On March 14, 2024, the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), a Massachusetts-­based non-­profit known for its data-­driven research on criminal justice, published its 10th annual report detailing how many people are locked up in the U.S. among all the myriad ways they can be incarcerated. As PPI noted, “to end mass incarceration, we must first consider where and why 1.9 million people are confined nationwide.”

The report, The Whole Pie, condensed a mountain of data into an easy-­to-­read pie chart that displays how many people were imprisoned and for what reasons and in each type of facility. Most people detained in the U.S.—just over a million—were held in 1,566 state prisons. About 550,000 were confined in 3,116 city and county jails. Another 208,000 or so were held by federal authorities, including some 147,000 confined in 98 Bureau of Prisons (BOP) lockups; about 60,000 more were awaiting federal trial in custody of U.S. Marshals—usually in beds rented from local jails.

Of those in state prisons, 63% awere incarcerated on violent charges, with the remainder convicted, in approximately equal proportions, for property, drug-­related and public order offenses. Most detainees in local jails, over 80%, had not been criminally convicted; though presumed innocent they remained behind bars because they were unable to make bond or bail while awaiting trial.

An additional 100,000 people were confined in sundry other ways: about 25,000 were held in juvenile facilities, with a similar number in civil commitment facilities and psychiatric hospitals; some 7,000 were in territorial prisons, such as those in Puerto Rico and Guam; about 2,000 were in Indian Country jails; around 1,000 were held in military brigs; and nearly 46,000 more were migrant detainees held for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in detention centers that are almost all privately operated.

According to 2022 data, there were around 469,000 new admissions to prisons and 7 million booking into local jails annually—though some of those may represent a single person jailed multiple times. These numbers provided a snapshot of the American carceral system, showing 1.9 million people penned behind bars on any given day, giving the U.S. the highest incarceration rate in the world: 583 people imprisoned out of every 100,000 residents. The cost of locking up all these people was at least $182 billion per year, according to PPI’ s analysis.

Nearly 5.6 Million Americans Under Government Supervision

Although the prison and jail population had dropped from 2.3 million in 2010—the decrease was especially notable during the COVID-­19 pandemic—the number was again slowly increasing. That represented an “inflection point” in America’s “failed experiment with mass incarceration,” stated PPI Executive Director Peter Wagner. “After years of progress reducing the number of people behind bars, many of the misguided policies that created this crisis in the first place are being resurrected,” he added, and choices made by officials over the next few years “will determine whether the country repeats past mistakes or chooses a better path that makes communities safer and reduces the number of people incarcerated.”

The PPI report also included a wealth of demographic data, noting, for example, that Black people comprise 42% of those held in prisons and jails but just 14% of the total U.S. population. Using this data, the authors also debunked “10 myths” about mass imprisonment—including the impact of privately-­operated prisons, which hold just 8% of all prisoners. While they may raise moral and ethical concerns, these lockups are “essentially a parasite on the massively publicly-­owned system—not the root of it,” the report noted.

Another myth is that reforming drug laws alone will significantly reduce mass incarceration; among all those incarcerated, only 20% are locked up for drug-­related crimes. Of 2020’s one million drug arrests, though, 80% were for possession offenses.

Another myth unsupported by available data is that criminal justice reform efforts result in more crime. Politicians often respond to upticks in crime—particularly violent offenses—with “tough-­on-­crime legislation” or cast blame on bail reform, progressive prosecutors or efforts to “defund the police.”

Other debunked myths include the deterrent effect of draconian punishments; long prison sentences don’t affect crime. Nor do most victims support harsh penalties. People with mental health or substance abuse problems don’t need to be incarcerated to get treatment. And the best way to reduce mass incarceration is not by expanding parole and probation.

Regarding the latter, PPI noted that supervision conditions “are often so restrictive that they set people up to fail.” Overly long terms, numerous and burdensome rules, monitoring fees and constant surveillance put 128,000 people back behind bars for non-­criminal “technical” probation or parole violations. The remaining 798,000 people on parole and 2.9 million on probation swelled the total number of Americans under government supervision to nearly 5.6 million. See: Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2024, PPI (Mar. 2024); view accompanying charts and tables at www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024.html.  

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