“Forcing those who cannot understand their punishment to live the remainder of their days behind bars appears to be exactly the type of excessive and cruel punishment that the Eighth Amendment was meant to protect against.”
50 years after Attica uprising
In March 2021, the Bureau of Justice Statistics revealed that around a quarter of the 24,848 incarcerated people it surveyed across 364 prisons had an intellectual, developmental or cognitive disability. Across the entire prison and jail network, that would equate to some 550,000 people.