Prison Policy Initiative provides "Mass Incarceration 101: Resources to help students and teachers understand the carceral system"

Prison Policy Initiative have this timely new posting authored by Danielle Squillante with this full title: "Mass Incarceration 101: Resources to help students and teachers understand the carceral system: It’s back to school season, so we’ve curated information and tools for students and teachers to use when researching the carceral system."  The posting serves to highlight a number of PPI's major data reports, and it worth a full read.  Here is how it gets started:

Students and teachers are heading back to the classroom. In addition to math, science, and language arts, many will also focus on the criminal legal system and mass incarceration. Unfortunately for them, the carceral system operates like a black box, making it hard to study what’s happening inside the walls of prisons and jails. Fortunately, we have made it our business to make the data that does exist as accessible and understandable as possible.

To better support the work of students and teachers, we’ve curated a list of publications and tools they can use to better study the carceral system and that can serve as launchpads for further research.

Where to start: The big picture

To start any lesson on mass incarceration, you have to understand the U.S. doesn’t have one criminal legal system; instead, it has thousands of federal, state, local, and tribal systems that incarcerate a combined population of nearly 2 million people.

Our flagship report, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie, puts these pieces together to give the “big picture” of mass incarceration by explaining not only the scale of our carceral system but also the policy choices that have driven its expansion.  It provides the most comprehensive picture of how many people are locked up in the U.S., in what types of facilities, and why.  In addition to showing how many people are behind bars on any given day in the U.S., it goes on to bust 10 of the most persistent myths about prisons, jails, crime, and more.