United States incarceration rate

The United States in 2022 had the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world, at 541 people per 100,000. Between 2019 and 2020, the United States saw a significant drop in the total number of incarcerations. State and federal prison and local jail incarcerations dropped by 14% from 2.1 million in 2019 to 1.8 million in mid-2020. The incarceration total has risen since then. In 2018, the United States had the highest incarceration rate in the world.

While the United States represented about 4.2 percent of the world's population in 2020, it housed around 20 percent of the world's prisoners. Corrections (which includes prisons, jails, probation, and parole) cost around $74 billion in 2007 according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). According to the Justice Expenditures and Employment in the United States, 2017 report release by BJS, it is estimated that county and municipal governments spent roughly US$30 billion on corrections in 2017.

As of their March 2023 publication, the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-profit organization for decarceration, estimated that in the United States, about 1.9 million people were or are currently incarcerated. Of those who were incarcerated, 1,047,000 people were in state prison, 514,000 in local jails, 209,000 in federal prisons, 36,000 in youth correctional facilities, 34,000 in immigration detention camps, 22,000 in involuntary commitment, 8,000 in territorial prisons, 2,000 in Indian Country jails, and 1,000 in United States military prisons. The data is from various years depending on what is the latest available data.

Inmate citizenship statistics, which are updated monthly by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, lists the following statistics for July 2021: 83.67% of Federal inmates are U.S. citizens; 9.3% are citizens of Mexico, and the next three countries—Colombia, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, contribute less than 1% each; 4.9% have other or unknown citizenship. The Bureau did not state how many had come to the U.S. legally.