Facts and Policy Reforms for Virginia
Like most states, Virginia’s prison population has exploded in recent decades.
Between 1980 and 2016, the state’s prison population grew by 341 percent. The state had 120,000 people under correctional control in 2016 — more than the entire population of cities such as Roanoke, Portsmouth, and Charlottesville. Virginia had the 11th largest state prison population in the country as of 2016.
Harsh sentences for drug and property charges are a primary driver of Virginia’s massive prison population. Three out of five people admitted to prison in 2014 were convicted of a drug or property offense. Eighty percent of people in Virginia prisons have “a history of substance abuse that contributed to their criminality,” according to the state’s Department of Corrections, pointing to the dire need to address substance use disorders with the public health system, rather than jails or prisons. Virginia is sending more people to prison and for longer amounts of time overall, with the average length of imprisonment of people released from prison increasing by 24 percent between 2000 and 2015.
Unsurprisingly, Virginia’s mass incarceration crisis has had an enormous impact on people of color, especially Black people. While Black adults were just 19 percent of the adult state population in 2015, they made up a staggering 57 percent of Virginia’s imprisoned population. One in every 27 adult Black men was in prison in 2014. Ending mass incarceration is a critical — although insufficient — step towards addressing racial disparities in Virginia’s criminal justice system as well as its broader society.
Women are also being sent to prison in Virginia at alarming rates. The female prison population grew more than eleven-fold between 1980 and 2016, far outpacing the growth of the total prison population. And while Virginia’s male prison population remained relatively level between 2010 and 2016, the female prison population rose by 9 percent.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Virginia can dramatically reduce its prison population by implementing just a few sensible reforms:
- Expanding access to treatment for substance use disorders.
- Investing in more alternatives to incarceration and diversion programs.
- Raising the felony larceny threshold to at least $1,500 to bring it in line with other states.
- Decriminalizing or legalizing marijuana possession.
- Reducing sentence lengths for charges such as assault, burglary, robbery, and drug sales.
- Scaling back the state’s requirement that people serve 85 percent of their sentence in every case.
If Virginia were to follow these and other reforms outlined in this Smart Justice 50-State Blueprint, by 2025 it could have 16,980 fewer people in its prison system, saving over $1.1 billion that could be invested in schools, services, and other resources that would strengthen communities.
For more information, along with detailed breakdowns of Virginia’s prison population and the reforms needed to reduce it, click here.