United States incarceration rate
Updated: Wikipedia source
According to the World Prison Brief (WPB) the United States had the world's highest incarceration rate from 2001 (when the US overtook Russia) through October 4, 2022 (US rate of 629 per 100,000 population at that time). That was except for periods when the Seychelles (population around 121,000) had the highest rate. According to the WPB as of September 3, 2025 the United States had the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world, at 541 per 100,000 population, using the latest available solid US numbers (2022) from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Between 2019 and 2020, the United States saw a significant drop in the total number of incarcerations. State and federal prison, and local jail, incarcerations dropped from 2 million in 2019 to 1 million in 2020. The US incarceration total has risen since 2020. See the Bureau of Justice Statistics timeline table to the right below the map. As of their March 2023 publication, the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-profit organization for decarceration, estimated that in the United States, about 1 million people were or are currently incarcerated. Of those who were incarcerated, 1,047,000 people were in state prison, 514,000 in local jails, 209,000 in federal prisons, 36,000 in youth correctional facilities, 34,000 in immigration detention camps, 22,000 in involuntary commitment, 8,000 in territorial prisons, 2,000 in Indian Country jails, and 1,000 in United States military prisons. The data is from various years depending on what is the latest available data. Corrections (which includes prisons, jails, probation, and parole) cost around $74 billion in 2007 according to the U . Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). According to the Justice Expenditures and Employment in the United States, 2017 report release by BJS, it is estimated that county and municipal governments spent roughly US$30 billion on corrections in 2017.