SJC Exchange Library

Originally posted by Wanda Bertram on 04/23/2025

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Hello all,

It has been over 20 years since the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics published national charge data about local jail populations in their 2002 Survey of Inmates in Local Jails. Late last week, the Prison Policy Initiative released a new briefing that fills in many of the gaps, using data collected by the Jail Data Initiative. Our analysis shows that the vast majority of people who go to jails today are charged with minor offenses like misdemeanors, drug offenses, property offenses, and technical supervision violations.

We explore aspects of the jail population including:

• The role of misdemeanors in driving millions of jail bookings each year;

• The unnecessary jailing of hundreds of thousands of people each year for probation and parole violations alone;

• Regional differences in how counties jail people for various types of offenses, as well as disparities in large vs. small jails (typically representing large vs. small counties).

This new publication also includes several data tables showing the distribution of top charges (and categories of charges) in jails, including by geographic region and jail size; additional detail about probation- and parole-related bookings; and details about the sample of jails used in the analysis.

You can see the full analysis here: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2025/04/17/jdi_jail_offenses/

And in case you missed it, we also released a briefing earlier this month about the recent correctional officers' strike in New York and subsequent rollback of the HALT Act. We bust several of the myths propagated by New York law enforcement (and NY Gov. Kathy Hochul), showing that continuing to suspend portions of the HALT Act will not make NY prisons safer.

I hope these pieces are useful in your work!

Take care,

Wanda

Prison Policy Initiative