How Many Innocent People Are in U.S. Prisons?

According to a February 2016 report from the National Registry of Exonerations, a project at the University of Michigan Law School, there were 149 exonerations in the U.S. in 2015. The rate of exonerations has been increasing rapidly for several years. The 149 defendants who were exonerated in 2015 served, on average, around 14-and-a-half years in prison. According to this report, there are tens of thousands of false convictions each year across the country, and many more that have accumulated over the decades.  

The Innocence Project’s website states that the few studies that have been done estimate that between 2.3% and 5% of all prisoners in the U.S. are innocent. If just 1% of prisoners are innocent, that would mean that more than 20,000 innocent people are in prison.  With about 2.4 million people incarcerated in the U.S., if the rate of innocence is 5%, as many as 120,000 innocent people could currently be in prison in this country.

Echoing Richard Nixon, Donald Trump calls for “law and order.”  We should remember the full-page ad he placed in the Daily News in New York in May 1989, regarding the “Central Park Five.” In that ad, Trump stated that “civil liberties end when an attack on our safety begins.” The headline of his ad was “Bring back the death penalty.  Bring back our police.” The five young men in that case were tried in the media, and ultimately convicted and imprisoned after police coerced their confessions. Their eventual exonerations were thoroughly covered in a documentary directed by Ken Burns. Sadly, the police and prosecutorial misconduct in their cases are very common in this country.

Thankfully, on September 28, Governor Brown signed SB 1134 into law, which enacts a standard of proof that innocent people, with strong new evidence of innocence, can meet, making California comparable to 43 other states. The new California standard is still difficult to meet, but is fair. The bipartisan support for this bill in both the California Assembly and Senate is encouraging, and demonstrates that criminal justice reform is an area where Democrats and Republicans can work together.

Our rates of incarceration in the U.S. are staggering and shameful.  The fact that we incarcerate vast numbers of innocent people only adds to the horror. We should all take a hard look at the biases, incentives, and political demagoguery that foster so much injustice for so many. The reform of our criminal justice system should be one of our highest priorities, as we inch our way towards liberty and justice for all.