reflection of the dominant ideology of their top government officials?)
From Portside, 5/25/2025 by Steven Rich, Tim Arango, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
Since George Floyd’s Murder, Police Killings Keep Rising, Not Falling
The number of people killed by the police has risen every year since the murder of Mr. Floyd by a Minneapolis officer in 2020.
After a police officer killed George Floyd on a Minneapolis street corner in 2020, millions of people flooded the streets of American cities demanding an end to brutal police tactics that too often proved fatal to those in custody.
Yet five years later, despite the largest racial justice protests since the civil rights era of the 1960s and a wave of measures to improve training and hold officers more accountable, the number of people killed by the police continues to rise each year, and Black Americans still die in disproportionate numbers.
Last year, the police killed at least 1,226 people, an 18 percent increase over 2019, the year before Mr. Floyd was killed, according to an analysis by The New York Times drawing on data compiled by The Washington Post and the nonprofit Mapping Police Violence. The vast majority of such cases have been shootings, and the vast majority of the people killed were reported to be armed. But police officers, as in the past, also killed people who had no weapon at all, some in the same manner as Mr. Floyd: pinned down by an officer and yelling, “I can’t breathe.”
Among them was Frank Tyson, an unarmed Black man in Canton, Ohio, who uttered Mr. Floyd’s famous words last year before dying when he was wrestled to the ground in a bar by police officers. This happened even though police departments around the country, especially in the aftermath of Mr. Floyd’s murder, have known about the dangers of asphyxiation when keeping a suspect in the prone position. (Two officers were charged with homicide in Mr. Tyson’s death.)
Derek Chauvin, the officer who knelt on Mr. Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes as he gasped for air, was convicted and sentenced to prison, along with three other officers who were on the scene. But even as the number of police killings has risen in the years since, it has remained exceedingly rare for officers to be charged with crimes for those deaths.
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Last year, for example, 16 officers were charged with either murder or manslaughter in a fatal shooting, the same number as in 2020, according to data tracked by Philip M. Stinson, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
Mr. Stinson said that given “all of the promise of five years ago, in terms of the promises of police reform, from where I sit, the reality is that policing hasn’t changed.”