150+ new charts & 6 data tables show how jails are overused in America & what can be done about it.

Prison Policy Initiative updates for April 15, 2024 Exposing how mass incarceration harms communities and our national welfare

New data and visualizations spotlight states' reliance on excessive jailing [[link removed]] We've updated the data tables and graphics from our 2017 report to show just how little has changed in our nation's overuse of jails: too many people are locked up in jails, most detained pretrial and many of them are not even under local jurisdiction. [[link removed]]

by Emily Widra

One out of every three [[link removed]] people behind bars is being held in a local jail, yet jails get almost none of the attention that prisons do. In 2017, we published an in-depth analysis of local jail populations in each state: Era of Mass Expansion: Why State Officials Should Fight Jail Growth [[link removed]]. We paid particular attention to the various drivers of jail incarceration — including pretrial practices and holding people in local jails for state and federal authorities — and we explained how jails impact our entire criminal legal system and millions of lives every year. In the years since that publication, many states have passed reforms aimed at reducing jail populations, but we still see the same trends playing out: too many people are confined in local jails, and the reasons for their confinement do not justify the overwhelming costs of our nation’s reliance on excessive jailing.

People cycle through local jails more than 7 million times each year and they are generally held there for brief, but life-altering, periods of time. Most are released in a few hours or days after their arrest, but others are held for months or years, often because they are too poor to make bail. [[link removed]] Fewer than one-third of the 663,100 people in jails on a given day have been convicted and are likely serving short sentences of less than a year, most often for misdemeanors. Jail policy is therefore in large part about how people who are legally innocent are treated, and how policymakers think our criminal legal system should respond to low-level offenses.

Figure 1. The frequent practice of renting jail cells to other agencies makes it difficult to draw conclusions from the little data that is available. This update to our 2017 report offers an updated analysis of national data to offer a state-by-state view of how jails are being used and we continue to find that pretrial populations continue to drive jail growth across the country. The data behind this graph is in Appendix Table 1 [[link removed]].

Pretrial policies have a warehousing effect

The explosion of jail populations is the result of a broader set of policies that treat the criminal legal system as the default response to all kinds of social problems that the police and jails are ill-equipped to address. In particular, our national reliance on pretrial detention has driven the bulk of jail growth over the past four decades.

More than 460,000 people [[link removed]] are currently detained pretrial - in other words, they are legally innocent and awaiting trial. Many of these same people are jailed pretrial simply because they can’t afford money bail [[link removed]], while others remain in detention without a conviction because a state or federal government agency has placed a “hold” [[link removed]] on their release.

Pretrial detention disproportionately impacts already-marginalized groups of people:

Low income: The median felony bail amount is $10,000 [[link removed]], but 32% [[link removed]] of people booked into jail in the past 12 months reported an annual income below $10,000. Black people: 43% [[link removed]] of people detained pretrial are Black. Black people are jailed at more than three times [[link removed]] the rate of white people. Health problems: 40% [[link removed]] of people in jail reported a current chronic health condition. 18% [[link removed]] of people booked into jail at least once in the past 12 months are not covered by any health insurance. Mental illness: 45% [[link removed]] of people booked into jail in the past 12 months met criteria for any mental illness, compared to only 30% [[link removed]] of people who had not been jailed. Experiencing homelessness: While national data don’t exist on the number of people in jail who were experiencing homelessness at the time of their arrest, data from Atlanta show that 1 in 8 city jail bookings [[link removed]] in 2022 were of people who were experiencing homelessness. Lesbian, gay, or bisexual: 15% [[link removed]] of people booked into jail in the past 12 months identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, compared to 10% [[link removed]] of people not booked in the past year.

This confinement creates problems for individuals on a short-term basis and also has long-term effects. Research in different jurisdictions has found that, compared to similarly-situated peers who are not detained, people detained prior to trial are more likely to plead guilty [[link removed]], be convicted [[link removed]], be sentenced to jail [[link removed]], have longer sentences if incarcerated [[link removed]], and be arrested again [[link removed]]. And these harms accrue quickly: being detained pretrial for any amount of time impacts [[link removed]] employment, finances, housing, and the well-being of dependent children. In fact, studies have found that pretrial detention is associated with a decreased likelihood of court appearance [[link removed]] and an increased likelihood of additional charges for new offenses [[link removed]]. There is no question that wholesale pretrial detention does far more harm than good for an increasing number of people and communities.

Renting jail space: a perverse incentive continues to fuel jail growth

There are two different ways to look at jail populations: by custody or jurisdiction. The custody population refers to the number of incarcerated people physically in local jails. The jurisdictional population focuses on the legal authority under which someone is incarcerated, regardless of the type of correctional facility they are in. This means that there are people in the physical custody of local jails, but who are under the jurisdictional authority of another agency, such as the federal government (including the U.S. Marshals Service, immigration authorities, and the Bureau of Prisons) or state agencies (namely the state prison system). For example, immigration authorities can request that local officials notify ICE before a specific individual is released from jail custody and then keep them detained for up to 48 hours after their release date. These holds or “detainers” essentially ask local law enforcement to jail people even when there are no criminal charges pending.

State and federal agencies pay local jails a per diem (per day) fee for each person held on their behalf. For example, in 2024, the state Department of Corrections (prison system) pays local jails in Louisiana $26.39 per person [[link removed]] per day. These fees range and depend on the contract between agencies: In 2023, the per diem rate negotiated between Daviess County, Kentucky and the U.S. Marshals Service increased from $55 to $70 per person [[link removed]] per day. These per diem fees can rack up quickly: in fiscal year 2021, the U.S. Marshals Service paid North Carolina counties more than $31 million [[link removed]] for jail holds, while the Louisiana Department of Corrections spent more than $123 million [[link removed]] on their “local housing of adult offenders” program.

In 28 states and the District of Columbia, more than 10% of the jail population is being held on behalf of a state or federal authority. This both skews the data and gives local jail officials a powerful financial incentive to endorse policies that contribute to unnecessary jail expansion. Local sheriffs — who operate jails that are rarely filled to anywhere near their total capacity with people held for local authorities — can pad their budgets by contracting out extra bed space to federal and state governments. To be sure, sharing some jail capacity can be a matter of efficiency: for example, if one county’s jail is occasionally full, borrowing space from a neighboring county may be better than building a larger jail. And, in some states - like Missouri - state law requires that local jails agree to hold people for state [[link removed]] or federal agencies [[link removed]]. But the systematic renting of jail cells to other jurisdictions — while also building ever-larger facilities in order to cash in on that market — changes the policy priorities of jail officials, leaving them with little incentive to welcome or implement reforms.

In our 2017 report [[link removed]], we found this phenomenon was most visible in Louisiana, where the state largely outsourced the construction and operation of state prisons to individual parish (county) sheriffs. The most recent data [[link removed]] suggests that as of 2022, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Mississippi stand out as the worst offenders. In all three states, at least one-third of the state prison population is actually held in local jails (53% in Louisiana, 47% in Kentucky, and 33% in Mississippi).

Another major consumer of local jail cells is the federal government, starting with the U.S. Marshals Service, which rents about 26,200 jail spaces each year — mostly to hold federal pretrial detainees in locations where there is no federal detention center. In the District of Columbia, South Dakota, New Hampshire, and New Mexico, more than 15% of the statewide jail population was actually held for the U.S. Marshals Service in 2019. Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement rents about 15,700 jail spaces each year for people facing deportation. In 2019, New Jersey stood out with 16% of the statewide jail population held for immigration authorities, followed by Mississippi (10%).

We should note there is significant geographic variation in just how much of a jail’s population is held for other authorities: more than a quarter of people in rural jails were held for state, federal, or American Indian and Alaska Native tribal governments in 2019, compared to only 11% of people in urban jails. The distribution also varies by state, as each has different levels of “excess” jail capacity, and federal officials have specific needs in different parts of the country.

The practice of holding people in local jails for other authorities carries significant personal, social, and fiscal costs, often exposing detained people [[link removed]] to the harms of incarceration [[link removed]] for longer periods of time than they would be otherwise. Jails are not designed to hold people for any significant period of time; they lack sufficient programming, services [[link removed]], and medical care [[link removed]] to house people for months or years. This practice also contributes to jail overcrowding, which fuels jail construction and expansion in turn. As scholars Jack Norton, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, and Judah Schept succinctly put it [[link removed]]: “When they build it, they fill it, and counties across the country have been building bigger jails and planning for a future of more criminalization, detention, and incarceration.”

Contextualizing prison and jail population changes during and after the COVID-19 pandemic

Most of the data used in this report come from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Census of Jails, which was most recently administered in 2019 and published in 2022 (see the methodology for sourcing details). However, the prison population data used to create our state-specific graphics are from 2022 and reveal the dramatic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic [[link removed]] on prison populations in many states over time. They show that state and federal prison admissions dropped 40% [[link removed]]in the first year of the pandemic (2020). While not reflected in the 2019 data used in this briefing, we know that by June 2021, jail admissions were down 33% [[link removed]] compared to the 12 months ending in June 2019. Before 2020, the number of annual jail admissions was consistently 10 million or more [[link removed]]. Because these declines were not generally due to permanent policy changes [[link removed]], we expect that both prison and jail admissions will return to pre-pandemic levels as cases that were delayed [[link removed]]for pandemic-related reasons work their way through the court system.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from 2017 remain just as relevant today, and can help state and local officials move away from using jails as catch-all responses to problems that disproportionately impact poor and marginalized communities:

Change offenses and how offenses are treated

States should reclassify criminal offenses and turn charges that don’t threaten public safety into non-jailable infractions. For other offenses, states should create a presumption of citation, in lieu of arrests, for certain low-level crimes. For low-level crimes where substance abuse and/or mental illnesses are involved, states should make community treatment-based diversion programs the default instead of jail. States should also fully fund these diversion programs.

Help people successfully navigate the criminal legal system to more positive outcomes

States should immediately set up pilot projects to test promising programs that facilitate successful navigation of the criminal legal system. Court notification systems and other “wrap-around” pretrial services often increase court appearances while also reducing recidivism.

Change policies that criminalize poverty or that create financial incentives for unnecessarily punitive policies

States should eliminate the two-track system of justice by abolishing money bail. States that are not ready to take that step should start by abolishing the for-profit bail industry in their state, and providing technical resources to existing local-level bail alternative programs to help these programs self-evaluate and improve state-level knowledge.

Address the troubling trend of renting jail space

States should evaluate whether the renting of local jail space to state and federal authorities is steering local officials away from effectively addressing local needs.

Updated state-specific graphics

In 2017, we argued [[link removed]] that if lawmakers want criminal legal system reform, they must pay attention to jails. Years later, this remains true. To help state officials and state-level advocates craft reform strategies appropriate for their unique situations, this report offers updated data and state-specific graphs on conviction status, as well as changes in incarceration rates and populations in both prisons and jails.

The graphs made for this briefing are included in our profiles for each state. Click the map below to be taken to our profile pages:

***

For more information, including more than 150 new charts [[link removed]], six detailed data appendices [[link removed]], footnotes, and an explanation of our methodology, see the full version of this briefing on our website [[link removed]].

Please support our work [[link removed]]

Our work is made possible by private donations. Can you help us keep going? We can accept tax-deductible gifts online [[link removed]] or via paper checks sent to PO Box 127 Northampton MA 01061. Thank you!

Other news: Is your county planning to build a bigger jail? Start here. [[link removed]]

From our 2019 report Does our county really need a bigger jail? [[link removed]] to our collection of resources for community activists [[link removed]], we have the information and data you need to understand jail expansion in your county and state.

Recent data offer a detailed snapshot of the cost of family contact in local jails [[link removed]]

Some of the questions we receive most often about communication policies (and rates) in local jails can finally be answered, thanks to two new resources from Michigan and Minnesota.

In this new briefing [[link removed]], we examine two unique data sets that provide information on kickbacks, visitation, and more in Michigan and Minnesota jails.

Since you asked: How many women and men are released from each state’s prisons and jails every year? [[link removed]]

550,000 people are locked up in local jails on any given day in this country, but that number barely scratches the surface of how many people are impacted.

In this briefing [[link removed]], we crunched the numbers that show millions of people cycle through U.S. jails every year. In addition, we provide detailed numbers for all 50 states broken down by sex.

Please support our work [[link removed]]

Our work is made possible by private donations. Can you help us keep going? We can accept tax-deductible gifts online [[link removed]] or via paper checks sent to PO Box 127 Northampton MA 01061. Thank you!

Our other newsletters Ending prison gerrymandering ( archives [[link removed]]) Criminal justice research library ( archives [[link removed]])

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