(Co-authored with Ram Subramanian for the Vera Institute of Justice)

As concern in the United States has grown over the number of people behind bars, policymakers and the public are turning their attention to addressing the decades-long growth in the number of people held in the country’s more than 3,000 locally run jails—county or municipal detention facilities that primarily house people who have been charged but not yet convicted of a crime (known as the “pretrial” population), and those sentenced to a short term of incarceration, usually under a year. With local jail populations swelling from 157,000 on any given day in 1970 to over 700,000 people in 2015, there are now an astronomical number of jail admissions annually—nearly 11 million—prompting many to question whether local jails have grown too large, and at too high a cost for the communities they serve. This has in turn focused efforts among policymakers and the public to better understand and reform the size, scope, and distribution of local incarceration. . . .

. . .To further understand the contours of jail growth, Vera researchers turned once again to its data tool to study the newly released 2013 Census of Jails from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and conducted an updated historical analysis of jail population trends to examine two specific drivers of local incarceration: 1) changes in the number of people held in pretrial detention; and 2) changes in the number of people who are held for another authority. Vera researchers also looked at the degree to which these trends are different along the urban-rural axis, as well as between U.S. regions—the Northeast, Midwest, South, and West.

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