For a brief moment last week, D.C. was at opposite ends of a debate.

One on side, criminal-justice reform advocates were saying that D.C. imprisons more people per capita than any of the 50 states. But the U.S. Attorney for D.C., which prosecutes all violent crime in the city, said just the opposite, pointing to data allegedly showing that the city actually sends fewer people to prison than any of the states.

Different Data, Different Conclusions

The contrasting data points were trotted out in the midst of a passionate debate over a D.C. Council bill that would expand opportunities for certain violent offenders to petition for a reduced sentence. Supporters of the bill say it’s necessary in part because advocates say D.C. — like many places — over-incarcerated residents in recent decades. The U.S. attorney’s opposition is founded in the belief that it doesn’t.

After making their claim at a public meeting on Thursday, the U.S. Attorney backtracked over the weekend, publicly admitting that it had used federal data that only counted inmates at the D.C. Jail as opposed to D.C. inmates held by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons in federal facilities across the country. And that’s not an insignificant omission; D.C. residents convicted of felonies are sent to federal prisons, since the city has no state-based prison system of its own. (We reported on the impact of this reality in 2017.) As of last week, there were 4,548 D.C. residents in federal prisons, compared to roughly 1,800 in the D.C. Jail.

But there’s also been debate over whether D.C. actually does incarcerate more people per capita than any of the 50 states, a powerful claim that is regularly made during debates over criminal justice reform. D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine and Ward 6 Council member Charles Allen did so in a recent op-ed in The Washington Post advocating for sentencing reform.

The source of the claim is the Prison Policy Initiative, which in its 2018 report found D.C. outpacing every state in the country in terms of its incarceration rate. It reports that D.C. incarcerates 1,153 per 100,000 D.C. residents, higher than even Oklahoma (1,079), Louisiana (1,052), Mississippi (1,039), Georgia (970) — and the national rate (698).

Comparing The District To States

But there are two caveats to consider: the actual numbers of D.C. residents who are incarcerated, and whether D.C. can be accurately compared to the 50 states.

On the first point, the Prison Policy Initiative has a detailed appendix describing how they counted the number of incarcerated residents for D.C. and the 50 states. For its 2018 report, it determined that 7,654 D.C. residents were in local and federal institutions. When divided by the estimated 2018 population of 689,154, the report landed on the 1,153 per 100,000 residents figure, putting D.C at the top of the list nationally.

But other criminal-justice reform advocates work with lower overall inmate counts, largely because they only include D.C. residents convicted of local offenses, not federal ones, and might not include pre-trial detentions or youth offenders. Nazgol Ghandnoosh, a senior researcher at The Sentencing Project, crunched her numbers, and she got an incarceration rate of 930 per 100,000 residents, which would put D.C. somewhere in the top five nationally — but not first.

And then there’s the second, and probably more important caveat — the difficulty of comparing D.C. to the 50 states.

“Generally I don’t make a comparison between D.C. and other states. It’s apples to oranges. D.C. is an urban area, it should be compared to other urban areas. We just don’t have that data,” says Ghandnoosh.

Michael Rocque, an assistant professor of sociology at Bates College and expert on criminology, agrees that stacking all-urban D.C. up against states that have mixes of urban, suburban and rural areas can be problematic.

“Are we comparing apples to apples? Not really when talking about rural and urban areas. Things from budgetary concerns to levels of law enforcement per population vary by area. So many things differ, from population density to mode of common transportation. We can try to take them into account when making comparisons (and we often do that), but it’s a problem that should be recognized,” he writes in an email. “And yes, I would caution against comparing D.C. to states, just as I would caution against comparing NYC to Maine.”

Even the FBI warns against these kinds of comparisons in its annual Uniform Crime Report, which collects crime data from jurisdictions across the country.

“Comparisons lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting communities and their residents,” it says. “Valid assessments are possible only with careful study and analysis of the range of unique conditions affecting each local law enforcement jurisdiction.”

The Prison Policy Initiative itself recognized D.C. isn’t the same as the 50 states in its 2018 report when it put D.C. on a separate list alongside the U.S. territories. But in its 2016 report, D.C. was listed along with states — and led them all in terms of its incarceration rate.

Legacy Of Tough On Crime Policies

Finally, there’s the separate challenge that in D.C., the prosecution of violent crime is handled by federal, not local prosecutors. That can result in criminal justice decisions that are removed from local policymakers.

But aside from how best to measure and compare D.C.’s incarceration rate, Wanda Bertram of the Prison Policy Initiative thinks it’s important to remember the broader contours of the current debate over criminal justice.

“D.C. was as much a participant in tough on crime policies as any of the states,” she says. “When it comes to conversations like this, D.C. absolutely deserves to be compared to states.”

Ghandnoosh of the Sentencing Project agrees, saying that from her point of view, there’s a bigger issue that needs to be tackled: “Too many people sent to prison and people sent there for too long.”