Following the Money of Mass Incarceration 2026

by Jacob Kang-Brown and Peter Wagner

The costs of funding the police — especially the bloated budgets of militarized federal agencies in the Department of Homeland Security — have become a recurring theme in discussions about criminal legal system policy. At the same time, crime has declined and fewer people are incarcerated, yet spending on the criminal legal system has still increased faster than inflation. All parts of the system, from local jails to fines and fees and prison industries, deserve a clear accounting and a hard look. Understanding more clearly who benefits and who pays can help re-orient budgets away from punishment and exclusion and toward public health and safety.

In an update to our 2017 report, we find that the broad system of mass incarceration costs the government and families of system-involved people at least $445 billion every year.

In this report:

• We provide the most significant costs of the nation’s globally-unprecedented system of mass incarceration and criminalization,
• We show the relative scale of the various parts of that system,
• We explain how funding for policing has rapidly increased, including the recent influx of federal dollars to immigration enforcement,
• We highlight some of the costly yet often overlooked parts of the system, and then
• We share all of our sources so that journalists and advocates can build upon our work.

The expenses covered in this report do not include a full accounting of the current, ongoing economic harms of mass incarceration. For example, we do not include recent estimates of income lost when people get sent to jail or prison ($111 billion per year) or income lost by children of incarcerated parents during their working years ($215 billion per year). For that reason, our estimate — as massive as it is — should be viewed as a limited one.

Our goal with this report is to give the “big picture” view of the economic incentives that help shape the criminal legal system, by identifying some of the key stakeholders and quantifying their “stake” in the status quo. Our data visualization shows how wide and how deep mass incarceration and criminalization have spread into the U.S. economy. We find:

• Policing is a massive public expense and its spending has grown faster than other parts of the system in recent years.
• Federal expenditures related to policing and the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda now make up 25% of all government spending on the criminal legal system.
• Almost half of the money spent on running the correctional system goes to paying staff. These employees form an influential lobby that sometimes blocks reform and whose jobs are often protected even when prison populations drop.
• The criminal legal system is overwhelmingly a public system, with private prison companies acting only as extensions of the public system. The government payroll for corrections employees is over 100 times higher than the private prison industry’s profits.
• Individuals who come into contact with the system — and their loved ones — pay over $27.7 billion a year in fines and fees, bail premiums, commissary payments, and telecommunications costs. This is over five times the amount that goes to private prisons and detention centers.
• Despite the fact that the Constitution requires counsel to be appointed for defendants unable to afford legal representation, the government spends only $7.9 billion on this right.
• Feeding and providing health care for nearly 2 million people, even as inadequately as they do behind bars, is expensive at $18 billion per year.

What’s changed since 2017

Public funding for the criminal legal system has increased in recent years, even as the number of people involved in the system has declined, reflecting changes in priorities as well as economic factors like inflation. The largest total increase has been funding for policing, but the most rapid funding increase came in 2025 for ICE, Border Patrol and other agencies involved in the criminalization of immigration and immigration detention.

The 31% inflation from 2017 to 2025 can disguise some of the changes in spending, so this visual adjusts the 2017 figures to their value in 2025. For the unadjusted figures and sourcing, see the text and methodology.

Spending on policing rose by $58.3 billion (a 40% increase), from $145 billion in 2017 to $203 billion in 2025. Expanded federal budgets account for about one-third of that increase ($19.3 billion), while state and local policing budgets grew by $38.5 billion. In contrast to the steep funding increase for police agencies, spending on public libraries grew only 22% in this same time period, from $12.7 to $15.4 billion, not even keeping pace with inflation (which was 31.5% between 2017 and 2025).

Corrections spending, a category that includes local jail, prison, probation, and parole systems, shot up $24.8 billion (a 27% increase), from $90.9 billion in 2017 to $115.8 billion in 2025, even as correctional populations shrank by over 1 million people (a 15% drop). Even as prison and jail populations have dropped, correctional payrolls continue to swell; agencies rely on overtime to meet staffing requirements and offer increasingly generous pay in vain attempts to relieve chronic understaffing.

Judicial and legal expenses connected to criminal law enforcement, such as spending on prosecution and defense, grew by $10.7 billion (a 32% increase), from $33.1 to $43.8 billion. While still under-funded compared to prosecution, increased funding for indigent defense has narrowed the gap in some states.

Finally, federal immigration- and border-related policing and immigration detention totaled $54.3 billion in 2025, up from $20 billion in 2017, making this the fastest-growing public expense in the sector. The 2025 budget, 2.7 times larger than in 2017, now makes up 13% of all government spending on the criminal legal system.

Conclusions

This report and infographic are a step toward better understanding who benefits from mass incarceration and why some stakeholders might be more resistant to reform. We have no doubt that we missed some costs, and we did not include some costs because they are currently unknowable or are relatively small in the big picture. But, by following the money, one can see that private prison corporations aren’t the only ones who benefit from mass incarceration. By far, the public agencies and public employees are the key beneficiaries. Some of the lesser-known major players in the system of mass incarceration and criminalization include:

• Bail bond companies that collect $1.65 billion in nonrefundable fees from defendants and their families. The industry also actively works to block or rollback reforms that threaten its profits, even though reforms have been shown to reduce wealth-based pretrial detention while maintaining public safety.
• Commissary vendors and specialized telecommunications companies that sell goods, tablets, and phone calls to incarcerated people — who rely largely on money sent by loved ones — is an even larger industry that brings in $5.6 billion a year.
• Correctional health care providers that provide, at great cost, inadequate staffing, medicine, and care to people behind bars.

A graphic like this shows the relative economic cost of different parts of mass incarceration, but it can also obscure the fact that we don’t have a single monolithic “system.” Instead, we have 50 state systems, thousands of local government systems, and a federal system. The federal system includes both criminal law enforcement and a bloated federal immigration system oriented towards criminalization and detention. Sometimes these local, state, and federal systems work together, but often they do not, and looking at one “national” picture can obscure the importance of state and local policy decisions. For example, while state government spending makes up the majority (57%) of corrections costs, local governments make up close to a third (31%). Local governments are largely enforcing state law, and local discretionary arrest and bail policies can have tremendous influence on both the state budget and legal system outcomes. For example, most of the cost of running local jails is spent detaining people who have not been convicted. Similarly, in some places, fines and fees are a major source of local revenue and thus incentivize both criminalization and unfair taxation. In turn, these fines and fees contribute to mass incarceration.

This report serves as a starting point for those ready to look at these systems anew, given the astronomical economic, social, and human costs of mass incarceration. To be sure, there are ideological as well as economic reasons for mass incarceration and criminalization. But at this moment, when crime is near record lows and federal policymakers seek to criminalize large numbers of people, we need a far more expansive view of how our criminal legal system works, whom it hurts, and whom it really serves.

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For more information, including detailed footnotes, and our methodology, see the full version of this report on our website.