At midyear 2016, about 740,700 inmates were confined in county and city jails in the United States (figure 1, table 1). The midyear jail population (i.e., the number of inmates held in custody on the last weekday in June) remained relatively stable from 2011 to 2016 and below a peak of 785,500 in 2008, which was the highest count since 1982. There were 229 jail inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents at midyear 2016, down from 259 per 100,000 residents at midyear 2007.

Community corrections agencies serve more than half of the corrections population but are generally underfunded. The need to manage increasing caseloads with diminishing resources has driven the field of community corrections to embrace innovations designed to improve the delivery of services. Examples of such innovations include offender location-tracking systems, advanced drug and alcohol testing methods, automated reporting systems, offender computer-monitoring tools, and automated risk and needs assessment instruments.

In 2014, Abt Associates began work on a grant from the National Institute of Justice to evaluate the effectiveness of home and field contacts in community supervision. The study was designed to describe the varying practices of home and other field contacts in community supervision, to document their use nationwide, and to evaluate their effectiveness in maintaining public safety and promoting compliance with supervision requirements. Abt’s research is designed to address the gap in our understanding of home and field contacts as part of community supervision.

A prisoner serving a 34-year sentence for child sex abuse suffered from gender dysphoria. Biologically male, they identify as female. Correctional medical staff members treated the prisoner’s condition with hormone therapy. While the prisoner repeatedly requested sex-reassignment surgery, national standards of care recommend that patients undertake one year of “real life” experience as a person of their self-identified gender before resorting to irreversible surgery. That presented challenges in a sex-segregated prison.

Police in America arrest millions of people each year, and the likelihood that arrest will lead to jail incarceration has increased steadily. Ending mass incarceration and repairing its extensive collateral consequences thus must begin by focusing on the front end of the system: police work.

This first-of-its-kind analysis shows that in addition to thwarting rehabilitation and failing to improve public safety, criminal-court fees and fines also fail at efficiently raising revenue. The high costs of collection and enforcement are excluded from most assessments, meaning that actual revenues from fees and fines are far lower than what legislators expect. And because fees and fines are typically imposed without regard to a defendant’s ability to pay, jurisdictions have billions of dollars in unpaid court debt on the books that they are unlikely to ever collect.

These fact sheets provide at-a-glance information about how many people are locked up in both state prisons and county jails and shows where the state stands on a variety of metrics, so that policymakers and the public can better determine where to target reforms.

In addition to calculating jail and prison incarceration trends, Vera researchers combined information about prisons and jails to produce a total incarceration ranking.

Office for Victims of Crime Training and Technical Assistance Center
Learn more about the impact of vicarious trauma on individuals and on organizations, as well as resources designed to help you identify and address vicarious trauma proactively.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) used criminal history data and prisoner records to analyze the post-release offending patterns of former prisoners both within and outside of the state where they were imprisoned. This is BJS’s first recidivism study on sex offenders with a 9-year follow-up period.

National Institute of Justice - Video (1:50 minutes)

Speakers: John Wetzel, Secretary of Corrections, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections , Grant Duwe, Ph.D., Director of Research and Evaluation, Minnesota Department of Correction