Vera Institute updates its Incarceration Trends website

As discussed in this press release, titled "Vera Institute of Justice Unveils Updated Incarceration Trends Website," the Vera Institute has updated this cool website. Here are the basics as described in the press release:

The Vera Institute of Justice [has] a new, updated version of its Incarceration Trends website, which now includes analysis of more than five decades of local jail and state prison data at the national, state, and county levels.  The updated site brings many of the data points current to spring 2021 and represents the most comprehensive look to date at the growth of mass incarceration across states, counties, and urban-to-rural geographies....

The nation’s biggest cities once had the highest rates of incarceration, but over the past several decades, jail incarceration and state prison admissions have declined in major metro areas as they rose precipitously in smaller cities and rural communities.  Today in the United States, approximately two out of three people in local jails have not been convicted of a crime — many are being detained in civil matters, such as people incarcerated pretrial for immigration cases or those who can’t pay child support or fines and fees.  The updated analysis presented in Incarceration Trends highlights that the disproportionate criminalization and incarceration of Black people and other people of color is also most pronounced in rural counties, as is the rise of women’s incarceration.

The newly visualized data also features the rebound in jail incarceration after an unprecedented 14 percent drop in incarceration in the first half of 2020 (bringing the total incarcerated population from 2.1 million to 1.8 million people) in response to the spread of COVID-19.  As of spring 2021, state prison decarceration had stalled and jail populations continued to trend upward.

Incarceration Trends offers insight on national-, state-, and county-level pages, enabling users to compare county-level data to state and national trends.  The website includes:

• analysis of the race, ethnicity, and gender of people in the nation’s jails and prisons;

• visualizations of state incarceration trends across major metros, smaller cities, suburbs, and rural communities;

• rankings of all of the counties in a given state by the incarceration rate and growth of incarceration;

• a visualization of each county’s jail population, representing the most recently available data about what proportion is held pretrial, sentenced, and held on behalf of other authorities, including state departments of corrections and federal agencies;

• the ability to toggle between the average number of people held in a jail on any day and the rate of incarceration, accounting for resident population changes; and

• data on regional jail systems that serve multiple counties.

The new Incarceration Trends website shows both the significant increase in jail incarceration across the urban to rural spectrum since 1970 and the more recent divergence in incarceration trends, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nationally, the rate at which people are incarcerated in local jails declined 26 percent between late 2019 and mid-2020. However, jail incarceration had rebounded sharply by spring 2021.