Despite progress, thousands of Mass. residents are behind bars. Why that’s happening | Analysis

Earlier this year, to great fanfare, Gov. Maura Healey’s office announced it planned to shutter the Bay State’s oldest men’s state prison — MCI Concord.

The Democratic administration pointed to an ever-decreasing number of people in state custody as the reason behind the move, which is expected to save the state about $16 million a year, and free up 182 acres in the suburban Boston community as the commonwealth contends with a historic housing shortage, MassLive and the Boston Globe previously reported.

The numbers were on the Democratic administration’s side.

In 2023, 6.070 people were in state custody, NBC-10 in Boston reported earlier this month.

That’s down from the 6,100 who were in the Bay State’s prisons in 2021, and down further still from the 2011 high of 11,723 people, state Department of Correction show.

But even with that years-long decline, a total of 16,000 people statewide are behind bars.

And with an incarceration rate of 275 per 100,000 people, the commonwealth still “lock[ed] up a higher percentage of its people than almost any democratic country on earth,” according to an analysis by the Northampton-based Prison Policy Initiative.

“People cycle through local jails more than 7 million times each year and they are generally held there for brief, but life-altering, periods of time,” the research group said, as it surveyed the incarceration landscape nationwide in a new report the research group released earlier this week.

“Most are released in a few hours or days after their arrest, but others are held for months or years, often because they are too poor to make bail."

In 2018, Massachusetts lawmakers passed, and then-Gov. Charlie Baker signed, a suite of criminal justice reform measures aimed at “[reducing] repeat offenders, [moving] those with mental illness and substance use disorder from prisons and jails to treatment, and [closing] stark racial disparities in incarceration,” according to a January analysis by Boston Indicators, the research arm of the Boston Foundation.

“Changes in criminal justice practices that occurred over the 2010s—culminating in the 2018 reform legislation— appear to have put us on a course toward safer and more resilient communities,” the report’s authors wrote.

The most recent Prison Policy Initiative data, however, suggests that work still remains.

In Massachusetts, people in local jails make up the largest share of people behind bars, with 8,300 people in county or city lock-ups, the report showed.

Some 1,300 people were in federal custody as of 2023, while 290 were in juvenile facilities, and 260 were the subject of involuntary commitments, the report showed.

And even that tally of local incarceration doesn’t provide a full picture, the report’s authors noted.

That’s because people cycle through local jails relatively quickly. And every year, at least 70,000 different people are booked into local jails in the Bay State, the data showed.

And, reflecting national trends, people of color are over-represented in the population of incarcerated people, even though they make up a smaller share of the state’s population as a whole.

• Read More: Mass. saw increase in juvenile justice involvement in 2023, report shows

Black people were incarcerated at a rate of 383 per 100,000 people in state prisons, and 511 per 100,000 people in jails, the data showed. That’s compared to 53 per 100,000 people in prison and 82 per 100,000 people for white people, the data showed.

At the state level, Healey administration officials say they’ve taken steps to reduce the commonwealth’s “correctional footprint,” that include opening educational opportunities, providing housing aid and substance use disorder treatment services.

“If we have to incarcerate someone, they should be the right person. So I think that’s one thing that Massachusetts has gotten right,” Andrew Peck, the undersecretary of the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, told NBC10 in Boston earlier this month.

• Read More: Report: Overall crime going down in Mass. since ‘18, but racial disparities widened

“As opposed to a lot of other states. We hold people accountable, but we understand that there are different pathways to that accountability, and we don’t have to incarcerate someone to hold them accountable,” Peck, whose office oversees state prisons, told the station.

The January report by Boston Indicators points to the commonwealth’s successes overall in both reducing crime and the number of people who are incarcerated statewide.

From “police departments to the courts and correctional agencies, the achievements of Massachusetts belong not just to legislators, but also workers on the front lines who have provided leadership and personal sacrifice to implement the many changes during the incredibly challenging pandemic,” the report’s authors wrote.

“Public perception of crime and criminal justice issues has long been susceptible to false narratives,” they continued. “With many social issues generating fear in society, we need conscientious efforts to make as much reliable information on criminal justice reform available to the public as possible.”

The Boston Indicators report offers five recommendations for further improvements to the state’s criminal justice system.

They are:

• “Fully [implementing] the data and transparency provisions of the 2018 reform law with a deeper commitment to evaluation and unearthing the root causes of racial disparities;
• “[Increasing] continuing care and community-based treatment capacity;
• “[Maintaining] investments in residential reentry and address unmet housing needs for emerging adults;
• “[Building] sustainable capacity for community reinvestment and restorative justice,” and
• “[Preparing] a correctional facilities master plan that confronts lingering issues that have major implications for criminal justice reform and public safety in the Commonwealth,” the report’s authors wrote.

“Taking stock of criminal justice reform is also critical because much work remains to remedy large racial disparities, build community capacity to offer robust alternatives to incarceration, counter gun violence, and repair the economic harms of mass incarceration,” they concluded. “With the state facing increasing fiscal pressures, meeting these needs will likely be more difficult in the coming years.”