Facts and Policy Reforms for North Carolina
Like most states, North Carolina’s prison population has exploded in recent decades.
Like most states, North Carolina’s prison population has exploded in recent decades. Since 1980, the state’s prison population has more than doubled. As of May 2018, 37,056 people were imprisoned across the state. North Carolina has the 13thlargest prison population in the country, according to the most recently available national data (2015), and the North Carolina Department of Public Safety projects the prison population will grow in the near future, exceeding current capacity by 2025.
Drug trafficking charges made up the largest percentage of prison admissions in 2015, at 14.7 percent, followed by common convictions such as burglary, driving while intoxicated, theft, and fraud. More than half of people admitted to prison that year had violated probation and other forms of community supervision. Nearly 90 percent of the 16,905 people in North Carolina county jails in 2015 were awaiting trial and had not been convicted of a crime. The average amount of time served by someone in prison for drug offenses jumped 63 percent between 2006 and 2016.
Unsurprisingly, North Carolina’s mass incarceration crisis has had an enormous impact on people of color, especially Black people. The state’s Black per capita adult imprisonment rate is 4.5 times higher than its white adult per capita imprisonment rate. Ending mass incarceration is a critical — although insufficient — step towards addressing racial disparities in North Carolina’s criminal justice system as well as its broader society.
Women are also being sent to prison in North Carolina at alarming rates. From 2006 and 2016, the number of women imprisoned in North Carolina grew 5.8 percent, while the number of men declined by 0.5 percent. Based on the most recently available data, women account for one in 14 people (7.6 percent) in North Carolina prisons as of 2016, and one in seven people (14.5 percent) in county jails as of 2015.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
North Carolina can dramatically reduce its prison population by implementing just a few sensible reforms:
- Making diversion or another alternative to prison the presumptive option where available, and requiring judges to write a statement explaining why incarceration is the more appropriate option if they wish to instead incarcerate.
- Ending cash bail to significantly reduce North Carolina’s high pretrial population, and to combat racial disparities in pretrial detention.
- Eliminating mandatory minimums for all drug sentences, including drug trafficking.
- Removing sentencing enhancements, such as the habitual felon law.
- Adopting statewide presumptive parole, which would require parole boards to justify denying release when someone is eligible for parole.
- Expanding access to compassionate release for the state’s rapidly aging prison population.
If North Carolina were to follow these and other reforms outlined in this Smart Justice 50-State Blueprint, 18,084 fewer people would be in prison in North Carolina by 2025, saving over $1 billion that could be invested in schools, services, and other resources that would strengthen communities. (Total prison population reduction may be +/- 1 due to rounding.)
For more information, along with detailed breakdowns of North Carolina’s prison population and the reforms needed to reduce it, click here.