States by imprisonment rate
Mississippi held 652 people in prison per 100,000 residents in 2023, the highest of any state; Massachusetts held 96, the lowest. The rate is the Bureau's own, computed against its own population denominator, not a count divided by a population of ours.
American Factbook Research
People in prison per 100,000 residents · 2023
What this data cannot show
- This counts people under the jurisdiction of a state prison system. It does not count people in local jails, which hold several hundred thousand more, and it does not count federal prisoners, who are not attributed to a state here.
- The rate is the Bureau of Justice Statistics' own, per 100,000 US residents of all ages, computed against its own denominators. Nothing here divides a count by a population of ours.
- One jurisdiction is absent from this ranking because the Bureau published no rate for it: District of Columbia. Each still has a page of its own.
- The series behind these pages runs 2012 to 2023, assembled from eleven editions. The Bureau revises: it states a different rate for the same state and year in two editions 11 times by more than 2%, and each state page names its own revisions rather than drawing a line through them.
Related
Sources
- BJS Prisoners — Statistical Tables — U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics · "Information generated by the Department of Justice is in the public domain and may be reproduced, published or otherwise used without the Department's permission." (https://bjs.ojp.gov/reuse-policy) · retrieved September 19, 2026
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