SJC Exchange Library

This report pieces together the most recent national data on state prisons, federal prisons, local jails, and other systems of confinement to provide a snapshot of mass incarceration in the United States. This new edition offers the most comprehensive view of mass incarceration since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Here are the key statistics from today's report:

• Today, roughly 1.9 million people are locked up in the U.S.
• Prison populations fell by about 16% during the pandemic.
• Local jail populations fell about 13% during the pandemic.

These numbers are easy to misread as saying the pandemic caused criminal justice reform. Our report explains why that's the wrong interpretation: 

• The drop in prison populations was due to COVID-19 jamming the gears of the criminal justice system, not to any coordinated efforts to change the system. In fact, 10% fewer people were released from prison during 2020 than in 2019, and preliminary data suggests that fewer still were released in 2021, meaning that a smaller number of admissions - not a higher number of releases - drove the population drop.
• Jail populations are quickly returning to pre-pandemic levels.
• Even when the U.S. prison population was at a historically low point in the pandemic, the U.S. still locked up far more people per capita than any other country on earth.

This new edition of Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie also includes:

• An updated "myth-busting" section tackling frequent misconceptions about mass incarceration related to prison labor, the war on drugs, private prisons, what victims of crime want, and community supervision.
• 31 powerful data visualizations showing racial disparities behind bars, the number of people in pretrial detention, the fraction of incarcerated people held in private versus public facilities, the number of people in the U.S. directly impacted by mass incarceration, and other long-standing truths about the criminal justice system.

You can find the full report at: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html