On the whole, people tend to take prisons for granted. It is difficult to imagine life without them. At the same time, there is reluctance to face the realities hidden within them, a fear of thinking about what happens inside them.¹

Incarceration Transparency – South Carolina seeks to share data and research to stimulate public conversations about the state’s carceral policies and practices and to address the harms of incarceration. The U.S. incarcerates nearly 2 million people in a web of state and federal prisons, city and county jails, youth jails and prisons, immigration detention centers, and other carceral facilities.^{2 9}

South Carolina ranks twenty-sixth in the nation for its per capita incarceration rate.³ A combination of state prisons, local jails, and youth jails and prisons hold 27,454 people behind bars.⁴ Approximately 16,000 of those people are held in state prisons, while 11,470 of them are held in local jails.⁵ While the state is 64% white, 27% Black, 6.1% Latine, 2.1% Asian, and 0.4% American Indian or Alaskan Native,⁶ the prison population is 58% Black⁷ and jails are 53% Black.⁸

South Carolina’s carceral facilities produce premature death.⁹ According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the state’s jails and prisons have mortality rates above the national average.¹⁰ South Carolina’s prison system is also unusually violent, with the highest homicide rate of any prison system in the country from 2001 to 2019.¹¹

Medical care remains inaccessible to many incarcerated people in South Carolina. The state is one of six where most prisoners are paid nothing for their labor. ¹² Even so, incarcerated people must pay a five-dollar co-pay to access medical care, putting treatment out of reach for these vulnerable individuals who must rely on the state for care.¹³

Those behind bars are missing from their communities, where they are be parents, sisters, uncles, cousins, co-workers, neighbors, and friends. Approximately 7% of children in the state have experienced the incarceration of a parent.¹⁴ Children and communities suffer from the ruptures in relationship that incarceration imposes.¹⁵