Bureau of Justice Statistics releases "Federal Prisoner Statistics Collected under the First Step Act, 2021"

I was excited to receive new of this new Bureau of Justice Statistics' publication with lots of rich new data about the federal prisoner population.  This website provides this overview and a few key findings from "Federal Prisoner Statistics Collected under the First Step Act, 2021":

Description

This is the third report as required under the First Step Act of 2018 (FSA; P.L. 115-391). It includes data on federal prisoners provided to BJS by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) for calendar year 2020. Under the FSA, BJS is required to report on selected characteristics of persons in prison, including marital, veteran, citizenship, and English-speaking status; education levels; medical conditions; and participation in treatment programs. Also, BJS is required to report facility-level statistics, such as the number of assaults on staff by prisoners, prisoners’ violations of rules that resulted in time credit reductions, and selected facility characteristics related to accreditation, on-site health care, remote learning, video conferencing, and costs of prisoners’ phone calls.

Highlights

• The federal prison population decreased 13%, from 174,391 at yearend 2019 to 151,283 at yearend 2020.
• In 2020, a total of 91 pregnant females were held in BOP-operated prison facilities, which was half the number held in 2019 (180).
• In 2020, a total of 14,791 persons held in federal prison participated in a nonresidential drug abuse program, 10,868 in a residential drug abuse program, and 1,268 in a treatment challenge program for a substance use disorder.
• In 2020, a total of 418 federal prisoners received medication-assisted treatment (approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration) to treat a substance use disorder.

The full document has a lot more interesting highlights, including these notable data points about the work of the federal risk assessment tool used by BOP known as PATTERN:

• Of those persons in federal prison assessed with PATTERN as of December 31 2020, 37% were considered to be at high risk for recidivism, 18% medium risk, 29% low risk, and 16% minimal risk.
• In 2020, PATTERN found that about half of federal prisoners age 24 or younger (51%) and those ages 25 to 34 (50%) were at high risk of future recidivism.
• Fifty-one percent of black prisoners (including those of both Hispanic and non-Hispanic ethnicity) in federal prison were deemed at high risk for future recidivism by the PATTERN tool, followed by more than 42% of American Indian or Alaska Native prisoners.