Mass Incarceration, by the Numbers

For over two decades, I drove East along SR 522 towards Monroe for the sole purpose of merging into Highway 2 en route to one of Washington’s many premiere climbing destinations amongst the Cascades. Even when I was younger, I looked to my right just before exiting into Monroe and paid absolutely no mind to the men in all grey clothing ambling along the slanted patch of grass tucked safely behind concertina wire. Consciously, I acknowledged that Monroe Correctional Complex sat there, but the meaning behind its purpose or the people it housed did not exist within my subconscious. It’s really difficult to conceptualize looking at an apple thousands of times, acknowledging that it’s an apple, but not knowing if the apple was red, or a fruit, or was edible.

On any given day, the United States holds roughly 1.9 million people in prisons and jails. For those of you who are good at quick maths, read this and go, “well Alex, that’s only 0.57% of the country’s population,” I say to you: that is more, per capita, than any other independent democracy on the planet. According to the World Prison Brief, the U.S. incarceration rate sits at around 541 individuals per 100,000 residents. For reference, Germany’s rate is 67. Italy’s is 97. We live in a country that enjoys locking up its own people at approximately six times the rate of other nations it considers its peers. Each one of those nearly two million incarcerated individuals is someone’s father, mother, son, niece, uncle, cousin, husband, wife, or friend.

These numbers are easy to dismiss as a soggy abstraction to make the prison system look bad, so here is a bit more crunch for you. The Prison Policy Initiative ran the numbers for each individual state across the U.S., comparing them to the global rankings. The results are bad, everyone. Massachusetts, the best ranking state (the state that has incarcerated the fewest number of its own people), sat at 30th in the world, ahead of Iran and Colombia, and every founding member of NATO. Let’s think about that.

It is not what you picture it is

If you were to ask most people on the street about their perception of mass incarceration, you would find a few common threads: the war on drugs, private prisons, and the place you put the really bad people who need somewhere extra special to be stowed away, never to be seen or heard from again. The data is unkind to all three.

Older cinema has done a number on the public perception of prison being mostly privatized, but the reality is they only hold roughly 8 percent of all incarcerated people. Instead, the system is overwhelmingly public, meaning it is built, staffed, and paid for by the government. Which means the American taxpayer. When you break down this population, drug offenses account for a significant portion of the whole, but four out of five inmates are actually there for something else entirely. What’s worse, the largest single group of incarcerated people, sitting in local jails on any given day, have not been convicted of anything at all. They are legally innocent, awaiting trial, and most are there for no other reason than they couldn’t afford bail. What is this, the Amanda Knox case?

The easiest explanations also provide the easiest fixes: close private prisons and release drug offenders. Cut off the head of the greedy hydras and provide substance abuse programs for those who need it. Even if these things are carried out in their entirety, the bulk of the system still stands.

The number is bigger than a number

Remember how I just told you there were two million people incarcerated on any given day in the U.S.? This datapoint undersells our entire criminal justice system in two major ways.

The first is churn and burn. Around 468,000 people enter U.S. prisons each year, but over seven million people are booked into jail during that same time period. This isn’t a fixed population in remote communes surrounded by that concertina wire I mentioned earlier. It’s a revolving door of chaos costing everyone more than just their time and money.

The second is scope. Beyond the population currently serving time, an additional 4.9 million have been to prison and returned to the community. A whopping 19 million Americans carry a felony conviction. Pushing further into the dismal abyss, an estimated 79 million (that’s nearly ⅓ of the U.S. population of adults) have a criminal record of some kind. According to research from FWD.us, around 113 million adults, or half the adult population in this country, have an immediate family member who has been incarcerated.

The “it’s not me, it’s you” line is a difficult position to maintain at 45 percent.

Washington is not the exception

I bet you’re reading this and thinking “hey, Washington isn’t so bad!” You might even be relying on the common assumption that mass incarceration is a problem only in the Deep South, an area known for their tough-on-crime platform. Washington’s own numbers make that difficult.

Washington incarcerates around 373 people per 100,000 residents, which is technically below the national average, but sits at nearly five times that of Germany’s rate. “Moderate by American standards” turns out to mean “extreme by every other standard."

"Moderate by American standards” turns out to mean “extreme by every other standard.”

Continuing to put earlier data points into Washington’s frame of reference: roughly 73 percent of people held in county jails have not been convicted of a crime. A lot of officials tout that the state’s prison population fell by several thousand during the pandemic, many coincidentally due to the legislative change from the Blake decision, as well as compassionately releasing many who were likely to die in prison due to age or severe health reasons, to clean up the overcapacity during a global pandemic. This is good, right? Then why has the prison population been steadily climbing back to its previous numbers ever since? Whatever Washington is, it is not an exception to the mass incarceration pattern. It’s a quieter, and arguably more insidious, version of it.

Smaller, but more expensive

One would think that as Washington’s prisons reduced their population size, the cost of incarceration should have dropped with it, yes? Wrong. The increase was as sharp as granite crimp. In 2024, the state spent an average of $75,576 to incarcerate one person for a single year. For reference, that is an 84 percent increase over 2019, even as the number of people serving time decreased significantly. Fixed costs like staffing, aging facilities, and healthcare do not adapt when the population does, and prisons are both bureaucratically slow and expensive to close. The result is a criminal justice system that now costs Washington almost $1 billion annually to house roughly 13,000 people, and continues to cost more per person every year that it holds fewer of them.

A billion dollars buys something. The question of what else that money could buy will be explored in future posts.

We do not “fall” evenly

Whatever this country’s criminal justice system is doing, it is not doing it to everyone equally. Black Americans make up around 14% of the U.S. population, yet nearly 41% of the people in prisons and jails. Hispanic and Latino adults—despite, by the CSG’s analysis, committing crimes at a lower rate—are imprisoned in state facilities at almost 2.9 times the rate of white adults nationally. In Washington specifically, these same groups, respectively, are incarcerated at roughly 5.7 times and 1.5 times the rate of white residents. These are not small disparities at the edges of the data. They are the core feature of it.

None of it tracks crime

I know you’re probably tired of reading random statistics about something that doesn’t directly affect you, but this final piece is the icing on the cake. It’s the one thing that should make everything else click into place for you. Make you question if this system is working.

Everything stated above—the scale, the cost, the reach, the disparity—holds true at a moment when crime in this country is at or near its lowest level since the early 1960s. Crime is currently at its lowest in over 60 years. Our system is not expanding because crime is expanding. The two numbers are no longer correlated. What actually makes the U.S. an outlier isn’t actually how many people it arrests. Several European countries send people to prison at comparable rates to us. It’s how long we keep them locked up. The average sentence for burglary in the U.S. runs around 16 months. In Canada, it’s about five months. In England, about seven. America’s route to freedom isn’t a sport climb, it’s multi-pitch. Or for those not raised in a scree field, the difference is not the doorway, but the length of the hallway.

Which leaves the conclusion the data keeps pointing back to with a giant neon sign that someone forgets to turn off. A system whose size moves independently of crime is not a response to crime. It’s a policy. A policy about bail or sentence length or who gets supervision and how long that supervision lasts or the default response to a violation. These choices can be examined. These choices can be made differently.

A system whose size moves independently of crime is not a response to crime. It’s a policy.

That is the reason this column exists. And every future drive along SR 522 into Monroe, this data will be seared into the back of my mind.

Sources

Prison Policy Initiative, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2025 — national incarceration total and facility counts; private-prison share (8%); the “four out of five” drug-offense figure; pretrial and jail population; annual prison admissions vs. jail bookings; the “directly impacted” figures (4.9M formerly imprisoned, 19M with felony convictions, 79M with criminal records). prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html

World Prison Brief (Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research, Birkbeck, University of London) — international incarceration rate comparisons; U.S. rate of ~541 per 100,000, drawn from 2022 Bureau of Justice Statistics data; Germany and Italy rates. prisonbrief.com

Prison Policy Initiative, States of Incarceration: The Global Context — the “every U.S. state as a country” comparison and the Massachusetts ranking. prisonpolicy.org/global/2024.html

FWD.us — estimate that roughly 113 million U.S. adults (about 45%) have an immediate family member who has been incarcerated.

Prison Policy Initiative, Washington State profile — Washington incarceration rate of 373 per 100,000; 73% of the state jail population not convicted; Black–white incarceration disparity of 5.7x. prisonpolicy.org/profiles/WA.html

Council of State Governments Justice Center — Hispanic adults imprisoned at roughly 2.9 times the rate of white adults nationally, despite committing crimes at a lower rate. csgjusticecenter.org

ACLU, Smart Justice: A Blueprint for Washington — state-level imprisonment disparities by race and ethnicity (Black ~5x, AI/AN ~3x, Latinx ~1.5x the white rate, based on 2017 imprisonment data).

Washington Department of Corrections, via OPB and KNKX reporting (April 2024) — Washington state prison population (~13,972 at the end of 2023); the rising cost-per-prisoner trend as population declined.

Washington State Standard (January 2026) — Washington’s average cost per incarcerated person of $75,576 in 2024, an 84% increase since 2019; close to $1 billion in annual corrections spending.

FBI Uniform Crime Reporting, preliminary 2024 data (via Prison Policy Initiative) — U.S. crime rate at or near its lowest level since the early 1960s.

National Research Council and New York Times reporting, via the comparative-incarceration literature — comparative average sentence lengths for burglary (U.S. vs. Canada vs. England).