Probation and parole in the United States

3,030,540 adults were on probation at the end of 2024 and 663,820 on parole — about 3.0 people under supervision in 2023 for every one in prison. Almost none of them appear in a crime statistic.

3,030,540
On probation, 2024: 1,142 per 100,000 adult residents; 663,820
On parole, 2024: down 24.5% since 2019; 1 in 22
Georgia supervises most: 4,564 per 100,000 adults, against New Hampshire’s 364; 1,558,260
Entered probation in 2024: 1,552,640 left

What these numbers are

A count of supervisions, not of people. A person on probation in two states is two records, and a person who leaves and returns within a year appears in both entries and exits. Probation and parole added together is an upper bound on the number of adults under supervision, not a count of them.
Entries and exits are imputed for the agencies that did not answer, and the reported figures — which count only those that did — are published beside them. The two are never added. Start plus entries minus exits reconstructs the year-end population to within 2.2% at its worst, across every year here, and that gap is the size of the imputation rather than an error.
The rate is per 100,000 adult residents, which is the publisher’s own denominator. It is not per 100,000 people: children are not eligible for adult probation, and dividing by the whole population would understate every state by about a fifth.
Maine abolished parole in 1976 and has not appeared in a parole table since 2021. A blank here is a jurisdiction the publisher did not report, never a zero.
The federal system supervises people convicted of federal offenses and is listed separately. It is in the national total and never in a state ranking.

Parole has fallen in every year since 2019; probation has not

Parole fell 24.5% between 2019 and 2024

Probation is not on this chart: at three million against two-thirds of a million the two share no useful axis, and the table below carries both. The parole series reaches back to 2019 because the 2023 edition republishes 2019, 2020 and 2021; probation is published only for its edition year.

Parole stood at 878,670 at the end of 2019 and 663,820 at the end of 2024.

Probation is published only for each edition year, so it begins in 2021 while parole reaches back to 2019.

Source: The Bureau of Justice Statistics

About this chart

The figures

Parole fell 24.5% between 2019 and 2024. Probation is not on this chart: at three million against two-thirds of a million the two share no useful axis, and the table below carries both. The parole series reaches back to 2019 because the 2023 edition republishes 2019, 2020 and 2021; probation is published only for its edition year.
Year	On parole	On probation
2019	878,670	not published
2020	862,516	not published
2021	799,853	2,963,018
2022	698,820	2,990,880
2023	680,390	3,103,350
2024	663,820	3,030,540

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<figure style="margin:0;max-width:960px">
  <img src="https://americanfactbook.org/embed/chart/crime-parole-trend.svg" alt="Parole fell 24.5% between 2019 and 2024" style="width:100%;height:auto" loading="lazy">
  <figcaption style="font:13px/1.4 system-ui,sans-serif">Chart: <a href="https://americanfactbook.org/crime">Parole fell 24.5% between 2019 and 2024</a>, American Factbook, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY 4.0</a></figcaption>
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3 more columns on a wider screen

Adults under community supervision, with the flow through each year
Year	Supervision	At year end	Entered	Left	Per 100,000 adults
2019	Parole	878,670	442,800	442,200	343
2020	Parole	862,516	392,400	388,400	334
2021	Parole	799,853	357,000	410,200	309
2021	Probation	2,963,018	1,419,300	1,553,200	1,143
2022	Parole	698,820	319,200	365,700	267
2022	Probation	2,990,880	1,571,500	1,526,300	1,142
2023	Parole	680,390	311,400	335,790	258
2023	Probation	3,103,350	1,626,330	1,607,540	1,179
2024	Parole	663,820	314,700	329,780	250
2024	Probation	3,030,540	1,558,260	1,552,640	1,142

Georgia supervises one adult in 22 · by jurisdiction

The spread is the finding rather than the total: Georgia supervises 4,564 adults per 100,000 and New Hampshire 364, a difference of 12.5 times between two states under the same federal constitution. The counts are added only in the last column, and that sum is an upper bound: nothing in the source says whether a person appears in both. The federal system has no rate here — the Bureau publishes one, but it is computed over the adult population of the whole country rather than a state’s, so it does not belong in this column.

3 more columns on a wider screen

Adults on probation and on parole by jurisdiction, 2024
Jurisdiction	Probation per 100,000	Parole per 100,000	On probation	On parole	Both, as an upper bound
Georgia	4,406	158	377,940	13,520	391,460
Arkansas	2,173	945	51,620	22,460	74,080
Idaho	2,132	461	32,360	7,000	39,360
Mississippi	1,622	456	36,750	10,320	47,070
Texas	1,632	409	381,330	95,480	476,810
Ohio	1,876	163	173,950	15,150	189,100
Colorado	1,818	189	85,670	8,900	94,570
Minnesota	1,841	148	82,300	6,620	88,920
Rhode Island	1,840	40	16,610	360	16,970
Maryland	1,654	192	80,510	9,340	89,850
Indiana	1,686	140	89,590	7,420	97,010
Kentucky	1,438	340	50,960	12,060	63,020
Tennessee	1,398	208	78,410	11,670	90,080
Louisiana	1,056	517	37,220	18,240	55,460
Michigan	1,419	114	113,510	9,090	122,600
Pennsylvania	812	654	84,540	68,150	152,690
Iowa	1,133	284	28,320	7,100	35,420
Washington	1,240	170	77,550	10,600	88,150
Arizona	1,270	116	75,410	6,890	82,300
Delaware	1,333	36	11,080	300	11,380
Wisconsin	846	473	39,760	22,240	62,000
Alabama	1,170	145	46,860	5,820	52,680
South Dakota	808	504	5,660	3,530	9,190
Hawaii	1,183	94	13,600	1,090	14,690
Montana	1,120	119	10,090	1,070	11,160
Wyoming	1,039	164	4,750	750	5,500
District of Columbia	819	306	4,630	1,730	6,360
Missouri	794	323	38,510	15,690	54,200
Connecticut	1,026	85	30,080	2,490	32,570
Oregon	539	568	18,510	19,500	38,010
North Dakota	982	92	5,970	560	6,530
Illinois	880	160	87,670	15,960	103,630
Virginia	1,017	21	70,080	1,420	71,500
Utah	869	151	22,050	3,830	25,880
Florida	964	20	179,980	3,720	183,700
Oklahoma	884	70	27,500	2,180	29,680
New Mexico	774	130	12,970	2,190	15,160
Nevada	674	213	17,210	5,440	22,650
Vermont	715	128	3,820	690	4,510
North Carolina	683	124	58,770	10,650	69,420
Nebraska	732	75	11,070	1,140	12,210
Massachusetts	744	33	42,760	1,870	44,630
West Virginia	553	219	7,850	3,110	10,960
South Carolina	640	75	27,420	3,210	30,630
Kansas	399	237	9,050	5,370	14,420
New Jersey	415	216	30,710	15,970	46,680
California	484	126	149,410	38,950	188,360
Alaska	384	212	2,160	1,190	3,350
New York	417	150	65,990	23,680	89,670
Maine	509	not reported	5,880	not reported	5,880
New Hampshire	222	142	2,570	1,650	4,220
Federal	—	—	11,280	104,070	115,350

Who is under supervision · nationally, 2024

The shares below are of the publisher’s own published total for each grouping, and the categories it could not classify are kept rather than dropped. That matters most for probation, where a fifth of the population is recorded as “not asked” — a share computed over the classified cases alone would be a claim about people the agencies never asked.

Probation, by sex

Probation, by sex, 2024
Category	People	Share of the group
Male	1,453,460	48.0%
Not asked	638,250	21.1%
Unknown/not reported	482,180	15.9%
Female	456,640	15.1%

Probation, by race or ethnicity

Probation, by race or ethnicity, 2024
Category	People	Share of the group
White	944,470	31.2%
Not asked	638,250	21.1%
Black	579,510	19.1%
Unknown/not reported	510,330	16.8%
Hispanic	299,390	9.9%
Other	58,590	1.9%

Parole, by sex

Parole, by sex, 2024
Category	People	Share of the group
Male	567,010	85.4%
Female	77,900	11.7%
Unknown/not reported	18,910	2.8%

Parole, by race or ethnicity

Parole, by race or ethnicity, 2024
Category	People	Share of the group
White	287,110	43.3%
Black	218,860	33.0%
Hispanic	116,100	17.5%
Unknown/not reported	23,020	3.5%
Other	18,740	2.8%

Where the publisher revised itself

The 2023 edition republishes parole for 2019, 2020 and 2021, so those years are published twice and independently. Most figures agree. The 8 below differ by more than one percent, and they are the Bureau restating its own counts rather than two ways of reading one table. A trend drawn through them without saying so would show a fall that is a revision.

3 more columns on a wider screen

Figures published twice and stated differently, by more than one percent
Jurisdiction	Year	Figure	First published	Restated	Apart
California	2021	change percent	-5 (2021)	-9 (2023)	95.6%
United States	2021	change percent	-7 (2021)	-7 (2023)	9.2%
State	2021	change percent	-7 (2021)	-8 (2023)	8.6%
California	2021	population start	119,595 (2021)	110,752 (2023)	7.4%
California	2021	population end	109,082 (2021)	105,713 (2023)	3.1%
California	2021	rate per 100k	358 (2021)	347 (2023)	3.1%
State	2021	population start	756,190 (2021)	747,347 (2023)	1.2%
United States	2021	population start	864,229 (2021)	855,386 (2023)	1.0%

Elsewhere in this hub

Sources

Bureau of Justice Statistics — Probation and Parole in the United States — U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics · Public domain — U.S. Government work · retrieved September 21, 2026

Compiled automatically from Bureau of Justice Statistics — Probation and Parole in the United States by a checked SQL query · Editor: Kian O'Connor · How this site is built

Data retrieved September 21, 2026