The number of people held in jails and prisons has fallen by approximately 250,000 over the past five years, thanks in part to dramatic drops in the incarcerated population during the COVID pandemic. Yet recent trends indicate some backsliding on that number, suggesting that progress can’t be taken for granted.
People in Jail and Prison in 2024, a recently published report from researchers with Vera’s Beyond Jails Initiative, surveys the current carceral landscape at the national, regional, and state levels, with a particular focus on developments during the 18-month period between the autumn of 2022 and the spring of 2024.
Its findings yield some reasons for optimism—there are indeed fewer people behind bars than in 2019—but also raise the alarm about stalling progress and the lasting impact of “tough-on-crime”-era criminal legal policies.
The state of local jails and state and federal prisons
Researchers generally consider 2009 to be the zenith of mass incarceration; at that time, 1.6 million people were held in state and federal prisons nationwide. Incarceration has steadily fallen since then, diminishing 22 percent from the peak. This drop was aided by a dramatic decline in 2020 as federal and state governments adopted emergency policies to prevent the spread of COVID-19 through their corrections systems.
Yet findings show that the number of people in jails and prisons is creeping back up to pre-pandemic levels, rising by two percent between the autumn of 2022 and the spring of 2024.
The rate of change varied across regions and states. The number of people incarcerated in state prisons has increased in a handful of states, including Arkansas (by 7.9 percent), Montana (5.7 percent), South Dakota (10.4 percent), and Wisconsin (9.6 percent).
By region, state prisons in the South had the most significant increase during that time, with an uptick of five percent, but the Midwest’s growth was close behind at 3.6 percent.
As of spring 2024, approximately 660,000 people were held in jails nationwide, a 10 percent decrease from mid-2019 but an increase of more than 100,000 people since 2020, a year that registered a significant population low due to pandemic emergency policies. Rural counties have seen the closest return to 2019 population tallies, while urban county jails have done the best job of maintaining declines.
Older people’s incarceration rates rise
Even if prison populations have declined since mass incarceration’s peak, report findings show how policies from decades ago still have damaging effects. Case in point: older people represent an accelerating segment of the United States incarcerated population.
In 2022, 254,900 people ages 55 or older were incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails. For the subgroup of Americans 65 years or older, the incarceration rate exceeds that of people of all ages in countries like Canada, France, and Italy.
Vera researchers explain that older adults’ widening share of the incarcerated population can be traced back to “the widespread use of long sentences that ensure ‘death by incarceration,’” popularized in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s amid “three-strikes” laws, the War on Drugs, and the 1994 Crime Bill. Restrictions on parole eligibility also acutely affect older people who would otherwise be eligible for release.
Condemning people to grow old and even pass away behind bars likely has little public safety benefits. Research indicates that people generally “age out” of crime. In a study of people on parole over age 65 in New York State, less than one percent returned to prison for a new conviction within three years of their release.
And concerningly, although more incarcerated older people are in prison than in jail, between 2020 and 2022—a period beset by a pandemic and housing crises—they were local jails’ fastest-growing age group.
States are building more prisons and jails, outpacing capacity demands
Several states—even those where the number of people in prison has fallen—are plowing ahead with new prison construction projects. These decisions threaten to stall decarceration efforts further.
In some states, these projects are being funded via pandemic relief funds and general funds that could instead be put toward social goods like education. Alabama had spent $400 million in pandemic relief money on prison construction by 2024, per public records. The cost of a new facility the state is building in Elmore County will equal “nearly the entire budget of the Alabama Department of Mental Health, which provides services to more than 200,000 people annually,” researchers write.
In Indiana, meanwhile, current figures project that the Westville Correctional Facility will be, at $1.2 billion, “the most expensive building project in the history of the state.”
There has also been a boom in jail construction, to the tune of more than $62 billion nationwide since 2002. This spending has increased the nation’s jail capacity by almost 40 percent.
However, this increase does not reflect national trends in jail incarceration, which has fallen in the past 15 years. Despite this, some states are doubling down on investments in incarceration.
Immigration detention, criminalization pack local corrections facilities
In order to criminalize undocumented immigration, state policymakers have devised their own immigration enforcement policies, helping to fill local jails, justify new infrastructure, and sustain related operations.
In addition to receiving federal dollars to detain people, states—most notably, Texas—are, in essence, building “separate and harsher immigration enforcement systems outside of the federal government,” enabling them to arrest people crossing the border and incarcerate them on state-specific criminal misdemeanor charges.
Texas’s “Operation Lone Star” did just this beginning in 2021. As reported by a local news outlet in the summer of 2021, the county attorney for Val Verde County, Texas, said the operation anticipated arresting as many as 200 people per day by that August. Officials held detained people in privately-owned facilities and, later, a state prison converted to hold people accused of immigration-related charges.
An expanded version of Operation Lone Star, SB 4, is currently being challenged in federal courts. However, a slew of other states are keen to replicate Texas’s scheme and are seeking to implement similar laws. Ensuring that SB 4 copycats cannot be realized—plus advocating against the construction of new jails and for the compassionate release of incarcerated older people—is critical if the gains made over the past several years are to be sustained and built upon.
