As of 2022, Black people were more likely than those of other races to be imprisoned in the United States. In that year, the rate of imprisonment for Black men stood at ***** per 100,000 of the population. For Black women, this rate stood at ** per 100,000 of the population.

In 2022, about 1,826 Black men per 100,000 residents were imprisoned in the United States. This rate was much lower for Black women, at 64 per 100,000 residents. The overall imprisonment rate in 2022 stood at 355 per 100,000 Americans.

As of February 2025, El Salvador had the highest prisoner rate worldwide, with over 1,600 prisoners per 100,000 of the national population. Cuba, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, and the United States, rounded out the top five countries with the highest rate of incarceration. Homicides in El Salvador Interestingly, El Salvador, which long had the highest global homicide rates, has dropped out of the top 20 after a high number of gang members have been incarcerated. A high number of the countries with the highest homicide rate are located in Latin America. Prisoners in the United StatesThe United States is home to the largest number of prisoners worldwide. More than 1.8 million people were incarcerated in the U.S. at the beginning of 2025. In China, the estimated prison population totaled 1.69 million people that year. Other nations had far fewer prisoners. The largest share of the U.S. prisoners in federal correctional facilities were of African-American origin. As of 2020, there were 345,500 black, non-Hispanic prisoners, compared to 327,300 white, non-Hispanic inmates. The U.S. states with the largest number of prisoners in 2022 were Texas, California, and Florida. Over 160,000 prisoners in state facilities were sentenced for rape or sexual assault, which was the most common cause of imprisonment. The second most common was murder, followed by aggravated or simple assault.

This statistic shows the share of the United States prison population that was Black in 2014, by state and the length of time inmates have served. In 2014, **** percent of the prison population in Alabama was Black. For those inmates who had served 10 years or more, that figure rose to ** percent.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, local jail incarceration rates fell across the board in the United States. In June 2019, the local jail incarceration rate for Black inmates was *** per 100,000 residents. This decreased the following year, where the jail incarceration rate was at *** per 100,000 residents.

Potential predictorsb'*' of incident incarceration during follow-up among Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino mSTUDY participants (n = 328).

Association between examined potential predictors and incarceration among Black/ African American and Hispanic/Latino mSTUDY participants.

The purpose of the study was to assess the impact of Latino ethnicity on pretrial release decisions in large urban counties. The study examined two questions:

Are Latino defendants less likely to receive pretrial releases than non-Latino defendants? Are Latino defendants in counties where the Latino population is rapidly increasing less likely to receive pretrial releases than Latino defendants in counties where the Latino population is not rapidly increasing? The study utilized the State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS) Database (see STATE COURT PROCESSING STATISTICS, 1990-2004: FELONY DEFENDANTS IN LARGE URBAN COUNTIES [ICPSR 2038]). The SCPS collects data on felony cases filed in state courts in 40 of the nation's 75 largest counties over selected sample dates in the month of May of every even numbered year, and tracks a representative sample of felony case defendants from arrest through sentencing. Data in the collection include 118,556 cases. Researchers supplemented the SCPS with county-level information from several sources:

Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reporting Program county-level data series of index crimes reported to the police for the years 1988-2004 (see UNIFORM CRIME REPORTS: COUNTY-LEVEL DETAILED ARREST AND OFFENSE DATA, 1998 [ICPSR 9335], UNIFORM CRIME REPORTING PROGRAM DATA [UNITED STATES]: COUNTY-LEVEL DETAILED ARREST AND OFFENSE DATA, 1990 [ICPSR 9785], 1992 [ICPSR 6316], 1994 [ICPSR 6669], 1996 [ICPSR 2389], 1998 [ICPSR 2910], 2000 [ICPRS 3451], 2002 [ICPSR 4009], and 2004 [ICPSR 4466]). Bureau of Justice Statistics Annual Survey of Jails, Jurisdiction-Level data series for the years 1988-2004 (see ANNUAL SURVEY OF JAILS: JURISDICTION-LEVEL DATA, 1990 [ICPSR 9569], 1992 [ICPSR 6395], 1994 [ICPSR 6538], 1996 [ICPSR 6856], 1998 [ICPSR 2682], 2000 [ICPSR 3882], 2002 [ICPSR 4428], and 2004 [ICPSR 20200]). Bureau of Justice Statistics National Prosecutors Survey/Census data series 1990-2005 (see NATIONAL PROSECUTORS SURVEY, 1990 [ICPSR 9579], 1992 [ICPSR 6273], 1994 [ICPSR 6785], 1996 [ICPSR 2433], 2001 census [ICPSR 3418], and 2005 [ICPSR 4600]). United States Census Bureau State and County Quickfacts. National Center for State Courts, State Court Organization reports, 1993 (see NCJ 148346), 1998 (see NCJ 178932), and 2004 (see NCJ 212351). Bureau of Justice Statistics Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties reports, 1992 (see NCJ 148826), 1994 (see NCJ 164616), 1996 (see NCJ 176981), 1998 (see NJC 187232), 2000 (see NCJ 202021), and 2002 (see NJC 210818). The data include defendant level variables such as most serious current offense charge, number of charges, prior felony convictions, prior misdemeanor convictions, prior incarcerations, criminal justice status at arrest, prior failure to appear, age, gender, ethnicity, and race. County level variables include region, crime rate, two year change in crime rate, caseload rate, jail capacity, two year change in jail capacity, judicial selection by election or appointment, prosecutor screens cases, and annual expenditure on prosecutor's office. Racial threat stimuli variables include natural log of the percentage of the county population that is Latino, natural log of the percentage of the county population that is African American, change in the percentage of the county population that is Latino over the last six years and change in the percentage of the county population that is African American over the last six years. Cross-level interaction variables include percentage minority (Latino/African American) population zero percent to 15 percent, percentage minority (Latino/African American) population 16 percent to 30 percent, and percentage minority (Latino/African American) population 31 percent or higher.

According to a survey conducted in 2023, ** percent of Black adults agreed that the prison system needs to be completely rebuilt to ensure equality for all people, regardless of race or ethnicity, in the United States. In comparison, ** percent of Black adults said that the prison system requires major changes to ensure equality, while eight percent said that only minor changes are required. Only ***** percent of Black adults were found to believe that the prison system requires no changes at all.

Historical Dataset of Interagency King County Jail is provided by PublicSchoolReview and contain statistics on metrics:Total Students Trends Over Years (2001-2004),Distribution of Students By Grade Trends,American Indian Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (2001-2004),Asian Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (2002-2004),Hispanic Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (2001-2004),Black Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (2001-2004),White Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (2001-2004),Diversity Score Comparison Over Years (2001-2004)

Historical Dataset of Cape School-jail High School is provided by PublicSchoolReview and contain statistics on metrics:Total Students Trends Over Years (1999-2023),Total Classroom Teachers Trends Over Years (1998-2023),Distribution of Students By Grade Trends,Student-Teacher Ratio Comparison Over Years (1997-2023),American Indian Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (1998-2023),Asian Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (2000-2010),Hispanic Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (1999-2023),Black Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (1999-2023),White Student Percentage Comparison Over Years (1998-2023),Diversity Score Comparison Over Years (1999-2023),Reading and Language Arts Proficiency Comparison Over Years (2010-2014),Math Proficiency Comparison Over Years (2010-2014),Overall School Rank Trends Over Years (2010-2014),Graduation Rate Comparison Over Years (2011-2019)

At the beginning of 2025, the United States had the highest number of incarcerated individuals worldwide, with around 1.8 million people in prison. China followed with around 100,000 fewer prisoners. Brazil followed in third. The incarceration problem in the U.S. The United States has an incredibly high number of incarcerated individuals. Therefore, the incarceration problem has become a widely contested issue, because it impacts disadvantaged people and minorities the most. Additionally, the prison system has become capitalized by outside corporations that fund prisons, but there is still a high cost to taxpayers. Furthermore, there has been an increase in the amount of private prisons that have been created. For-profit prison companies have come under scrutiny because of their lack of satisfactory staff and widespread lobbying. Violent offenses are the most common type of offense among prisoners in the U.S. Incarceration rates worldwide El Salvador had the highest rate of incarceration worldwide, at 1,659 prisoners per 100,000 residents as of February 2025. Cuba followed in second with 794 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants. The incarceration rate is a better measure to use when comparing countries than the total prison populations, which will naturally have the most populous countries topping the list.

How does a criminal record shape interactions with the State and society? We present evidence from a nationwide field experiment in the United States, showing that prospective applicants with criminal records are about five percentage points less likely to receive information from college admission offices. However, we demonstrate that bias does not extend to race. There is no difference in response rates to Black and White applicants. We further show that bias is all but absent in public bureaucracies, as discrimination against formerly incarcerated applicants is driven by private schools. Examining why bias is stronger for private colleges, we demonstrate that the private-public difference persists even after accounting for college selectivity, socio-economic composition and school finances. Moving beyond the measurement of bias, we evaluate an intervention aimed at reducing discrimination: whether an email from an advocate mitigates bias associated with a criminal record. However, we find no evidence that advocate endorsements decrease bureaucratic bias.

This dataset lists inmates incarcerated at Cockatoo Island prison in Sydney (Australia) between 1847-1869. It offers insights into how the colonial criminal justice system operated after New South Wales’ transition from a penal colony to a ‘free’ colony when transportation ceased in 1840. It is a useful tool for genealogists tracing the lives of their criminal ancestors and for historians of crime and punishment researching nineteenth-century Australia. The dataset includes prisoners' names and aliases, their ship of arrival, place of origin, details of their colonial conviction(s) (trial place, court, offence, sentence), date(s) admitted to Cockatoo Island, and when and how they were discharged from Cockatoo Island. In some cases, it also includes prisoners' place of origin, occupation, biometric information (height, eye/hair colour, complexion, scars, tattoos), 'condition upon arrival' (convict or free), and (for convicts) details of their original conviction in Britain or Ireland. As a UNESCO World Heritage 'Convict Site' Cockatoo Island is best known as a site of secondary punishment for recidivist convicts, especially those transferred from Norfolk Island. This dataset demonstrates the diversity of the prison population: including nominally free convicts (ticket-of-leave holders), migrants from Britain, China and other Australian colonies drawn in by the gold rush, exiles from Port Phillip, Aboriginal Australians convicted during frontier warfare, colonial-born white Australians (including bushrangers), and black, Indian and American sailors visiting Sydney. Significant attention has been paid to the more than 160,000 British and Irish convicts who were transported Australia as colonists between 1787 and 1868. Much less has been said about those punished within the criminal justice system that arose in the wake of New South Wales' transition from 'penal' to 'free' colony (Finnane, 1997: x-xi). Cockatoo Island prison opened in 1839, a year before convict transportation to New South Wales ceased, and was intended to punish the most recidivist and violent of the transported convicts. This archetype has prevailed in historical discourses, and they have been described as 'criminal lunatics... [and] criminals incapable of reform' (Parker, 1977: 61); 'the most desperate and abandoned characters' (O'Carrigan, 1994: 64); and people of 'doubtful character' (NSW Government Architect's Office, 2009: 29). Yet, this was far from the truth. My analysis of 1666 prisoners arriving between 1839-52 show they were overwhelming non-violent offenders, tried for minor property crimes at lower courts. They were also far more diverse population than commonly recognised, including Indigenous Australian, Chinese and black convicts alongside majority British and Irish men (Harman, 2012). This project will make publicly available extremely detailed records relating to Cockatoo Island's prisoners to show people firsthand exactly who made up the inmate population. The digital version of the original registers will include information on convicts' criminal record, but also their job, whether they were married or had children, and even what they looked like. It will also be a name-searchable database so family historians can search for their ancestors, who may have been incarcerated on the island. As it stands, they will be able find information online about ancestors who were transported as long as they remained in the 'convict system', but they may seem to disappear as soon as they are awarded their ticket-of-leave and become 'free'. However, many former convicts, and free immigrants, to New South Wales were convicted locally, and these records can give us information about their lives within the colony. The type of data included in these registers will also allow researchers to investigate questions including: (1) were convicts more likely to offend again than free immigrants? (2) Were the children of convicts more likely to offend than others? (3) Did the influx of mostly Chinese migrants during the gold rush actually lead to a crime-wave, as reported in the press? (4) Were laws introduced between 1830 and 1853, actually effective at prosecuting bushrangers (highwaymen)? (5) Was the criminal-judicial system in Australia more rehabilitative, despite developing out of a harsher convict transportation system? Alongside the dataset, the website will include 'life-biographies' of individual convicts to show you how this dataset can be used to piece together a life-story. It also to warns against understanding a real-life person only through the records of their conviction. There many of fascinating stories to tell, including those 'John Perry' ('Black Perry') the prizewinning boxer; the love story of the 'Two Fredericks'; and Tan, the Chinese gold-digger who resisted his incarceration. In addition, there will be teaching resources for secondary school children and undergraduate university students who want to engage directly with historical materials, without having to leave their classroom. Overall, this website invites anyone with an interest in the history of crime and punishment, and any visitors to the UNESCO world heritage site 'Cockatoo Island', to try searching for a name in the database or read about a featured convict's life story. It asks them, though, to think about how and why these people's lives intersected with the state, leading to their incarceration, and how history has erased much of their lives outside of it. Data collection involved photographing a Cockatoo Island’s surviving prison registers and returns kept at the State Archives of New South Wales (call numbers: 4/4540, 4/6501, 4/6509, 6571, 4/6572, 4/6573, 4/6574, 4/6575, X819). In these volumes, clerks had listed details of incoming prisoners on the dates they arrived between April 1847 and October 1869. This prison register for the period 1839-46 (call number: 2/8285) had not survived to a good enough quality for accurate transcription and was excluded from data collection. I photographed and then transcribed these records in full into a tabular form, with minor standardisation of abbreviations and irregular spellings. Where multiple records existed for one person I combined information from two separate archival records into one line of the dataset. Where I could not verify that two people with the same name were the same person, I listed them as separate entries. Barring errors in entry at the time of record creation, the studied population represents the entire population of prisoners incarcerated at Cockatoo Island between April 1847 and October 1869 when the prison closed.

Inequality in economic and social outcomes across U.S. regions has grown in recent decades. The economic theory of crime predicts that this increased variability would raise geographic disparities in violent crime. Instead, I find that geographic disparities in homicide rates decreased. Moreover, these same decades saw decreases in the geographic disparities in policing, incarceration, and the share of the population that is African American. Thus, changes in policing, incarcerations, and racial composition could have led to a decrease in inequality in homicide rates. Moreover, the joint provision of law enforcement by local, state, and federal authorities may have reduced the impact of economic distress on violent crime.

The global correctional system market is projected to reach a value of $263.2 million by 2033, expanding at a CAGR of 3.2% from 2025 to 2033. The increasing demand for effective and efficient security solutions in correctional facilities is driving the market growth. Additionally, the rising prevalence of crime and the need for improved rehabilitation programs are contributing to the demand for correctional systems. Key market players include Montgomery Technology, Tyler Technologies, Spillman Technologies, ALERT PUBLIC SAFETY SOLUTIONS, Encartele, Sun Ridge Systems, Eagle Advantage Solutions, Bio-Metrica, Black Creek, Huber & Associates, and Beacon Software Solutions. The North American region is expected to dominate the global correctional system market throughout the forecast period, followed by Europe and Asia Pacific. The high prevalence of crime and the increasing focus on rehabilitation programs in these regions are driving the market growth. Furthermore, government initiatives to improve the safety and security of correctional facilities are expected to support the adoption of advanced correctional systems in the coming years. However, the market growth may be restrained by budgetary constraints and concerns over the increasing cost of incarceration.

Despite making up approximately 10-12 pecent of the total population of the United States in the period between 1933 and 1970, Black people comprised roughly 20-30 percent of arrests made in these years. Today, Black people still have the highest incarceration rates relative to their population, however these rates have been declining in the past two decades.

In 2021, around 221,200 Black/African American people were confined to local jails in the United States. In that year, Black and African American people were confined to local jails at a higher rate than any other ethnicity.

There were almost 700 thousand slaves in the US in 1790, which equated to approximately 18 percent of the total population, or roughly one in every six people. By 1860, the final census taken before the American Civil War, there were four million slaves in the South, compared with less than 0.5 million free African Americans in all of the US. Of the 4.4 million African Americans in the US before the war, almost four million of these people were held as slaves; meaning that for all African Americans living in the US in 1860, there was an 89 percent* chance that they lived in slavery. A brief history Trans-Atlantic slavery began in the early sixteenth century, when the Portuguese and Spanish forcefully brought captured African slaves to the New World, in order to work for them. The British Empire introduced slavery to North America on a large scale, and the economy of the British colonies there depended on slave labor, particularly regarding cotton, sugar and tobacco output. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century the number of slaves being brought to the Americas increased exponentially, and at the time of American independence it was legal in all thirteen colonies. Although slavery became increasingly prohibited in the north, the number of slaves remained high during this time as they were simply relocated or sold from the north to the south. It is also important to remember that the children of slaves were also viewed as property, and (apart from some very rare cases) were born into a life of slavery. Abolition and the American Civil War In the years that followed independence, the Northern States began gradually prohibiting slavery, and it was officially abolished there by 1805, and the importation of slave labor was prohibited nationwide from 1808 (although both still existed in practice after this). Business owners in the Southern States however depended on slave labor in order to meet the demand of their rapidly expanding industries, and the issue of slavery continued to polarize American society in the decades to come. This culminated in the election of President Abraham Lincoln in 1860, who promised to prohibit slavery in the newly acquired territories to the west, leading to the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865. Although the Confederacy (south) were victorious in much of the early stages of the war, the strength in numbers of the northern states (including many free, black men), eventually resulted in a victory for the Union (north), and the nationwide abolishment of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Legacy In total, an estimated twelve to thirteen million Africans were transported to the Americas as slaves, and this does not include the high number who did not survive the journey (which was as high as 23 percent in some years). In the 150 years since the abolishment of slavery in the US, the African-American community have continuously campaigned for equal rights and opportunities that were not afforded to them along with freedom. The most prominent themes have been the Civil Rights Movement, voter suppression, mass incarceration and the relationship between the police and the African-American community has taken the spotlight in recent years.

In 2019, 2,144 white state prison inmates died in the United States. A further 1,174 Black or African American inmates died in that same year. In total, 3,853 United States state prison inmates died in 2019.