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From various years; latest available as of June 2024. State, federal, and local inmates.[ See tooltips, and scroll past table for detailed sourcing.]]]
The United States in 2022 had the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world, at 541 people per 100,000.[ United States of America. World Prison Brief. See
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target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> archive. Pick year to get rates and counts.[ 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.] 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.[ In 2018, the United States had the highest incarceration rate in the world.]
While the United States represented about 4.2 percent of the world's population in 2020,["The 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.] it housed around 20 percent of the world's prisoners.[ 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.] Corrections (which includes prisons, jails, probation, and parole) cost around $74 billion in 2007 according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).[ 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.][ 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.] 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.
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.[ Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2023. By Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner. March 14, 2023. Prison Policy Initiative.]
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.
Prison and jail population
Total U.S. incarceration (prisons and jails) peaked in 2008. Total correctional population peaked in 2007.[ Correctional Populations in the United States, 2013 (NCJ 248479). Published December 2014 by U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). By Lauren E. Glaze and Danielle Kaeble, BJS statisticians. See appendix table 5 on page 13 in the PDF, for "Estimated number of persons supervised by adult correctional systems, by correctional status, 2000–2013."] If all prisoners are counted (including those juvenile, territorial, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) (immigration detention), Indian country, and military), then in 2008 the United States had around 24.7% of the world's 9.8 million prisoners.[ Prisoners in 2008 . (NCJ 228417). December 2009 report from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. By William J. Sabol, PhD and Heather C. West, PhD, BJS Statisticians. Also, Matthew Cooper, BJS Intern. Table 9 on page 8 of the PDF file has the number of inmates in state or federal prison facilities, local jails, U.S. territories, military facilities, ICE owned and contracted facilities, jails in Indian country, and juvenile facilities (2006 Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement). Table 8 on page 8 has the incarceration rates for 2000, 2007, and 2008.][Sickmund, M., Sladky, T.J., Kang, W., & Puzzanchera, C. Easy Access to the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement. Click "National Crosstabs" at the top, and then choose the census years. Click "Show table" to get the total number of juvenile inmates for those years. Or go here for all the years. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.]
In 2009, the United States had the highest documented incarceration rate in the world, at 754 per 100,000.[ Entire world – Prison Population Rates per 100,000 of the national population. Highest to Lowest Rates. For more details about the figures of any country, click on the name of that country. World Prison Brief. International Centre for Prison Studies. See this page for breakdowns by region, whole world, prison population total, prison population rate, percentage of pre-trial detainees / remand prisoners, percentage of female prisoners, percentage of foreign prisoners, and occupancy rate.][ This resulted in a decline to the 6th highest incarceration rate of 505 per 100,000 in 2020.]
This number comprises local jails with a nominal capacity of 907,700 inmates occupied at 60.5%, state prisons with a nominal capacity of 1,121,402 occupied at 86.9%, and federal prisons with a nominal capacity of 134,133 occupied at 112.8%. Of this number, 23.3% are pretrial detainees (2019), 10.2% are female prisoners (2019), 0.2% are juveniles (2019), and 7.3% are foreign prisoners (2019).[
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The imprisonment rate varies widely by state; Louisiana surpasses this by about 100%, but Maine incarcerates at about a fifth this rate. A report released February 28, 2008, indicates that more than 1 in 100 adults in the United States are in prison.
According to a U.S. Department of Justice report published in 2006, over 7.2 million people were at that time in prison, on probation, or on parole (released from prison with restrictions). That means roughly 1 in every 32 adult Americans are under some sort of criminal justice system control.[ Probation and Parole in the United States, 2006 . By Lauren E. Glaze and Thomas P. Bonczar. U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), US Department of Justice.][ BJS. Correctional Population Trends Chart.]
Growth and subsequent decline
+US incarceration count, and rate per 100,000 population. Jails, state prisons, federal prisons.[
!Year
!Count
!Rate] |
| 1940 | 264,834 | 201 |
| 1950 | 264,620 | 176 |
| 1960 | 346,015 | 193 |
| 1970 | 328,020 | 161 |
| 1980 | 503,586 | 220 |
| 1985 | 744,208 | 311 |
| 1990 | 1,148,702 | 457 |
| 1995 | 1,585,586 | 592 |
| 2000 | 1,937,482 | 683 |
| 2002 | 2,033,022 | 703 |
| 2004 | 2,135,335 | 725 |
| 2006 | 2,258,792 | 752 |
| 2008 | 2,307,504 | 755 |
| 2010 | 2,270,142 | 731 |
| 2012 | 2,228,424 | 707 |
| 2014 | 2,217,947 | 693 |
| 2016 | 2,157,800 | 666 |
| 2018 | 2,102,400 | 642 |
| 2020 | 1,675,400 | 505 |
| 2021 | 1,767,200 | 531 |
| 2022 | 1,808,100 | 541 |
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the incarceration rate in the US increased by 325 percent.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics has released a study which finds that, despite the total number of prisoners incarcerated for drug-related offenses increasing by 57,000 between 1997 and 2004, the proportion of drug offenders to total prisoners in State prison populations stayed steady at 21%. The percentage of Federal prisoners serving time for drug offenses declined from 63% in 1997 to 55% in that same period.[ Christopher J. Mumola: Drug Use and Dependence, State and Federal Prisoners, 2004, U.S. Department of Justice, October 2006, NCJ 213530] In the twenty-five years since the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, the United States penal population rose from around 300,000 to more than two million.
In 2009, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that the growth rate of the state prison population had fallen to its lowest since 2006, but it still had a 0.2% growth-rate compared to the total U.S. prison population.
When looking at specific populations within the criminal justice system the growth rates are vastly different. In 1977, there were just slightly more than eleven thousand incarcerated women. By 2004, the number of women under state or federal prison had increased by 757 percent, to more than 111,000, and the percentage of women in prison has increased every year, at roughly double the rate of men, since 2000.
Comparison with other countries
In comparison to countries with similar percentages of immigrants, Germany has an incarceration rate of 67 per 100,000 population (as of June 2022),[ Germany. International Centre for Prison Studies. Accessed January 8, 2023.] Italy is 97 per 100,000 (as of November 2022),[ Italy. International Centre for Prison Studies. Accessed January 8, 2023.] and Saudi Arabia is 207 per 100,000 (as of 2017).[ Saudi Arabia. International Centre for Prison Studies. Accessed January 8, 2023.] When compared to other countries with a zero tolerance policy for illegal drugs, the rate of Russia is 304 per 100,000 (as of November 2022),[ Russia. International Centre for Prison Studies. Accessed January 8, 2023.] Kazakhstan is 184 per 100,000 (as of July 2022),[ Kazakhstan. International Centre for Prison Studies. Accessed January 8, 2023.] Singapore is 169 per 100,000 (as of December 2021),[ Singapore. International Centre for Prison Studies. Accessed January 8, 2023.] and Sweden is 74 per 100,000 (as of January 2022).[ Sweden. International Centre for Prison Studies. Accessed January 8, 2023.]
Causes
A 2014 report by the National Research Council identified two main causes of the increase in the United States' incarceration rate over the previous 40 years: longer prison sentences and increases in the likelihood of imprisonment. The same report found that longer prison sentences were the main driver of increasing incarceration rates since 1990.
Increased sentencing laws
Even though there are other countries that commit more inmates to prison annually, the fact that the United States keeps their prisoners longer causes the total rate to become higher. To give an example, the average burglary sentence in the United States is 16 months, compared to 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.
Looking at reasons for imprisonment will further clarify why the incarceration rate and length of sentences are so high. The practice of imposing longer prison sentences on repeat offenders is common in many countries, but the three-strikes laws in the U.S. with mandatory 25-year imprisonmentimplemented in many states in the 1990sare statutes enacted by state governments in the United States which mandate state courts to impose harsher sentences on habitual offenders who are previously convicted of two prior serious criminal offenses and then commit a third.
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 may have had a minor effect on mass incarceration.
Economic and age contributions
Crime rates in low-income areas are much higher than in middle to high class areas. As a result, incarceration rates in low-income areas are much higher than in wealthier areas due to these high crime rates.
Drug sentencing laws
The "War on Drugs" is a policy that was initiated by Richard Nixon with the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 and vigorously pursued by Ronald Reagan.
As of December 2017, only 14.4% of state prisoners were serving sentences for a drug offenses with 3.7% of serving for possession and 10.8% serving for trafficking, other drug offenses, and unspecified drug offenses.
After the passage of Reagan's Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, incarceration for non-violent offenses dramatically increased. The Act imposed the same five-year mandatory sentence on those with convictions involving crack as on those possessing 100 times as much powder cocaine.
Courts were given more discretion in sentencing by the Kimbrough v. United States (2007) decision, and the disparity was decreased to 18:1 by the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010.[ "Fair Sentencing Act of 2010" , Families Against Mandatory Minimums, famm.org. Retrieved September 30, 2010.]
By 2003, 58% of all women in federal prison were convicted of drug offenses.[Bureau of Justice Statistics. Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics Online (30th ed.). 2002. Cited in "Words From Prison – Did You Know...?", American Civil Liberties Union, June 12, 2006.] Black and Hispanic women in particular have been disproportionately affected by the War on Drugs. Since 1986, incarceration rates have risen by 400% for women of all races, while rates for Black women have risen by 800%.[Marc Mauer, Cathy Potler & Richard Wolf, Gender and Justice: Women, Drugs, and Sentencing Policy, The Sentencing Project. November 1997. Cited in "Words From Prison – Did You Know...?", American Civil Liberties Union, June 12, 2006, and ] Formerly incarcerated Black women are also most negatively impacted by the collateral legal consequences of conviction.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, "Even when women have minimal or no involvement in the drug trade, they are increasingly caught in the ever-widening net cast by current drug laws, through provisions of the criminal law such as those involving conspiracy, accomplice liability, and constructive possession that expand criminal liability to reach partners, relatives and bystanders."[" Words From Prison – Did You Know...?", American Civil Liberties Union, June 12, 2006.]
These new policies also disproportionately affect African-American women. According to Dorothy E. Roberts, the explanation is that poor women, who are disproportionately black, are more likely to be placed under constant supervision by the State to receive social services.
Racialization
One of the first laws in the U.S. against drugs was the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act of 1909. It prohibited the smoking of opium, which was ingested but not smoked by a substantial portion of Caucasian housewives in the United States. It was smoked mainly by Asian American immigrants coming to build the railroads. These immigrants were targeted with anti-Asian sentiment, as many voters believed they were losing jobs to Asian immigrants.
Disproportionate incarceration of black and Hispanic people
In the early 2000s, the U.S. was at its highest rate of imprisonment in history,
However, in the 21st century, the incarceration rates for African American and Hispanic American women have declined, while incarceration rates have increased for White Americans. Between 2000 and 2017, the incarceration rate for white women increased by 44%, while at the same time declining by 55% for African American women.
In 2017, the Washington Post reported that White American women's incarceration rate was growing faster than ever before, as the rate for black women declined.
The War on Drugs played a role in the disproportionate amount of incarcerated African-Americans.
A significant contributing factor to these figures are the racially and economically segregated neighborhoods that account for the majority of the Black prison population. These neighborhoods are normally impoverished and possess a high minority population. For example, as many as one in eight adult males who inhabit these urban areas is sent to prison each year, and one in four of these men is in prison on any given day. A 1992 study revealed that 72% of all New York State's prisoners came from only 7 of New York City's 55 community districts. Upon release from prison, the most common area that African Americans return to is a poor, impoverished neighborhood.
Finding employment post-release is a significant struggle for African Americans.[ " Pages 36–37: White women have odds of receiving a favorable response from hiring managers that are nearly 50 percent smaller than the odds of Hispanic women with a prison record, the odds of white women with a prison record are only five percent smaller than black women’s with a prison record. Page 39: More than half—52 percent—of the positive outcomes observed during the audit benefitted the employment prospects of Hispanic women. White women received 36 percent of favorable responses. A complete breakdown of the distribution of favorable responses is reported in Table 3."]
Unemployment rates impacted the body of African Americans that would take up prisons. The young African Americans who have found themselves as unemployed are found to be incarcerated at a higher rate than unemployed white people, as a result of drug usage.
Prison privatization
In the 1980s, the rising number of people incarcerated as a result of the War on Drugs and the wave of privatization that occurred under the Reagan administration saw the emergence of the for-profit prison industry. Although modern did not exist in the US prior to the 1980s,[Khalek, Rania. How private prisons game the system. Salon.com. December 1, 2011.][Bernard Harcourt (2012). The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order. Harvard University Press. p. 235][Selman, Donna and Paul Leighton (2010). Punishment for Sale: Private Prisons, Big Business, and the Incarceration Binge. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p. xi] the concept of private prisons can be found within the United States as early as the 1800s.
In a 2011 report by the ACLU, it is claimed that the rise of the for-profit prison industry is a "major contributor" to "mass incarceration," along with bloated state budgets.[Margaret Newkirk & William Selway (July 12, 2013). "Gangs Ruled Prison as For-Profit Model Put Blood on Floor." Bloomberg News. Retrieved July 16, 2013.]
Corporations who operate prisons, such as CoreCivic (formerly the Corrections Corporation of America) and the GEO Group, spend significant amounts of money lobbying the federal government along with state governments.[Elk, Mike and Sloan, Bob (2011). The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor. The Nation.][ Prison Privatization and the Use of Incarceration. The Sentencing Project, September 2004. ][Sullivan, Laura (2010). Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law. National Public Radio.][Pat Beall (November 22, 2013). Big business, legislators pushed for stiff sentences. The Palm Beach Post. Retrieved November 10, 2014.][Marie Gottschalk. Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. Princeton University Press, 2014. p. 61] Prison companies also sign contracts with states that guarantee at least 90 percent of prison beds be filled. If these "lockup quotas" are not met, the state must reimburse the prison company for the unused beds. Prison companies use the profits to expand and put pressure on lawmakers to incarcerate a certain number of people.[Katy Hall and Jan Diehm (September 19, 2013). One Disturbing Reason For Our Exploding Prison Population (INFOGRAPHIC). The Huffington Post Retrieved September 20, 2013.][ CRIMINAL: How Lockup Quotas and "Low-Crime Taxes" Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations . In the Public Interest. Retrieved September 20, 2013.] This influence on the government by the private prison industry has been referred to as the prison–industrial complex.
The industry is well aware of what reduced crime rates could mean to their bottom line. This from the CCA's SEC report in 2010:
Our growth … depends on a number of factors we cannot control, including crime rates … Reductions in crime rates … could lead to reductions in arrests, convictions and sentences requiring incarceration at correctional facilities.
In January 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order directing the Department of Justice (DOJ) to begin phasing out its contracts with private federal prisons.
As of March 2021, the private prison population of the United States has seen a 16% decline since reaching its peak in 2012 with 137,000 people incarcerated.
Editorial policies of major media
Gallup polling since 1989 has found that in most years in which there was a decline in the U.S. crime rate, a majority of Americans said that violent crime was getting worse.
A substantial body of research claims that incarceration rates are primarily a function of media editorial policies, largely unrelated to the actual crime rate. Constructing Crime: Perspectives on Making News and Social Problems is a book collecting together papers on this theme.[Potter and Kapeller (1998)] The researchers say that the jump in incarceration rate from 0.1% to 0.5% of the United States population from 1975 to 2000 (documented in the figure above) was driven by changes in the editorial policies of the mainstream commercial media and is unrelated to any actual changes in crime. Media consolidation reduced competition on content. That allowed media company executives to maintain substantially the same audience while slashing budgets for investigative journalism and filling the space from the police blotter, which tended to increase and stabilize advertising revenue. It is safer, easier and cheaper to write about crimes committed by poor people than the wealthy. Poor people can be libeled with impunity, but major advertisers can materially impact the profitability of a commercial media organization by reducing their purchases of advertising space with that organization.
News media thrive on feeding frenzies (such as missing white women) because they tend to reduce production costs while simultaneously building an audience interested in the latest development in a particular story. It takes a long time for a reporter to learn enough to write intelligently about a specific issue. Once a reporter has achieved that level of knowledge, it is easier to write subsequent stories. However, major advertisers have been known to spend their advertising budgets through different channels when they dislike the editorial policies. Therefore, a media feeding frenzy focusing on an issue of concern to an advertiser may reduce revenue and profits.[McChesney (2004, p. 81) wrote, "A five-year study of investigative journalism on TV news completed in 2002 determined that investigative journalism has all but disappeared from the nation's commercial airwaves."]
Sacco described how "competing news organizations responded to each other's coverage while the police, in their role as gatekeepers of crime news, reacted to the increased media interest by making available more stories that reflected and reinforced" a particular theme. "The dynamics of competitive journalism created a media feeding frenzy that found news workers 'snatching at shocking numbers' and 'smothering reports of stable or decreasing use under more ominous headlines.'"[, reprinted as chapter 2 of Potter and Kapeller (1998, pp. 37-51, esp. p. 42)]
The reasons cited above for increased incarcerations (US racial demographics, Increased sentencing laws, and Drug sentencing laws) have been described as consequences of the shift in editorial policies of the mainstream media.[See also and ]
Additionally, media coverage has been proven to have a profound impact on criminal sentencing. Beale found that the more media attention a criminal case is given, the greater the incentive for prosecutors and judges to pursue harsher sentences.[Potter and Kapeller (1998).] While crime decreased by 8% between 1992 and 2002, news reports on crime increased by 800% and the average prison sentence length increased by 2,000% for all crimes. Less media coverage means a greater chance of a lighter sentence or that the defendant may avoid prison time entirely.
See also
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List of countries by incarceration rate
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Comparison of United States incarceration rate with other countries
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Felony disenfranchisement in the United States
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Incarceration in the United States
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List of U.S. states by incarceration rate
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Mass incarceration
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Mentally ill people in United States jails and prisons
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Prison–industrial complex
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Race and the War on Drugs
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Youth incarceration in the United States
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Decarceration in the United States
Notes
External links
