People held in jail in the United States

What this data cannot show

• A jail is not a prison. Jails are run locally and hold people awaiting trial and those serving short sentences; prisons are run by a state or the federal government. These figures are never added to the prison figures, because one person can pass through both in a year.
• 6 states are absent because they run combined jail and prison systems and have no locally operated jails to count: Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia. They are missing from this table rather than reporting zero, and West Virginia was in the 2019 tables and is not in these.
• Alaska appears in the Bureau’s table and is left out of this ranking. It runs a combined system as well as fourteen local jails, and its row counts only those fourteen — 31 people — so ranking it beside a complete state would publish a figure wrong by two orders of magnitude.
• The three counts measure different things. 658,700 people were held on one day, an average of 667,700 across the year, and 7,944,000 bookings were made into the same jails over twelve months. A booking is not a person.
• State figures come from a Census of Jails year, a complete enumeration. In other years the Bureau surveys a sample and publishes national estimates only, so a state series is a few points rather than an annual trend.
• The rate is the Bureau’s own, per 100,000 US residents of all ages, against its own denominators. Nothing here divides a count by a population of ours.
• Nationally the count fell from 744,600 in 2014 to 658,700 in 2024, with a drop to 549,100 in 2020. What the data cannot say is why any of those movements happened.
• The 44 states ranked here sum to within a rounding of the national total the Bureau publishes separately, which is what shows that the national count excludes the combined-system states rather than estimating them.