Special Section/ Jail Stats & News

LOCAL JAILS ARE BUSTLING. A S OF THE LATEST STATISTICS, SOME 750,000 PEOPLE INCARCERATED ARE HELD IN COUNTY OR CITY JAIL . THAT’S ONE OUT OF EVERY THREE PEOPLE BEHIND BARS TODAY IS HELD IN ONE OF 3,163 LOCAL U.S. JAILS, ACCORDING TO THE ORGANIZATION PRISON POLICY INITIATIVE.

In fact most of those held in local jails are for pretrial detention. Across the U.S. our county and city jails house 462,000 people who haven’t been convicted of a crime or sentenced.

While the pie chart “How many people are locked up in the United States?” provides a comprehensive snapshot of our correctional system, the graphic does not capture the enormous churn in and out of our correctional facilities, nor the far larger universe of people whose lives are affected by the criminal justice system, according the Prison Policy’s study “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019.” In fact, it furthers, “Every year, over 600,000 people enter prison gates, but people go to jail 10.6 million times each year.

The 10.6 million jail admissions, of course, include multiple

admissions of some individuals; it does not mean 10.6 million unique individuals cycle through jails in a year. According to the PowerPoint presentation, “The Importance of Successful Reentry to Jail Population Growth” given at The Jail Reentry Roundtable, Bureau of Justice Statistics statistician Allen Beck estimates that of the 12 million to 12.6 million jail admissions in 2004-2005, 9 million were unique individuals. More recently, the Prison Policy Initiative analyzed the 2014 National Survey of Drug Use and Health, which includes questions about whether respondents have been booked into jail; from this source, it estimates that approximately 6 million unique individuals were arrested and booked into jails in 2014.

Jail churn is particularly high because most people in jails have not been convicted.

Some have just been arrested and will make bail within hours or days, while many others are too poor to make bail and remain behind bars until

SOURCE: PRISON POLICY INITIATIVE SOURCE: PRISON POLICY INITIATIVE

asserts the Prison Policy report. The long supervision terms, numerous requirements, and constant surveillance (especially with electronic monitoring) result in frequent “failures,” often for minor infractions like breaking curfew or failing to pay supervision fees.

Furthermore, in 2016, at least 168,000 people were incarcerated for such “technical violations” of probation or parole—that is, not for any new crime (see above chart), according to appendix tables in the Bureau of Justice Statistics report “Probation and Parole in the United States, 2016.”

their trial. Only a small number (less than 150,000 on any given day) have been convicted, and are generally serving misdemeanor sentences under a year.

The Prison Policy Initiative dispels the myth that most people serving time are there for nonviolent drug convictions. Drug offenses still account for the incarceration of almost half a million people, they note, and nonviolent drug convictions remain a defining feature of the federal prison system. But at the state and local levels, far more people are locked up for violent and property offenses than for drug offenses alone.

Again in local jails, of 153,000 locked up for nonviolent drug offenses on a given day, 118,000 remain unconvicted.

Community supervision, which includes probation, parole, and pretrial supervision, is often seen as a “lenient” punishment, or as an ideal “alternative” to incarceration. But while remaining in the community is certainly preferable to being locked up, the conditions imposed on those under supervision are often so restrictive that they set people up to fail,

According to BJS reports, “Correctional Populations in the United States, 2016” and “Jail Inmates in 2017”: • In 2016, the number of persons supervised by U.S. adult correctional systems dropped for the ninth consecutive year. • From 2007 to 2016, the portion of the adult population under supervision of U.S. correctional systems decreased by 18%, from 3,210 to 2,640 per 100,000 adult residents. • The incarceration rate has declined since 2009 and is currently at its lowest rate since 1996. • All of the decrease in the incarcerated population was due to a decline in the prison population (down 21,200), while the jail population remained relatively stable. • Inmates in jails confined at midyear 2017 com

pared to midyear 2016 rose slightly from 740,700 to 745,200 • Jails employed 225,700 full-time staff at midyear 2017, and the inmate-to-correctional-officer ratio was 4.2 to 1.