PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Philadelphia's prison population is rising again after years of going down — so much so that incarcerated women have been moved to a different facility to accommodate the increased numbers.
The women have moved from Alternative Special Detention Units to the Philadelphia Industrial Correction Center (PICC), in units isolated from the male population there. Prisons Commissioner Blanche Carney said there are more than 300 women now incarcerated on State Road, an increase of more than 70 from the pre-pandemic population.
"The increase in population made it so that we needed to transfer the women to a larger housing unit area," she said.
No one seems to know why the population is increasing. Carney says it's due to more admissions but she can't say why admissions are up. A police spokesman said he was not aware of an increase in arrests.
Since 2015, Philadelphia has received nearly $10 million from the McArthur Foundation to reduce the prison population. The Kenney administration had aimed to bring the population down below 4,000 by the end of this year, under the most recent McArthur grant — a goal that seems less and less likely.
The administration declined an interview request. The District Attorney's office had also pledged to decarcerate. It did not respond to a request for comment. Even the Pennsylvania Prison Society said it was stumped.
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Clearly, this is a setback for all of those offices, who had been making progress on their stated goal of decarceration. They had gotten the total population down to about 4,400. Now, Carney said, it's more than 4,500. "Over the summer, it would fluctuate, It was ebbs and flows, about 280, 299," she said.
Carney said the current female population is 306, up from a low of 230. She added there are also fewer releases than there had been. That may be due to the courts working their way out of the backlog caused by the pandemic.
"We're looking to see if there are issues with case processing and how they’re being scheduled," she said.
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