Bureau of Justice Statistics
National Prisoner Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, and other federal justice-system statistics, including state and national prisoner counts and imprisonment rates.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/ ยท Federal
State prisoner counts and rates
Prisoners under the jurisdiction of state or federal correctional authorities on December 31, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics' own imprisonment rate per 100,000 residents, for the nation and each state, from the annual Prisoners report series.
- Organization
- Bureau of Justice Statistics
- Dataset
- National Prisoner Statistics
- Geography
- Nation and states
- Time coverage
- 2012-2023
- Update frequency
- Annual
- Published
- Original file
- https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/prisoners-2023-statistical-tables
- License
- Public domain. U.S. federal government work.
- Our copy
- National Prisoner Statistics
Caveats
- A prisoner is counted under whichever state's or the federal government's jurisdiction is legally responsible for them, regardless of the facility where they are actually held, including another jurisdiction's prison, a privately operated facility, or a local jail.
- Figures are a snapshot on December 31 of the year, not a count of admissions, releases, or an average population over the year.
- Each annual edition of this report covers two years. Where a later edition gives a different figure than an earlier edition for a year both cover, the later edition's figure is kept, since the Bureau of Justice Statistics revises earlier counts.
- The District of Columbia does not appear in this dataset. DC felony sentencing has been the Federal Bureau of Prisons' responsibility since December 31, 2001, so no separate DC jurisdiction total is published.
- A small number of state and year combinations have no published figure and are left out here rather than estimated.
- For the nation, this figure is the state total and the federal total combined, not a sum limited to state prison systems.
- This is the rate the Bureau of Justice Statistics itself publishes, using the U.S. Census Bureau's population estimate for January 1 of the following year as the denominator; it is not calculated here.
Measures
- Prisoners under state or federal jurisdiction (count): Total prisoners under the jurisdiction of a state's correctional authorities on December 31 of the year; for the nation, the states' total and the federal total combined, as the Bureau of Justice Statistics prints it.
- Imprisonment rate (per 100k): The Bureau of Justice Statistics' own published imprisonment rate: sentenced prisoners per 100,000 U.S. residents of all ages, not the separate rate it also prints per 100,000 residents aged 18 or older.
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