Prison Reform in the United States

Most Americans don’t know what it’s like inside the United States’ 1,664 state and federal prisons.¹ Yet even those who believe the primary purpose of incarceration is to deter crime or to inflict punishment expect that people returning home from prison should be ready to be productive, law-abiding members of their communities. Indeed, a 2025 Brennan Center poll found that more than 80 percent of likely voters think that formerly incarcerated people deserve a second chance and can be prepared to reenter society through rehabilitative, educational, or vocational programs.²

Some correctional leaders are recognizing this and implementing innovative programs to set incarcerated people up for success. These reforms improve conditions for the people who live and work in prisons and, if adopted more widely, could also improve public safety.

But most prisons rarely offer such opportunities. Life behind bars is marked by social and physical isolation and punctuated by violence and brutality.³ People who have regular contact with U.S. prisons — law enforcement officers, correctional staff, lawyers, academics, nonprofit leaders, volunteers, and of course those who have been incarcerated and their loved ones — have referred to them as “warehouses that degrade and brutalize” and places where people have been “thrown away.”⁴ Judges have described the conditions in some U.S. prisons as objectively inhumane, with one saying such conditions have “no place in civilized society.”⁵ As of February 2026, the Department of Justice had 43 open investigations into jails, prisons, or entire state correctional systems for constitutional violations relating to physical and sexual violence, sanitation problems, staffing deficiencies, inadequate medical and psychiatric care, overuse of solitary confinement, and crowding.⁶ And as the Correctional Leaders Association has noted, the people who work in these systems suffer themselves.⁷

Former Chief Justice Warren E. Burger once opined: “To put a man behind walls to protect society and then not try to change him is to win a battle and lose a war.”⁸ None of the underlying personal, structural, and societal conditions that drive prison incarceration — such as poverty, mental illness, substance use, and lack of vocational skills or education — are addressed by incarceration alone.⁹ Where rehabilitative programming does exist, limited resources often result in extensive wait lists for it.¹⁰ The U.S. Chamber of Commerce identified this “patchwork programming” problem as early as 1971, but little progress has been made since.¹¹ Nonprofit organizations such as Prison Fellowship provide services that compensate for the lack of support people receive both during and after incarceration, but without political backing and increased funding, their work faces substantial limitations.¹² The 95 percent of people who return home will do so lacking the necessary tools to successfully reintegrate.¹³ This harms not only these individuals but also their communities, which are often the most marginalized: Black, Latino, and poor.¹⁴

Still, there are signs that corrections practices in the United States can improve. This report describes innovations unfolding in states as varied as Maine, Michigan, North Dakota, and South Carolina. The leaders driving these reforms are moving beyond business-as-usual punitive policies and practices, which not only harm the people in their custody but also cultivate unhealthy, stressful, and often bleak working conditions for correctional officers, contributing to high attrition rates and elevated rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide.¹⁵

These leaders are eager to test an alternative hypo­thesis: that a focus on rehabilitation rather than retribution will yield safer prisons, better post-release outcomes, and ultimately improved public safety. Their reforms approach this proposition from different angles. Some programs center on successful reentry into society; others expand educational offerings. Many new policies and practices posit that human dignity should be the guiding principle in how correctional officers interact with people in their custody and even in how housing units are designed.¹⁶ Other initiatives focus on the well-being and professional development of people who work in prisons.¹⁷

While most of the programs are so far too limited in reach or too new to demonstrate a long-term measurable impact on recidivism, initial studies point to positive outcomes. For example, the Little Scandinavia reform unit at the Pennsylvania state prison in Chester had almost no violent episodes in 2024 even as other facilities across the state experienced a 22 percent leap in violence.¹⁸ And 2019 graduates of the Vocational Village program in Michigan had a recidivism rate 6.5 percentage points lower than the state’s overall rate that year.¹⁹ Given their brief appointments, correctional leaders often have only a few years to make a real difference for their states. Early successes like these can provide policymakers with enough preliminary data to encourage them to pursue more complete transformations of correctional systems.

To explore how jurisdictions can adopt reforms, Brennan Center researchers interviewed correctional directors, operational staff, formerly and currently incarcerated people, nonprofit leaders who provide technical assistance to prison systems, and program funders. They emphasized the need to identify champions among prison and political leadership, to engage operational staff and incarcerated people in policy formation and implementation, and to leverage emerging data to build support for systemic change. Our research also pointed to the importance of a national network in which correctional leaders engaged in reform can share successes and learn from challenges.

Prison as we know it isn’t working. It doesn’t deliver safety inside or outside its walls, and endemic in-custody violence matched with persistently high recidivism rates suggests that it may even have the opposite effect. By failing to provide rehabilitation, prisons undermine public safety and community well-being. But correctional leaders are demonstrating that prisons do not have to be this way. This report aims to combat civic indifference and ignorance about the circumstances of those who live and work in prisons and show that change is possible. Nearly two million people are incarcerated in the United States, and 450,000 return home each year.²⁰ What happens behind prison walls ultimately affects all of us.