Crime and correctional control—any court-ordered supervision of an individual, whether in the community, as with probation or parole, or in a facility, such as juvenile or adult incarceration—create substantial burdens for governments and taxpayers, as well as for people in confinement or under supervision and their families. But decades of research and state innovation have revealed a range of strategies that provide better public safety outcomes with reduced levels of correctional control.
From 2005 to 2023, The Pew Charitable Trusts and its partners conducted research, provided technical assistance to governments, and made strategic grants to advance fiscally sound, data-driven criminal and juvenile justice policies and practices that protect public safety, ensure accountability, and reduce correctional populations and costs.
Pew worked with federal, state, and local officials and community stakeholders around the country to reform prison, jail, community supervision, and juvenile justice systems. Through these strategies, Pew helped policymakers enact data-driven reforms that have delivered lasting results.
Pew’s public safety performance project launched in 2005 to produce groundbreaking research on the size, cost, and trends of America’s corrections system and provide technical assistance to states seeking to safely reduce correctional populations.
A juvenile court’s decision to remove young people from their homes and place them in state-funded residential facilities in response to delinquent behavior generally fails to reduce future crime.
Nationwide, nearly 3.7 million people—or 1 in 69 adults—were on probation or parole in the U.S. at the end of 2021. Although supervision rates have been declining since 2007—with the sharpest drop in 2019 (see figure below)—this population still outnumbers the people in local jails and state and federal prisons combined. And even though people on probation or parole make up the largest subset of individuals under correctional control, and such supervision systems can be drivers of incarceration themselves, they’re often overlooked by the media, researchers, and policymakers.
From 2010 to 2017, jail admissions fell 18%, while crime and arrests also fell, 14% and 20%, respectively. Yet the number of people held in county and municipal jails barely budged, hovering around 750,000 throughout this seven-year period and costing taxpayers $25 billion annually.
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Julie Wertheimer
Project Director
Mental Health and Justice Partnerships
