DES MOINES, IOWA (March 7, 2019) — Today the ACLU of Iowa and the ACLU’s nation Smart Justice Project released a report — the first-ever analysis of its kind — that details how Iowa’s rate of incarceration is spiraling out of control.

  • Between 1980 and 2016, Iowa’s prison-population more than tripled, and, as of December 2016, 46,7000 Iowans were in prison, jail, or under correctional-control. Iowa prisons are currently at 124-percent capacity and projected to reach 143-percent capacity by 2027. Much of this expansion is because of non-violent drug-charges.
  • Iowa’s overwhelmed mental-health system also comes into play — 57-percent of Iowa’s prison population suffers from chronic mental-illness.
  • Meanwhile, besides our prisons, our county jails are being filled with people who haven’t been convicted of a crime — 87 percent of the total jail-population.
  • Spending on incarceration has gone through the roof, with Iowa spending $379 million on corrections in 2017, about 5-percent of its general fund.
  • Iowa’s prisons are also disproportionately filled with people of color. The imprisonment rate of Black people in Iowa is nearly 11 times that of white people, one of the worst rates in the country.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Iowa can reduce the tremendous human and financial cost of mass-incarceration by doing the following:

  • Decriminalizing drug-possession across the state.
  • Expanding social-services and treatment for mental-health and substance-use needs.
  • Reforming the pretrial-system to enhance constitutional protections, and eradicating wealth-based discrimination by restricting the use of cash bail.
  • Eliminating crack- and powder-cocaine sentencing disparities.
  • Enacting parole-reform to expand access to early release.

A press release with more details can be found here:

https://www.aclu-ia.org/en/press-releases/aclu-iowa-releases-roadmap-cutting-incarceration-50-percent

The report itself can be found here:

https://www.aclu-ia.org/sites/default/files/sj-blueprint-ia.pdf

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