United States incarceration rate

This article is about the incarceration rate. For incarcerations in general, see Incarceration in the United States.

Incarceration rates by state. From various years; latest available as of June 2024. State, federal, and local inmates.[1]

The United States in 2022 had the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world, at 541 people per 100,000.[2][3] Between 2019 and 2020, the United States saw a significant drop in the total number of incarcerations. State and federal prison and local jail incarcerations dropped by 14% from 2.1 million in 2019 to 1.8 million in mid-2020.[4] The incarceration total has risen since then.[2] In 2018, the United States had the highest incarceration rate in the world.[5]

While the United States represented about 4.2 percent of the world's population in 2020,[6] it housed around 20 percent of the world's prisoners.[7] Corrections (which includes prisons, jails, probation, and parole) cost around $74 billion in 2007 according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).[8][9] According to the Justice Expenditures and Employment in the United States, 2017 report release by BJS, it is estimated that county and municipal governments spent roughly US$30 billion on corrections in 2017.[10][11]

As of their March 2023 publication, the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-profit organization for decarceration, estimated that in the United States, about 1.9 million people were or are currently incarcerated. Of those who were incarcerated, 1,047,000 people were in state prison, 514,000 in local jails, 209,000 in federal prisons, 36,000 in youth correctional facilities, 34,000 in immigration detention camps, 22,000 in involuntary commitment, 8,000 in territorial prisons, 2,000 in Indian Country jails, and 1,000 in United States military prisons. The data is from various years depending on what is the latest available data.[12]

Inmate citizenship statistics, which are updated monthly by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, lists the following statistics for July 2021: 83.67% of Federal inmates are U.S. citizens; 9.3% are citizens of Mexico, and the next three countries—Colombia, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, contribute less than 1% each; 4.9% have other or unknown citizenship. The Bureau did not state how many had come to the U.S. legally.[13]

  1. ^ Widra, Emily (June 2024). "Appendix 1 - States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2024". Prison Policy Initiative. See tooltips, and scroll past table for detailed sourcing.
  2. ^ a b United States of America. World Prison Brief. See archive. Pick year to get rates and counts.
  3. ^ Highest to Lowest. World Prison Brief (WPB). See archive. Pick year for rates and counts. Use dropdown menu to choose lists of countries by region, or the whole world. Use menu to select highest-to-lowest lists of prison population totals, prison population rates, percentage of pre-trial detainees / remand prisoners, percentage of female prisoners, percentage of foreign prisoners, and occupancy rate. Column headings in WPB tables can be clicked to reorder columns lowest to highest, or alphabetically. For detailed information for each country click on any country name in lists. The individual country pages also give the date of the data. See also the WPB main data page and click on the map links and/or the sidebar links to get to the region and country desired. Please update the tables here only from this WPB source.
  4. ^ Kang-Brown, Jacob; Montagnet, Chase; Heiss, Jasmine (January 2021). "People in Jail and Prison in 2020" (PDF).
  5. ^ ""Contempt for the poor in US drives cruel policies," says UN expert". OHCHR. June 4, 2018. Retrieved June 25, 2018. The United States now has the highest income inequality in the Western world, the highest incarceration rate in the entire world, and one of the lowest turnout rates in elections among developed countries.
  6. ^ "[T]he world population ...was estimated to have reached 7,800,000,000 people as of March 2020." Meanwhile, "The United States had an official resident population of 331,449,281 on April 1, 2020", according to the Wikipedia articles accessed September 26, 2021. 331.448/7900 = 0.042.
  7. ^ Roy Walmsley (September 1, 2018), World Prison Population List, 12th edition (PDF) (12th ed.), Wikidata Q108701677 Table 7, p. 17, gives numbers for "World prison population levels" including separate numbers for "Americas" and "[Americas] without U.S.A." for 2000 and 2020. Subtracting "[Americas] without U.S.A." from "Americas" gives U.S.A. Dividing those numbers by the World total gives 22 percent for 2000, the previous number used in this article prior to modifying this reference to cite the 12th edition, and 20 percent for 2020.
  8. ^ Direct expenditures by justice function, 1982–2007 (billions of dollars). Inflation adjusted to 2007 dollars. U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). Retrieved January 1, 2012, by the Internet Archive. See BJS timeline graph based on the data.
  9. ^ Justice Expenditures and Employment, FY 1982–2007 – Statistical Tables (NCJ 236218). Published December 2011. U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). By Tracey Kyckelhahn, PhD, BJS statistician. See table 2 of the PDF. "Total justice expenditures, by justice function, FY 1982–2007 (real dollars)". A total of around $74 billion for corrections in 2007.
  10. ^ "Justice Expenditures and Employment in the United States, 2017". Bureau of Justice Statistics. Retrieved July 27, 2021.
  11. ^ "Justice Expenditures and Employment in the United States, 2017" (PDF). U.S. Department of Justice; Office of Justice Programs; Bureau of Justice Statistics. July 2021.
  12. ^ Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2023. By Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner. March 14, 2023. Prison Policy Initiative.
  13. ^ "BOP Statistics: Inmate Citizenship". Federal Bureau of Prisons.