Incarceration in the United States

thumb|300px|U.S. timeline graphs of number of people incarcerated in jails and prisons

Incarceration in the United States is one of the primary means of punishment for crime in the United States. In 2021, over five million people were under supervision by the criminal justice system, with nearly two million people incarcerated in state or federal prisons and local jails. The United States has the largest known prison population in the world. The country comprises 5% of the world's population while having 20% of the world's incarcerated persons. For comparison, China, with more than four times as many inhabitants, has fewer people in prison. Prison populations grew dramatically beginning in the 1970s, but began a decline around 2009, dropping 25% by year-end 2021.

Drug offenses account for the incarceration of about 1 in 5 people in U.S. prisons. Violent offenses account for over 3 in 5 people (62%) in state prisons. According to the World Prison Brief on May 7, 2023, the United States has the sixth highest incarceration rate in the world, at 531 people per 100,000. Expenses related to prison, parole, and probation operations are estimated at around $81 billion annually. Court costs, bail bond fees, and prison phone fees amounted to another $38 billion annually.

Since reaching its peak level of imprisonment in 2009, the U.S. has averaged a rate of decarceration of 2.3% per year. This figure includes the anomalous 14.1% drop in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. There is significant variation among state prison population declines. Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York have reduced their prison populations by over 50% since peaking. Twenty-five states have reduced their prison populations by 25% since reaching their peaks. There was a 2% decrease in the number of persons sentenced to more than 1 year under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Prisons from 2022 to 2023.

Although debtor's prisons no longer exist in the United States, residents of some U.S. states can still be incarcerated for unpaid court fines and assessments . The Vera Institute of Justice reported in 2015 that the majority of those incarcerated in local and county jails are there for minor violations and have been jailed for longer periods of time over the past 30 years because they are unable to pay court-imposed costs. People in some states may face extra penalties or longer supervision if they are unable to pay court-related fines and fees.

History

thumb|Lines of men in prisoner's uniforms marching towards a building

In the 18th century, English philanthropists began to focus on reforming convicted criminals in prison, whom they believed needed a chance to become morally pure to stop or slow crime. Since at least 1740, some of these philosophers have thought of solitary confinement as a way to create and maintain spiritually clean people in prisons. As English people immigrated to North America, so did these penological theories.

Spanish colonizers in Florida also brought their own ideas of confinement, and Spanish soldiers in St. Augustine, Florida, built the first substantial prison in North America in 1570.

Some of the first structures built in English-settled America were jails, and by the 18th century, every English-speaking North American county had a jail. These jails served a variety of functions, such as a holding place for debtors, prisoners-of-war, and political prisoners, those bound in the penal transportation and slavery systems, and those accused but not tried for crimes. Sentences for those convicted of crimes were rarely longer than three months and often lasted only a day. Poor citizens were often imprisoned longer than their wealthier neighbors, as bail was rarely granted. This was known among prison reformers as the Pennsylvania System, which focused on reform, rehabilitation of the prisoner, and saving prisoners' souls through religious instruction.

In 1841, Dorothea Dix claimed that prison conditions in the U.S. were, in her opinion, inhumane. Imprisoned people were chained naked and whipped with rods. Others, who were criminally insane, were caged or placed in cellars or closets. She insisted on changes throughout the rest of her life. While focusing on the insane, her comments also resulted in changes for other inmates. Late in the 1800s, Superintendent Zebulon Brockway also changed the landscape of prison life by introducing institutionalized learning programs to inmates for rehabilitation purposes at the Elmira Reformatory in New York. As Monroe County Penitentiary Superintendent, Brockway implemented a points-based behavior system that identified low risk offenders and allowed them to participate in education programs which was later included industrial/trade schools, moral education, and academia (Gehring, 1982). These legal frameworks became mainstream practices resulting in mass incarceration and legal discrimination of African Americans and other marginalized groups in America. However, as the crime rate declined, the prison system started to focus more on rehabilitation.

{| class="wikitable sortable"

|+ style="border: 1px solid;" |US incarceration count, and rate per 100,000 population. Jails, state prisons, federal prisons.

!Year

!Count

!Rate

|1940

|264,834

|201

|1950

|264,620

|176

|1960

|346,015

|193

|1970

|328,020

|161

|1980

|503,586

|220

|1985

|744,208

|311

|1990

|1,148,702

|457

|1995

|1,585,586

|592

|2000

|1,937,482

|683

|2002

|2,033,022

|703

|2004

|2,135,335

|725

|2006

|2,258,792

|752

|2008

|2,307,504

|755

|2010

|2,270,142

|731

|2012

|2,228,424

|707

|2014

|2,217,947

|693

|2016

|2,157,800

|666

|2018

|2,102,400

|642

|2020

|1,675,400

|505

|2021

|1,767,200

|531

</div>

On June 18, 1971, President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse "public enemy number one" in a message to Congress. His message also called for federal resources to be used for the "prevention of new addicts and the rehabilitation of those who are addicted." Following this, the media began using the term "war on drugs". According to author Emily Dufton, Nixon "transformed the public image of the drug user into one of a dangerous and anarchic threat to American civilization."

The presidency of Ronald Reagan saw the expansion of federal efforts to prevent drug abuse and prosecute offenders. Reagan signed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which established mandatory minimum sentences and expanded penalties for marijuana possession. He also signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. Support for Reagan's crime legislation was bipartisan. The 1980s saw a dramatic rise in the prison population, especially among non-violent offenders and people convicted of drug offenses.

Researcher Valerie Jenness writes, "Since the 1970s, the final wave of expansion of the prison system, there has been a huge expansion of prisons that exist at the federal and state level. Now, prisons are starting to become a private industry as more and more prisons are starting to become privatized rather than being under government control."

The federal prison population is approximately 209,000. 148,000 of these people are incarcerated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Of these people, there are 69,000 people incarcerated for drug offenses, 61,000 for public order offenses, 11,000 for violent offenses, and 6,000 for property offenses. The percentage breakdown of people incarcerated by offense-type is as follows: 47% of people are incarcerated for drug offenses, 42% for public order offenses, 7% for violent offenses, and 4% for property offenses. The U.S. Marshals Service incarcerates a further 60,000 people. Of these people, there are 21,000 incarcerated for drug offenses, 14,000 for immigration offenses, 9,000 for weapons offenses, and 7,000 for violent offenses. In 2025, BOP Director William Marshall announced a renewed emphasis on the execution of those promises, including shrinking the population of non-violent offenders in the federal system.

Demographics

Race and ethnicity

{| class="wikitable"

| colspan="4" |2021. People incarcerated in state or federal prisons by race and ethnicity.

|Race, ethnicity

|% of US population

|% of incarcerated <br> population

|Incarceration rate <br />(per 100,000)

|White (non-Hispanic)

|59

|31

|181

|Hispanic

|19

|24

|434

|Black

|14

|32

|901

Studies have found that differences at multiple stages of the criminal justice process, including pretrial detention, sentencing decisions, and sentence length, can compound over time and contribute to disparities in incarceration rates among racial and ethnic groups.

"Blacks are more likely than Whites to be confined awaiting trial (which increases the probability that an incarcerative sentence will be imposed), to receive incarcerative rather than community sentences, and to receive longer sentences. Racial differences found at each stage are typically modest, but their cumulative effect is significant." In 2021, people of color constituted over two-thirds (69%) of the prison population. The extent of decarceration has varied by race and ethnicity, but all major racial and ethnic groups experienced decarceration since reaching their highest levels. The Black prison population has decreased the most. Since 2002, the year it reached its peak levels, the number of Black people in prison declined from 622,700 to 378,000 (a 39% decrease).

Gender

{| class="wikitable sortable sort-under" style="margin-left:5px; float:right;"

! colspan="4" |2010 adult incarceration rates<br />by race, ethnicity, and sex<br />per 100,000 adult US residents

!Race or<br />ethnicity

!Male

!Female

|White || 678 || 91

|Black || 4,347 || 260

|Hispanic|| 1,775 || 133

In 2013, there were 102,400 adult women in local jails in the United States and 111,300 in state and federal prisons. Within the U.S., the rate of female incarceration increased fivefold in a two-decade span ending in 2001; the increase occurred because of increased prosecutions and convictions of offenses related to recreational drugs, increases in the severities of offenses, and a lack of community sanctions and treatment for women who violate laws. In the United States, authorities began housing women in correctional facilities separate from men in the 1870s. According to the ACLU, "More than half of the women in prisons and jails (56%) are incarcerated for drug or property offenses, and Black women are two times as likely to be incarcerated as white women." Black women tend to receive longer sentences and harsher punishments than white women for committing the same crimes. According to Angela Davis (2003), in many situations, white women are put in mental institutions, whereas black women are sent to prison for the same crime.

However, since the early 2000s, the incarceration rates for African American and Hispanic American women have declined, while incarceration rates have increased for white women. Between 2000 and 2017, the incarceration rate for white women increased by 44%, while at the same time declining by 55% for African American women. The Sentencing Project reports that by 2021, incarceration rates had declined by 70% for African American women, while rising by 7% for white women. In 2017, the Washington Post reported that white women's incarceration rate was growing faster than ever before, as the rate for black women declined. The incarceration rate of African American males is also falling sharply, even faster that white men's incarceration rate, contrary to the popular opinion that black males are increasingly incarcerated.

In 2011, it was reported that 85 to 90% of women incarcerated were victims of sexual and domestic violence, which is significantly higher than the national average of 22.3% of women in the United States. Women who face sexual or domestic violence are more likely to commit crimes themselves and become incarcerated. The history of black women experiencing higher rates of abuse than white women provides one of many explanations for why African American women have faced higher rates of incarceration than white women. A later study by Sonja B. Starr found sentences for men to be up to 60% higher when controlling for more variables. Several explanations for this disparity have been offered, including that women have more to lose from incarceration, and that men are the targets of discrimination in sentencing.

Youth

{| class="wikitable sortable sort-under" style="text-align:right; margin-left: 5px; float:right;"

! colspan="4" style="background:white;" | Juveniles in residential<br />placement, 1997–2015. US

|-

! Year

! Male

! Female

! Total

! 1997

| 90,771

| 14,284

| 105,055

! 1999

| 92,985

| 14,508

| 107,493

! 2001

| 89,115

| 15,104

| 104,219

! 2003

| 81,975

| 14,556

| 96,531

! 2006

| 78,998

| 13,723

| 92,721

! 2007

| 75,017

| 11,797

| 86,814

! 2010

| 61,359

| 9,434

| 70,793

! 2011

| 53,079

| 8,344

| 61,423

! 2013

| 46,421

| 7,727

| 54,148

! 2015

| 40,750

| 7,293

| 48,043

Through the juvenile courts and the adult criminal justice system, the United States incarcerates more of its youth than any other country in the world, a reflection of the larger trends in incarceration practices in the United States. This has been a source of controversy for many reasons, including the overcrowding and violence in youth detention facilities, the prosecution of youths as adults, and the long-term consequences of incarceration on the individual's chances for success in adulthood. In 2014, the United Nations Human Rights Committee criticized the United States for about ten judicial abuses, including the mistreatment of juvenile inmates. A UN report published in 2015 criticized the U.S. for being the only nation in the world to sentence juveniles to life imprisonment without parole.

According to federal data from 2011, around 40% of the nation's juvenile inmates are housed in private facilities.

The incarceration of youths has been linked to the effects of family and neighborhood influences. One study found that the "behaviors of family members and neighborhood peers appear to substantially affect the behavior and outcomes of disadvantaged youths".

Nearly 53,000 youth were incarcerated in 2015. 4,656 of those were held in adult facilities, while the rest were in juvenile facilities. Of those in juvenile facilities, 69% are 16 or older, while over 500 are 12 or younger. The school-to-prison pipeline is the idea that a school's harsh punishments—which typically push students out of the classroom—lead to the criminalization of students' misbehaviors and result in increasing a student's probability of entering the prison system. Although the school-to-prison pipeline is aggravated by a combination of ingredients, zero-tolerance policies are viewed as main contributors. Additionally, the "School to Prison Pipeline disproportionately impacts the poor, students with disabilities, and youth of color, especially African Americans, who are suspended and expelled at the highest rates, despite comparable rates of infraction." Zero-tolerance policies both implicitly and explicitly usher the student into the prison track. Implicitly, when a student is extracted from the classroom, the more likely that student is to drop out of school as a result of being in class less. As a dropout, that child is then ill-prepared to obtain a job and become a fruitful citizen. Explicitly, schools sometimes do not funnel their pupils to the prison systems inadvertently; rather, they send them directly. Once in juvenile court, even sympathetic judges are not likely to evaluate whether the school's punishment was warranted or fair. For these reasons, it is argued that zero-tolerance policies lead to an exponential increase in the juvenile prison populations.

The national suspension rate doubled from 3.7% to 7.4% from 1973 to 2010. The claim that Zero Tolerance Policies affect students of color at a disproportionate rate is supported in the Code of Maryland Regulations study, which found black students were suspended at more than double the rate of white students. This data is further backed by Moriah Balingit, who states that when compared to white students, black students are suspended and expelled at greater rates according to the Civil Rights Data Collection, that has records with specific information for the 2015–2016 school year of about 96,000 schools. In addition, further data shows that although black students only accounted for 15% of the student population, they represented a 31% of the arrests. This trend can be seen throughout numerous studies of this type of material and particularly in the south. Furthermore, between 1985 and 1989, there was an increase in referrals of minority youth to juvenile court, petitioned cases, adjudicated delinquency cases, and delinquency cases placed outside the home. During this time period, the number of African American youth detained increased by 9% and the number of Hispanic youths detained increased by 4%; yet, the proportion of White youth declined by 13%. Additionally, as punitive action leads to dropout rates, so does imprisonment. Data shows that in the year 2000, one in three black male students ages 20–40 who did not complete high school were incarcerated. Moreover, about 70% of those in state prison have not finished high school.

State governments pay all of their inmates' housing costs, which significantly increase as prisoners age. Inmates are unable to apply for Medicare and Medicaid. Most Departments of Corrections report spending more than 10 percent of the annual budget on elderly care.

LGBT people

LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender) youth are disproportionately more likely than the general population to come into contact with the criminal justice system. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, 16 percent of transgender adults have been in prison and/or jail, compared to 2.7 percent of all adults. It has also been found that 13–15 percent of youth in detention identify as LGBT, whereas an estimated 4–8 percent of the general youth population identify as such.

According to Yarbrough (2021), higher rates of poverty, homelessness, and profiling of transgender people by law enforcement are the cause of the higher rate of imprisonment experienced by transgender and gender non-conforming people. LGBT youth not only experience these same challenges, but many also live in homes unwelcoming to their identities. This often results in LGBT youth running away and/or engaging in criminal activities, such as the drug trade, sex work, and/or theft, which places them at higher risk for arrest. Because of discriminatory practices and limited access to resources, transgender adults are also more likely to engage in criminal activities to be able to pay for housing, health care, and other basic needs. According to the National Inmate Survey, in 2011–12, 40 percent of transgender inmates reported sexual victimization compared to 4 percent of all inmates.

Mentally disabled

In the United States, the percentage of inmates with mental illness has been steadily increasing, with rates more than quadrupling from 1998 to 2006. Many have attributed this trend to the deinstitutionalization of mentally ill persons beginning in the 1960s, when mental hospitals across the country began closing their doors. However, other researchers indicate that "there is no evidence for the basic criminalization premise that decreased psychiatric services explain the disproportionate risk of incarceration for individuals with mental illness".

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, over half of all prisoners in 2005 had experienced mental illness as identified by "a recent history or symptoms of a mental health problem"; of this population, jail inmates experienced the highest rates of symptoms of mental illness at 60 percent, followed by 49 percent of state prisoners and 40 percent of federal prisoners. Not only do people with recent histories of mental illness end up incarcerated, but many who have no history of mental illness end up developing symptoms while in prison. In 2006, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that a quarter of state prisoners had a history of mental illness, whereas 3 in 10 state prisoners had developed symptoms of mental illness since becoming incarcerated, with no recent history of mental illness. Another factor to be considered is that most inmates do not get the mental health services that they need while incarcerated. Due to limited funding, prisons are not able to provide a full range of mental health services and thus are typically limited to inconsistent administration of psychotropic medication, or no psychiatric services at all.

Mental illness rarely stands alone when analyzing the risk factors associated with incarceration and recidivism rates. The American Psychological Association recommends a holistic approach to reducing recidivism rates among offenders by providing "cognitive–behavioral treatment focused on criminal cognition" or "services that target variable risk factors for high-risk offenders" due to the numerous intersecting risk factors experienced by mentally ill and non-mentally ill offenders alike.

Immigrants and foreign nationals

The United States government holds tens of thousands of immigrants in detention under the control of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). These immigrants seek asylum in the United States and are detained before release into the United States or deportation and removal from the country. During 2018, 396,448 people were booked into ICE custody: 242,778 of whom were detained by CBP and 153,670 by ICE's own enforcement operations.

The BOP receives all prisoner transfer treaty inmates sent from foreign countries, even if their crimes, if committed in the United States, would have been tried in state, DC, or territorial courts. Non-US citizens incarcerated in federal and state prisons are eligible to be transferred to their home countries if they qualify.

Class and poverty

The poor in the United States are incarcerated at a much higher rate than their counterparts in other developed nations. According to a 2015 study by the Vera Institute of Justice, jails in the U.S. have become "massive warehouses" of the impoverished since the 1980s.

A December 2017 report by Philip Alston, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, asserted that the justice system throughout the U.S. is designed to keep people mired in poverty and to generate revenue to fund the justice system and other governmental programs.

Sociologist Matthew Desmond of Princeton University writes that the "overwhelming majority" of prisoners and former prisoners of the U.S. prison system, which "has no equal in any other country or any other epoch," are extremely poor. And they stay poor, as prison jobs pay an average wage of between 14 cents and $1.41 an hour. He notes that the carceral state also "disappears" the incarcerated poor by erasing them from poverty statistics and national surveys, "which means there are millions more poor Americans than official statistics let on."

Features of the criminal justice system

Duration

Many legislatures have continually reduced judges' discretion in both the sentencing process and the determination of when the conditions of a sentence have been satisfied. Determinate sentencing, use of mandatory minimums, and guidelines-based sentencing continue to remove the human element from sentencing, such as the prerogative of the judge to consider the mitigating or extenuating circumstances of a crime to determine the appropriate length of the incarceration. As a consequence of "three strikes laws", the increase in the duration of incarceration in the last decade was most pronounced in the case of life prison sentences, which increased by 83% between 1992 and 2003, while violent crimes fell in the same period.

Violent and nonviolent crime

In 2016, there were an estimated 1.2 million violent crimes committed in the United States. Over the course of that year, U.S. law enforcement agencies made approximately 10.7 million arrests, excluding arrests for traffic violations.

thumb|Felony Sentences in State Courts, study by the [[United States Department of Justice ]]

As of September 30, 2009, in federal prisons, 7.9% of sentenced people were incarcerated for violent crimes, while at year end 2008 of sentenced people in state prisons, 52.4% had been jailed for violent crimes.

From 2000 to 2008, the state prison population increased by 159,200 imprisoned people, and violent offenders accounted for 60% of this increase. The number of drug offenders in state prisons declined by 12,400 over this period. Furthermore, while the number of violent offenders sentenced to state prison increased from 2000 through 2008, the expected length of stay for these offenders declined slightly during this period.

In 2016, about 200,000, under 16%, of the 1.3 million people in state jails, were serving time for drug offenses. 700,000 were incarcerated for violent offenses.

Nonviolent crime was the main driver of the increase in the incarcerated population in the United States from 1980 to 2003. Violent crime rates had been relatively constant or declining over those decades. The prison population increased primarily due to public policy changes, resulting in more prison sentences and longer time served, for example, through mandatory minimum sentences, "three strikes" laws, and reductions in the availability of parole or early release.

Perhaps the single greatest force behind the growth of the prison population has been the national "war on drugs". The legislation for the "war on drugs" can be traced back to the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances in 1971, which led to the regulation and classification of substances deemed to meet the criteria set by the World Health Organization. The criteria used by the World Health Organization are that the substance has the capacity to produce a state of dependence, and central nervous system stimulation or depression that results in hallucinations or disturbances in motor function, thinking, behavior, perception, or mood. If the World Health Organization finds that the substance meets these criteria, it is placed under international control. After the substances were identified, all governments with the necessary facilities should take similar action facilitating the campaign and creating a guideline for the war on drugs. Following this convention, the United States enacted the Federal Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act on May 1, 1971, outlining the United Nations' findings and implementing policies aligned with the United Nations' request. The war on drugs initiative expanded during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. During Reagan's term, a bipartisan Congress established the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, galvanized by the death of Len Bias. According to the Human Rights Watch, legislation like this led to the extreme increase in drug offense imprisonment and "increasing racial disproportions among the arrestees". The number of incarcerated drug offenders has increased twelvefold since 1980. In 2000, 22 percent of those in federal and state prisons were convicted on drug charges. In 2011, 55.6% of the 1,131,210 sentenced people in state prisons were being held for violent crimes (this number excludes the 200,966 imprisoned people being held due to parole violations, of which 39.6% were re-incarcerated for a subsequent violent crime). Also in 2011, 3.7% of the state prison population consisted of imprisoned people whose highest conviction was for drug possession (again excluding those incarcerated for parole violations of which 6.0% were re-incarcerated for a subsequent act of drug possession).

In 2017, 482,100 inmates in federal and state prisons were held pre-trial.

Advocates for decarceration contend the large pre-trial detention population serves as a compelling reason for bail reform anchored in a presumption of innocence. "We don't want people sitting in jails only because they cannot afford their financial bail," said Representative John Tilley (D) of Kentucky, a state that has eliminated commercial bail and relies on a risk assessment to determine a defendant's flight risk.

In March 2020, the Department of Justice issued its report, noting the county and municipal jail population, totaling 738,400 inmates, had decreased by 12% over the last decade, from an estimated 258 jail inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents in 2008 to 226 per 100,000 in 2018. For the first time since 1990, the 2018 jail incarceration rate for African Americans fell below 600 per 100,000, while the juvenile jail population dropped 56%, from 7,700 to 3,400.

In 2018, sixty-eight percent of jail inmates were behind bars on felony charges, and about two-thirds of the total jail population was awaiting court action or held for other reasons.

Prison education

Prison education encompasses any educational program offered within a prison, including literacy programs, high school or GED- equivalent programs, vocational education, and tertiary education. In the early 1800s, tutors began to enter prisons, and the idea of punishment began to shift towards rehabilitation. By the early 1990s, there were over 350 prison education programs nationwide. In 1994, Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act into law, which barred incarcerated people from receiving Pell Grants. This led to a decline in the number of educational programs due to a lack of federal funding.

The Civil Rights Act of 1960 prompted the collection of employment data, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act required the collection of data for school funding. However, the true depth of inequality in education was not known despite several significant education policies being enacted because inmates were excluded from federal surveys. This resulted in the restoral of federal Pell Grant funding for Prison Education Programs (PEP) and legislation like California bill SB416 that protects incarcerated students from predatory lending. That same study showed that individuals who received vocational education and training saw a 28% increase in employment following incarceration, and those who participated in strictly academic educational programs saw an 8% increase in employment. However, the study found no evidence that spending more time in prison raises the recidivism rate, and found that those serving the longest time, 61 months or more, had a slightly lower re-arrest rate (54.2%) than every other category of prisoners. This is most likely explained by the older average age of those released with the longest sentences, and the study shows a strong negative correlation between recidivism and age upon release. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a study tracked 404,638 prisoners in 30 states after their release from prison in 2005. From the examination, it was found that within three years after their release, 67.8% of the released prisoners were rearrested; within five years, 76.6% of the released prisoners were rearrested, and of the prisoners that were rearrested, 56.7% of them were rearrested by the end of their first year of release.

Comparison with other countries

[[File:World map of prison population rates from World Prison Brief.svg|thumb|350px|A map of incarceration rates by country According to the World Prison Population List (11th edition) there were around 10.35 million people in penal institutions worldwide in 2015. The U.S. had 2,173,800 prisoners in adult facilities in 2015. That means the U.S. held 21.0% of the world's prisoners in 2015, even though the U.S. represented only around 4.4 percent of the world's population in 2015.

Comparing other English-speaking developed countries, whereas the incarceration rate of the U.S. is 655 per 100,000 population of all ages, England and Wales is 146 per 100,000 (as of 2016), Australia is 160 per 100,000 (as of 2016) and Ireland is 82 per 100,000 (as of Aug 2022). Compared with other developed countries, Spain's rate is 133 per 100,000 (as of 2016). Greece is 89 per 100,000 (as of 2016), Norway is 73 per 100,000 (as of 2016), Netherlands is 69 per 100,000 (as of 2014), and Japan is 48 per 100,000 (as of 2014).

According to a 2021 report by the Prison Policy Initiative, every state has a higher incarceration rate than "virtually any independent democracy on earth." Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate at 1,094. This incarceration rate exceeded the average incarceration levels in the Soviet Union during the existence of the Gulag system, when the Soviet Union's population reached 168 million, and 1.2 to 1.5 million people were in the Gulag prison camps and colonies (i.e., about 0.8 imprisoned per 100 USSR residents, according to numbers from Anne Applebaum and Steven Rosefielde). In The New Yorker article The Caging of America (2012), Adam Gopnik writes: "Over all, there are now more people under 'correctional supervision' in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height."

Operational

thumb|U.S. federal prisoner distribution since 1950

thumb|Prisons in the United States

Prison systems

The American prison system is highly heterogeneous. In fact, it would be misleading to suggest that the U.S. has one "criminal justice system." Instead, there are thousands of systems across federal, state, local, and tribal levels. In 2023, there were reported to be "1,566 state prisons, 98 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails, 1,323 juvenile correctional facilities, 181 immigrant detention facilities, and 80 Indian country jails, as well as military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories." State prisons are run by state departments of correction, holding sentenced people serving time for felony offenses, usually longer than a year.

Security levels

In some, but not all, states' departments of corrections, inmates reside in different facilities that vary by security level, particularly in security measures, inmate administration, housing type, and the weapons and tactics used by corrections officers. The federal government's Bureau of Prisons uses a numbered scale from one to five to represent the security level. Level five is the most secure, while level one is the least. State prison systems operate similar systems. California, for example, classifies its facilities from Reception Center through Levels I to V (minimum to maximum security) to specialized high security units (all considered Level V), including Security Housing Unit (SHU)—California's version of supermax—and related units. Jails operated by county and local governments are typically smaller than prisons and less able to manage security issues raised by overcrowding. Due to the variety of prisoners incarcerated in jails, from defendants awaiting trial, to people serving short sentences for minor crimes, to people with significant histories of escape attempts or violence, jails often have multiple levels of security within a single facility, as compared to prisons, which often have specialized facilities for each security level.

Supermax prison facilities provide the highest level of prison security. These units hold those considered the most dangerous inmates, as well as inmates who have been deemed too high-profile or too great a national security risk for a normal prison. These include inmates who have committed assaults, murders, or other serious violations in less secure facilities, and inmates known to be or accused of being prison gang members. Most states have either a supermax section of a prison facility or an entire prison facility designated as a supermax. The United States Federal Bureau of Prisons operates a federal supermax, A.D.X. Florence, located in Florence, Colorado, also known as the "Alcatraz of the Rockies" and widely considered to be the most secure prison in the United States. A.D.X. Florence has a standard supermax section where assaultive, violent, and gang-related inmates are kept under normal supermax conditions of 23-hour confinement and abridged amenities. A.D.X. Florence is considered to be of a security level above that of all other prisons in the United States, at least in the "ideological" ultramax part of it, which features permanent, 24-hour solitary confinement with rare human contacts or opportunity to earn better conditions through good behavior.

In a maximum security prison or area (called high security in the federal system), all prisoners have individual cells with sliding doors controlled from a secure remote control station. Prisoners are allowed out of their cells for 1 out of every 24 hours (1 hour and 30 minutes for prisoners in California). When out of their cells, prisoners remain in the cell block or an exterior cage. Movement out of the cell block or "pod" is tightly restricted using restraints and escorts by correctional officers.

thumb|Incarceration Rate by State, 2016; excludes jail inmates.

Under close security, prisoners usually have one- or two-person cells operated from a remote control station. Each cell has its own toilet and sink. Inmates may leave their cells for work assignments or correctional programs and may otherwise be allowed in a common area in the cellblock or in an exercise yard. The fences are generally double fences with watchtowers housing armed guards, plus often a third, lethal-current electric fence in the middle.

Prisoners that fall into the medium security group may sleep in cells, but share them two and two, and use bunk beds

Correspondence

Inmates who maintain contact with family and friends in the outside world are less likely to be convicted of further crimes and usually have an easier reintegration period back into society. Inmates benefit from corresponding with friends and family members, especially when in-person visits are infrequent. However, guidelines exist as to what constitutes acceptable mail, and these policies are strictly enforced.

Mail sent to inmates in violation of prison policies can result in sanctions such as loss of imprisonment time reduced for good behavior. Most Department of Corrections websites provide detailed information regarding mail policies. These rules can even vary within a single prison, depending on which part of the prison an inmate is housed. For example, death row and maximum security inmates are usually under stricter mail guidelines for security reasons.

There have been several notable challenges to prison corresponding services. The Missouri Department of Corrections (DOC) stated that effective June 1, 2007, inmates would be prohibited from using pen pal websites, citing concerns that inmates were using them to solicit money and defraud the public. Service providers such as WriteAPrisoner.com, together with the ACLU, planned to challenge the ban in Federal Court. Similar bans on an inmate's rights or a website's right to post such information has been ruled unconstitutional in other courts, citing First Amendment freedoms. Some faith-based initiatives promote the positive effects of correspondence on inmates; some have made efforts to help ex-offenders reintegrate into society through job placement assistance. Inmates' ability to mail letters to other inmates has been limited by the courts.

Conditions

thumb|400px|right|Living facilities in [[Mule Creek State Prison (2006)]]

The non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch claims that prisoners and detainees face "abusive, degrading and dangerous" conditions within local, state and federal facilities, including those operated by for-profit contractors. The organization also raised concerns with prisoner rape and medical care for inmates. In a survey of 1,788 male inmates in Midwestern prisons by Prison Journal, about 21% responded they had been coerced or pressured into sexual activity during their incarceration, and 7% that they had been raped in their current facility.

In August 2003, a Harper's article by Wil S. Hylton estimated that "somewhere between 20 and 40% of American prisoners are, at this very moment, infected with hepatitis C". Prisons may outsource medical care to private companies such as Correctional Medical Services (now Corizon) that, according to Hylton's research, try to minimize the amount of care given to prisoners to maximize profits. After the privatization of healthcare in Arizona's prisons, medical spending fell by 30 million dollars, and staffing was greatly reduced. Some 50 prisoners died in custody in the first 8 months of 2013, compared to 37 for the preceding two years combined.

The poor quality of food provided to inmates has become an issue, as over the last decade, corrections officials looking to cut costs have been outsourcing food services to corporations such as Aramark, A'Viands Food & Services Management, and ABL Management. A prison riot in Kentucky has been blamed on the low quality of food Aramark provided to inmates, which was tainted with worms and human feces. A 2017 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that because of lapses in food safety, prison inmates are 6.4 times more likely to contract a food-related illness than the general population.

Also identified as an issue within the prison system is gang violence, because many gang members retain their gang identity and affiliations when imprisoned. Segregation of identified gang members from the general population of inmates, with different gangs being housed in separate units, often results in the imprisonment of these gang members with their friends and criminal cohorts. Some feel this has the effect of turning prisons into "institutions of higher criminal learning".

Many prisons in the United States are overcrowded. For example, California's 33 prisons have a total capacity of 100,000, but they hold 170,000 inmates. Many prisons in California and around the country are forced to turn old gymnasiums and classrooms into huge bunkhouses for inmates. They do this by placing hundreds of bunk beds side by side in these gyms, without barriers to separate inmates. In California, the inadequate security engendered by this situation, coupled with insufficient staffing levels, has led to increased violence and a prison health system that causes one death a week. This situation has led the courts to order California to release 27% of the current prison population, citing the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. The three-judge court considering requests by the Plata v. Schwarzenegger and Coleman v. Schwarzenegger courts found California's prisons have become criminogenic as a result of prison overcrowding.

In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court case Cutter v. Wilkinson established that prisons receiving federal funds could not deny prisoners accommodations necessary for religious practices.

According to a Supreme Court ruling issued on May 23, 2011, California – which has the highest overcrowding rate of any prison system in the country – must alleviate overcrowding in the state's prisons, reducing the prisoner population by 30,000 over the next two years.

thumb|300px|Inmates in an [[Orleans Parish Prison yard]]

Solitary confinement is widely used in U.S. prisons, yet it is underreported by most states, while some do not report it at all. Isolation of prisoners has been condemned by the UN in 2011 as a form of torture. A June 2023 study by Solitary Watch found that over 120,000 people on any given day are in solitary confinement in the United States.

In 1999, the Supreme Court of Norway refused to extradite American hashish-smuggler Henry Hendricksen, as they declared that US prisons do not meet their minimum humanitarian standards.

In 2011, some 885 people died while being held in local jails (not in prisons after being convicted of a crime and sentenced) throughout the United States. According to federal statistics, roughly 4,400 inmates die in U.S. prisons and jails annually, excluding executions.

As of September 2013, condoms for prisoners are only available in the U.S. State of Vermont (on September 17, 2013, the California Senate approved a bill for condom distribution inside the state's prisons, but the bill was not yet law at the time of approval) and in county jails in San Francisco.

In September 2016, a group of corrections officers at Holman Correctional Facility went on strike over safety concerns and overcrowding. Prisoners refer to the facility as a "slaughterhouse" as stabbings are a routine occurrence.

During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) requested health data from 54 state and territorial health department jurisdictions. 32 (86%) of 37 jurisdictions that responded reported at least one confirmed COVID-19 case among inmates or staff members. As of April 21, 2020, there were 4,893 cases and 88 deaths among inmates and 2,778 cases and 15 deaths among staff members.

Conditions for women

The conditions for women, especially Black women, are often poor. Many prisons are known to do less to help Black women get out of the prison system. Because prisons are male-dominated, a larger portion of the resources is allocated toward them. Another major issue that women face in prisons is sexual assault, which often comes from guards. Although this is a major issue for women, these types of assaults do not usually get the attention that they need, and the victims are often left not being taken care of.

Based on Angela Davis' "Are Prisons Obsolete?", the prison industrial complex and mass incarceration are shaped by gender. There are significant differences in the treatment of imprisoned men and women. Women endure physical, mental, and emotional trauma as they are forced to endure sexual abuse and a lack of resources for their intimate needs. In prison, women are dehumanized and treated like objects in a way that has become normal. Like many other socio-political issues, women seem to be left out of the conversation when it comes to prison reform. Again, not many people consider the experiences that women have endured in their time of imprisonment. Women were degraded to an extreme extent, and sexual abuse was often brought on by the guards and officers who were supposed to watch over them. They are sexualized, and often sent to prison for a longer duration than men.

According to Davis, "masculine criminality has always been deemed more "normal" than feminine criminality."

Privatization

Before the 1980s, private prisons did not exist in the U.S. During the 1980s, as a result of the war on drugs by the Reagan Administration, the number of people incarcerated rose. This created a demand for more prison space. The result was the development of privatization and the for-profit prison industry.

A 1998 study was conducted in three comparable Louisiana medium-security prisons, two of which were privately run by different corporations and one was publicly run. The data from this study suggested that the privately run prisons operated more cost-effectively without sacrificing the safety of inmates and staff. The study concluded that both privately run prisons had a lower cost per inmate, a lower rate of critical incidents, a safer environment for employees and inmates, and a higher proportional rate of inmates who completed basic education, literacy, and vocational training courses. However, the publicly run prison outperformed the privately run prisons in areas such as experiencing fewer escape attempts, controlling substance abuse through testing, offering a wider range of educational and vocational courses, and providing a broader range of treatment, recreation, social services, and rehabilitative services.

According to Marie Gottschalk, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, studies that claim private prisons are cheaper to run than public prisons fail to "take into account the fundamental differences between private and public facilities," and that the prison industry "engages in a lot of cherry-picking and cost-shifting to maintain the illusion that the private sector does it better for less." The American Civil Liberties Union reported in 2013 that numerous studies indicate private jails are actually filthier, more violent, less accountable, and possibly more costly than their public counterparts. The ACLU stated that the for-profit prison industry is "a major contributor to bloated state budgets and mass incarceration – not a part of any viable solution to these urgent problems." The primary reason Louisiana is the prison capital of the world is because of the for-profit prison industry.

In Mississippi, a 2013 Bloomberg report stated that assault rates in private facilities were three times higher on average than in their public counterparts. In 2012, the for-profit Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility was the most violent prison in the state, with 27 assaults per 100 offenders. A federal lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of prisoners at the privately run East Mississippi Correctional Facility in 2013 claims the conditions there are "hyper-violent", "barbaric" and "chaotic", with gangs routinely beating and exploiting mentally ill inmates who are denied medical care by prison staff. A May 2012 riot in the Corrections Corporation of America-run Adams County Correctional Facility, also in Mississippi, left one corrections officer dead and dozens injured. Similar riots have occurred in privatized facilities in Idaho, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Florida, California, and Texas.

thumb|400px|[[Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Mississippi, operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA)]]

Sociologist John L. Campbell of Dartmouth College claims that private prisons in the U.S. have become "a lucrative business". Between 1990 and 2000, the number of private facilities grew from five to 100, operated by nearly 20 private firms. Over the same time period the stock price of the industry leader, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which rebranded as CoreCivic in 2016 amid increased scrutiny of the private prison industry, climbed from $8 a share to $30. The aforementioned Bloomberg report also notes that in the past decade, the number of inmates in for-profit prisons throughout the U.S. rose 44 percent. Both CCA and GEO Group, the two largest operators of private facilities, have been contributors to ALEC, which lobbies for policies that would increase incarceration, such as three-strike laws and "truth-in-sentencing" legislation. In fact, in the early 1990s, when CCA was co-chair of ALEC, it co-sponsored (with the National Rifle Association) the so-called "truth-in-sentencing" and "three-strikes-you're-out" laws. Truth-in-sentencing called for all violent offenders to serve 85 percent of their sentences before being eligible for release; three strikes called for mandatory life imprisonment for a third felony conviction. Some prison officers' unions in publicly run facilities, such as the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, have also, in the past, supported measures such as three-strike laws. Such laws increased the prison population.

In addition to CCA and GEO Group, companies operating in the private prison business include Management and Training Corporation and Community Education Centers. The GEO Group was formerly known as the Wackenhut Corrections division. It includes the former Correctional Services Corporation and Cornell Companies, which were acquired by GEO in 2005 and 2010, respectively. Such companies often sign contracts with states obliging them to fill prison beds or reimburse them for those that go unused.

Private companies that provide services to prisons are members of the American Correctional Association, a 501(c)(3) that advocates legislation favorable to the industry. Such private companies comprise what has been termed the prison–industrial complex. An example of this phenomenon would be the Kids for cash scandal, in which two judges in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan, were receiving judicial kickbacks for sending youths, convicted of minor crimes, to a privatized, for-profit juvenile facility run by the Mid Atlantic Youth Service Corporation.

The industry is aware of what reduced crime rates could mean to their bottom line. This from the CCA's SEC report in 2010: