Facts and Policy Reforms for Indiana
Like most states, Indiana’s prison population has exploded in recent decades.
While the national state imprisonment rate dropped eight percent between 2000 and 2016, Indiana’s imprisonment rate grew 18 percent. Following lawmakers’ efforts to restructure Indiana’s criminal code, the prison population has decreased to 26,877 people as of January 2019 from its peak of 29,220 people in 2014. Still, Indiana prisons for both men and women hover dangerously close to operational bed capacity, and the state’s jail population is increasing. There were an estimated 21,187 people in Indiana county jails in 2018.
In January 2019, 24 percent of people in Indiana prisons were serving time for a drug offense, while 15 percent were serving time for property offenses. The segment of people serving time for weapons offenses (4 percent in 2019) has grown 63 percent over the past decade. Although admissions to Indiana prisons each year declined 33 percent between 2007 and 2017, the average length of stay has increased and annual releases from prison have declined, resulting in a nearly constant total prison population.
Unsurprisingly, Indiana’s mass incarceration crisis has had an enormous impact on people of color, especially Black people. As of 2017, Black Hoosiers were imprisoned at more than 5 times the rate of white adults, and although Black people accounted for just 9 percent of the state’s adult population, they comprised 34 percent of the prison population that year.
The population of women in Indiana prisons is also growing at an alarming rate, even as other incarcerated demographics decrease. Between 2009 and 2019, the number of women in the state’s prisons grew 9 percent while the population of men in prison dropped 4 percent; between 2005 and 2015, the population of women in jail increased 28 percent while the overall jail population declined 6 percent.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Indiana can dramatically reduce its prison population by implementing just a few sensible reforms:
- Investing in strong, well-resourced, holistic indigent defense services
- Expanding access to treatment for both mental health and substance use needs
- Enacting pretrial justice reform
- Ending excessive sentences and extreme punishments for young people
- Ceasing to expand the criminal code
If Indiana were to follow these and other reforms outlined in this Smart Justice 50-State Blueprint, 13,263 fewer people would be in prison in Indiana, saving over $541 million dollars that could be invested in schools, services, and other resources that would strengthen communities.
For more information, along with detailed breakdowns of Indiana’s prison population and the reforms needed to reduce it, click here.