Lower prison population will likely be ‘new normal’
The state prison population has hit the lowest mark in nearly three decades — 10,793 — while the number of releases for the past two months has hit historic highs in part due to the coronavirus pandemic that is sweeping across the state and the world.
At least one criminal justice expert believes the trend toward lower incarceration rates will continue long after public health concerns have ebbed.
“What’s clear is that something very dramatic is happening,” said Michael Lawlor, the state’s former undersecretary for criminal justice within the Office of Policy and Management. “I think there’s a new normal that has been established.”
The downward trend has been nearly a decade in the making with Connecticut and national crime rates falling annually since 2008 and the state making a concerted effort to adopt incarceration reforms, said Lawlor, now an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven.
State Department of Correction officials agree.
“Acknowledging that medical experts continue to learn more about this virus every day, it’s too premature to have any solid understanding of what corrections will look like when we get to the other side of this pandemic,” said Karen Martucci, executive director for external affairs for the DOC.
DOC officials have already begun to evaluate the agency’s preparedness plans on how they can adjust and improve their existing strategies in case the virus resurfaces in the fall, Martucci said.
The state’s prison population
Total Connecticut correctional facility population count 2020 peaked at 19,894 in February 2008, according to figures provided by OPM. The population has since dropped annually by about 3 to 6 percent. As of Jan. 1, there were 12,284 people incarcerated.
DOC records show that as of March 1, just as the state was starting to ramp up efforts to deal with COVID-19, the prison population was at 12,409 inmates. Of that figure, 3,373 people were being held on bond for pretrial and 9,036 were sentenced inmates.
As of Friday, 3,011 were being held on bond for pretrial, while 7,962 people were serving sentences. During a typical month, between 600 to 900 people are released after completing sentences or who are eligible to finish their sentence in the community, according to the OMP. At the same time, an average of 1,200 people come into the prison system after 2017 2018 2019 being arrested, OMP’s figures showed.
During the month of March, pretrial admissions to the DOC were 741, the lowest on record. This was in part due to a drop in arrests and a decline in the number of people being held on bond, officials said. During the same period, discretionary releases, which the DOC can do without court intervention, increased 72 percent from an average of 303 to 522, Lawlor said.
It’s a trend that he expects to continue, Lawlor said.
“This is an unfortunate way to prove a point,” Lawlor said of the pandemic, which is leading to more people being released to free up space in prisons to stop the spread of COVID-19. “But it does show that the criminal justice system should be reserved for people who are really dangerous.”