Map Shows Which States Have the Worst Prisons

A key factor the two presidential candidates will need to address as the election draws closer is the crime and justice system, and how it maintains public safety.
According to a Pew Research poll conducted earlier this year, 80 percent of prospective Republican voters felt the justice system wasn’t tough enough on criminals, while about half of the Democrat voters felt the same way. Those feeling strongest about the handling of criminals were older, white Trump supporters, the poll showed.
The state and effectiveness of the justice system in the U.S. has featured in Donald Trump’s policies for the 2024 election cycle, as his campaign site wrote: “There is no higher priority than quickly restoring law and order and public safety in America.”
Meanwhile, former prosecutor Kamala Harris also takes also crime seriously. She even wrote a book in 2009 titled Smart on Crime, in which she spells out how she believes America can increase public safety.
One vital issue they must consider in relation to keeping the public safe is prison conditions, Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Kaia Stern told Newsweek.
She said that “people who are condemned to state prison and people who work in state prisons are members of the state’s community,” adding that “healthy conditions, whether they are in cellblocks or classrooms, are vital for public safety.”
Stern, who is also co-founder of the Prison Studies Project, told Newsweek that she hopes the U.S. will “stop equating justice with punishment and invest in community-based solutions before people ever get to prison.”
Given the connection of prison conditions and public safety, Newsweek has investigated where the country’s best and worst ranked prisons are located.
The map shows how each U.S. state ranks in relation to the correction outcomes of its prisons. The data was calculated by the outlet U.S. News using the metrics: incarceration rate, juvenile incarceration and racial equality in jailing.
Incarceration rate refers to the number of prisoners per 100,000 residents, counting sentences of more than one year, while racial equality refers to the difference in the incarceration rates between non-Hispanic whites and other racial and ethnic groups, where both are based on data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau.
From the data, Louisiana is shown to have the worst prisons, followed by Wisconsin and Wyoming, based on U.S. News’ metric of correction outcomes, while New Hampshire has the best, followed by Hawaii and Vermont.
Speaking generally about the conditions in prisons, Stern told Newsweek that when she has spoken to prisoners previously, “all too often,” their “basic needs” such as access to clean water, air, sanitary products, medical care and more “are not being met.”
She added that prisoners are also “disproportionately vulnerable” to “climate hazards” like extreme cold and hot temperatures, and a lawsuit relating to such a circumstance is still in motion over the conditions of prisons in Texas.
There, prisoners have been reported as faking suicide attempts in order to be moved to cooler medical areas.
On the subject of racial equality in prisons, Stern told Newsweek “it is no surprise” that the U.S. ranks “poorly on racial equity in prisons,” as “racial and ethnic disparities in sentencing and incarceration persist.”
The Pew Research poll also showed that treating people equally regardless of race was considered more important by Democrat voters than Republicans, as 77 percent of Democrats believed this to be extremely important, while 60 percent of Republicans felt the same way.
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