Vera Institute of Justice reports on "People in Jail and Prison in 2022"

The Vera Institute of Justice is continuing to do terrific work on the challenging task of collecting (near-real-time) data on the number of people in state and federal jails and prisons. Vera's latest effort is this 30-page report titled simply "People in Jail and Prison in 2022," and here is some of text from the document's summary:

In the first years of the coronavirus pandemic, federal, state, and local governments reduced the number of people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and local jails from 2.1 million in 2019 to 1.8 million at midyear 2020.  By 2021, however, this decarceration trend appeared to have stalled, as further drops in prison populations were countered by large increases in jail numbers.  From mid-2021 to fall 2022, incarceration rose slightly, up by 4 percent.  Nonetheless, the number of people incarcerated is still near its 2020 level of 1.8 million.

The national increase seen during 2022 is the result of a patchwork of different state and local trends.  Between mid-2021 and fall 2022, a total of 34 states increased the number of people in prison, and some saw substantial growth: Mississippi and Montana both increased the number of people incarcerated in their prisons by about 9 percent. Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, and North Dakota saw prison population increases of 8 percent.

Nationally, jail populations have not fully rebounded to pre-pandemic levels and are still down 8.3 percent from 2019. (This is not universal: in 2022, Texas jail populations surpassed their 2019 level by more than 6 percent.)

Still, jail populations in many regions increased during the past year. Between mid-2021 and fall 2022, the fastest growth in jail populations was in the suburban counties of large metropolitan areas, followed by small and midsize metro counties.  Rural counties — which for some time have jailed people at rates double those of urban areas — had already come close to refilling their jails by mid-2021.

By fall 2022, jail incarceration rates in rural counties were 343 people per 100,000 working-age residents, compared to 159 per 100,000 in urban counties.  This growth brought rural jail incarceration rates to just 5 percent below mid-2019 levels in fall 2022, while urban counties’ jail incarceration rates were down 12 percent.