The National Prisoner Statistics (NPS) data collection began in 1926 in response to a congressional mandate to gather information on persons incarcerated in state and federal prisons. Originally under the auspices of the U.S. Census Bureau, the collection moved to the Bureau of Prisons in 1950, and then in 1971 to the National Criminal Justice Information and Statistics Service, the precursor to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) which was established in 1979. From 1979 to 2013, the Census Bureau was the NPS data collection agent. In 2014, the collection was competitively bid in conjunction with the National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP), since many of the respondents for NPS and NCRP are the same. The contract was awarded to Abt Associates, Inc. The NPS is administered to 51 respondents. Before 2001, the District of Columbia was also a respondent, but responsibility for housing the District of Columbia's sentenced prisoners was transferred to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and by yearend 2001 the District of Columbia no longer operated a prison system. The NPS provides an enumeration of persons in state and federal prisons and collects data on key characteristics of the nation's prison population. NPS has been adapted over time to keep pace with the changing information needs of the public, researchers, and federal, state, and local governments.

Investigator(s): Bureau of Justice Statistics Conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, this survey is part of a series of data gathering efforts undertaken to assist policymakers in assessing and remedying deficiencies in the nation's correctional institutions. Its primary objective is to produce national statistics of the state and sentenced federal prison populations across a variety of domains. The survey gathered information on demographic, socioeconomic, and criminal history characteristics of prisoners. Also obtained were details of prisoner’ military service, current offense and sentence, incident characteristics, and firearm possession and sources. Other information includes age at time of interview, ethnicity, education, lifetime drug use and alcohol use and treatment, mental and physical health and treatment, and pre-arrest employment and income. Data on characteristics of victims, prison programs and services, and rule violations are provided as well. With the 2016 administration, the survey was renamed the Survey of Prison Inmates. NACJD has prepared a resource guide for the Survey of Prison Inmates Series.

As of December 2022, there was a total of 139,631 prisoners in the state of Texas, the most out of any state. California, Florida, Georgia, and Ohio rounded out the top five states with the most prisoners in the United States.

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.

Overview

The Marshall Project, the nonprofit investigative newsroom dedicated to the U.S. criminal justice system, has partnered with The Associated Press to compile data on the prevalence of COVID-19 infection in prisons across the country. The Associated Press is sharing this data as the most comprehensive current national source of COVID-19 outbreaks in state and federal prisons.

Lawyers, criminal justice reform advocates and families of the incarcerated have worried about what was happening in prisons across the nation as coronavirus began to take hold in the communities outside. Data collected by The Marshall Project and AP shows that hundreds of thousands of prisoners, workers, correctional officers and staff have caught the illness as prisons became the center of some of the country’s largest outbreaks. And thousands of people — most of them incarcerated — have died.

In December, as COVID-19 cases spiked across the U.S., the news organizations also shared cumulative rates of infection among prison populations, to better gauge the total effects of the pandemic on prison populations. The analysis found that by mid-December, one in five state and federal prisoners in the United States had tested positive for the coronavirus -- a rate more than four times higher than the general population.

This data, which is updated weekly, is an effort to track how those people have been affected and where the crisis has hit the hardest.

Methodology and Caveats

The data tracks the number of COVID-19 tests administered to people incarcerated in all state and federal prisons, as well as the staff in those facilities. It is collected on a weekly basis by Marshall Project and AP reporters who contact each prison agency directly and verify published figures with officials.

Each week, the reporters ask every prison agency for the total number of coronavirus tests administered to its staff members and prisoners, the cumulative number who tested positive among staff and prisoners, and the numbers of deaths for each group.

The time series data is aggregated to the system level; there is one record for each prison agency on each date of collection. Not all departments could provide data for the exact date requested, and the data indicates the date for the figures.

To estimate the rate of infection among prisoners, we collected population data for each prison system before the pandemic, roughly in mid-March, in April, June, July, August, September and October. Beginning the week of July 28, we updated all prisoner population numbers, reflecting the number of incarcerated adults in state or federal prisons. Prior to that, population figures may have included additional populations, such as prisoners housed in other facilities, which were not captured in our COVID-19 data. In states with unified prison and jail systems, we include both detainees awaiting trial and sentenced prisoners.

To estimate the rate of infection among prison employees, we collected staffing numbers for each system. Where current data was not publicly available, we acquired other numbers through our reporting, including calling agencies or from state budget documents. In six states, we were unable to find recent staffing figures: Alaska, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maryland, Montana, Utah.

To calculate the cumulative COVID-19 impact on prisoner and prison worker populations, we aggregated prisoner and staff COVID case and death data up through Dec. 15. Because population snapshots do not account for movement in and out of prisons since March, and because many systems have significantly slowed the number of new people being sent to prison, it’s difficult to estimate the total number of people who have been held in a state system since March. To be conservative, we calculated our rates of infection using the largest prisoner population snapshots we had during this time period.

As with all COVID-19 data, our understanding of the spread and impact of the virus is limited by the availability of testing. Epidemiology and public health experts say that aside from a few states that have recently begun aggressively testing in prisons, it is likely that there are more cases of COVID-19 circulating undetected in facilities. Sixteen prison systems, including the Federal Bureau of Prisons, would not release information about how many prisoners they are testing.

Corrections departments in Indiana, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota and Wisconsin report coronavirus testing and case data for juvenile facilities; West Virginia reports figures for juvenile facilities and jails. For consistency of comparison with other state prison systems, we removed those facilities from our data that had been included prior to July 28. For these states we have also removed staff data. Similarly, Pennsylvania’s coronavirus data includes testing and cases for those who have been released on parole. We removed these tests and cases for prisoners from the data prior to July 28. The staff cases remain.

About the Data

There are four tables in this data:

• covid_prison_cases.csv contains weekly time series data on tests, infections and deaths in prisons. The first dates in the table are on March 26. Any questions that a prison agency could not or would not answer are left blank.

• prison_populations.csv contains snapshots of the population of people incarcerated in each of these prison systems for whom data on COVID testing and cases are available. This varies by state and may not always be the entire number of people incarcerated in each system. In some states, it may include other populations, such as those on parole or held in state-run jails. This data is primarily for use in calculating rates of testing and infection, and we would not recommend using these numbers to compare the change in how many people are being held in each prison system.

• staff_populations.csv contains a one-time, recent snapshot of the headcount of workers for each prison agency, collected as close to April 15 as possible.

• covid_prison_rates.csv contains the rates of cases and deaths for prisoners. There is one row for every state and federal prison system and an additional row with the National totals.

Queries

The Associated Press and The Marshall Project have created several queries to help you use this data:

Get your state's prison COVID data: Provides each week's data from just your state and calculates a cases-per-100000-prisoners rate, a deaths-per-100000-prisoners rate, a cases-per-100000-workers rate and a deaths-per-100000-workers rate here

Rank all systems' most recent data by cases per 100,000 prisoners here

Find what percentage of your state's total cases and deaths -- as reported by Johns Hopkins University -- occurred within the prison system here

Attribution

In stories, attribute this data to: “According to an analysis of state prison cases by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit investigative newsroom dedicated to the U.S. criminal justice system, and The Associated Press.”

Contributors

Many reporters and editors at The Marshall Project and The Associated Press contributed to this data, including: Katie Park, Tom Meagher, Weihua Li, Gabe Isman, Cary Aspinwall, Keri Blakinger, Jake Bleiberg, Andrew R. Calderón, Maurice Chammah, Andrew DeMillo, Eli Hager, Jamiles Lartey, Claudia Lauer, Nicole Lewis, Humera Lodhi, Colleen Long, Joseph Neff, Michelle Pitcher, Alysia Santo, Beth Schwartzapfel, Damini Sharma, Colleen Slevin, Christie Thompson, Abbie VanSickle, Adria Watson, Andrew Welsh-Huggins.

Questions

If you have questions about the data, please email The Marshall Project at info+covidtracker@themarshallproject.org or file a Github issue.

To learn more about AP's data journalism capabilities for publishers, corporations and financial institutions, go here or email kromano@ap.org.

The National Prisoner Statistics (NPS) data collection began in 1926 in response to a congressional mandate to gather information on persons incarcerated in state and federal prisons. Originally under the auspices of the U.S. Census Bureau, the collection moved to the Bureau of Prisons in 1950, and then in 1971 to the National Criminal Justice Information and Statistics Service, the precursor to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) which was established in 1979. From 1979 to 2013, the Census Bureau was the NPS data collection agent. In 2014, the collection was competitively bid in conjunction with the National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP), since many of the respondents for NPS and NCRP are the same. The contract was awarded to Abt Associates, Inc. The NPS is administered to 51 respondents. Before 2001, the District of Columbia was also a respondent, but responsibility for housing the District of Columbia's sentenced prisoners was transferred to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and by yearend 2001 the District of Columbia no longer operated a prison system. The NPS provides an enumeration of persons in state and federal prisons and collects data on key characteristics of the nation's prison population. NPS has been adapted over time to keep pace with the changing information needs of the public, researchers, and federal, state, and local governments.

There were about 87,784 female prisoners under the jurisdiction of state or federal correctional authorities in the United States as of December 2022. This is an increase from the previous year, when there were 83,651 female prisoners in the country.

Adult correctional services, custodial and community supervision, average counts of offenders in federal programs, Canada and regions, five years of data.

This data collection supplies annual data on the size of the prison population and the size of the general population in the United States for the period 1925 to 1986. These yearend counts include tabulations for prisons in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as the federal prisons, and are intended to provide a measure of the overall size of the prison population. The figures were provided from a voluntary reporting program in which each state, the District of Columbia, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons reported summary statistics as part of the statistical information on prison populations in the United States.

Around 1.23 million people were imprisoned in the United States in 2022. This is a slight increase from the previous year, when 1.2 million people were in prison.

As of October 28, 2023, about 35.4 percent of federal inmates in the United States were in low security prison facilities. A further 12.1 percent of inmates were in high security facilities in that year.

As of October 28, 2023, around 3,676 prisoners under federal jurisdiction in the United States were sentenced to life in prison. A further 37,113 prisoners had a prison sentence from five to 10 years.

The National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP) compiles offender-level data on admissions and releases from state and federal prisons and post-confinement community supervision. The data are used to monitor the nation's correctional population and address specific policy questions related to recidivism, prisoner reentry, and trends in demographic characteristics of the incarcerated and community supervision populations. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has administered the NCRP since 1983. Abt Associates has served as the NCRP data collection agent since October 2010.

The National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP) compiles offender-level data on admissions and releases from state and federal prisons and post-confinement community supervision. The data are used to monitor the nation's correctional population and address specific policy questions related to recidivism, prisoner reentry, and trends in demographic characteristics of the incarcerated and community supervision populations. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has administered the NCRP since 1983. The United States Bureau of the Census served as data collection agent for BJS until October 2010, when Abt Associates assumed this position. From 2000 to 2009, NCRP data were archived each year in four, year-specific files that corresponded to the four files that states were asked to submit to the Census Bureau. The four files are: Prison Admissions (Part A), Prison Releases (Part B), Parole Exits (Part C), and Prison Custody (Part D). For example, the 2009 NCRP archive consists of prison admissions occurring in 2009, prison releases occurring in 2009, parole exits occurring in 2009, and prisoners in custody on December 31, 2009. Starting in 2011, NCRP data will be archived in a single, multi-year Term Record file. A Term Record represents a single period of incarceration for an individual offender. Each year, the archived Term Record file will be replaced by a new Term Record file that incorporates new NCRP data collected and processed during the previous year, as well as updates to previously collected data. The Term Records were created from the Prison Admissions (Part A), Prison Releases (Part B), and Prison Custody (Part D) records submitted by states since 2000. With a few lines of computing code (included with the archive), an analyst can create a prison admission, release, or custody file from the Term Record file. In addition to the Term Record file, two additional files are being archived: (1) Prison Admissions (Part A), Prison Releases (Part B), and Prison Custody (Part D) records that were not used in building the Term Record file and (2) Part C (Parole Exit) records collected from January 1, 2011 to October 31, 2012.

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.

This statistic shows the distribution of adults in federal correctional services in Canada in the fiscal year of 2022, by race. 51.8 percent of the adult offender population in federal correctional services in Canada were Caucasian in the fiscal year of 2022.

Correctional facilities have suffered from a mixture of policy changes at the federal and local levels, coupled with broader support for rehabilitative solutions to the broader issue of crime. The implementation of a ban on private prison contract renewals with the DOJ in 2021 cut off a considerable revenue stream across BOP and USMS clientele. While the order was reversed in January 2025, facilities were forced to pivot to alternative revenue streams, namely community centers and rehabilitative service provision. Demand is uniquely separate from the broader economic climate, since revenue growth is primarily influenced by crime and incarceration rates. Falling approval of for-profit prisons also influenced statewide restrictions on private correctional facilities. Revenue fell at a CAGR of 3.6% to an estimated $9.0 billion, including an estimated 3.5% decline in 2025 alone, as profit reached an estimated 12.4%. Decreasing national crime and incarceration rates have been the primary contributing factors influencing revenue. A sharp 7.6% collapse in the national incarceration rate over the past five years was influenced by a conscious effort by the US government to reduce prison overcrowding. Since private correctional facilities charge fixed, per-diem rates based on occupancy, a reduction in the inmate population not only lowers demand for facility, but also raises fixed costs that eat into their profit margin. However, stricter immigration enforcement, caused agencies such as ICE to contract correctional facilities to provide detention and processing centers for new arrivals. In February 2025, major company GEO Group signed off on a contract with ICE for a new processing facility in Newark, New Jersey, providing a crucial revenue stream that offset larger losses. Moving forward, correctional facilities face an uncertain future. Continued slippage in public opinion regarding for-profit prison systems will force facilities to invest capital in rehabilitative services aimed at reentry and reduction of recidivism. Reputational problems stemming from reports of inadequate medical care, excessive use of solitary confinement and unsanitary conditions may lead to financial penalties or full-on closures. A continued retreat in national incarceration and crime rates will continue shrinking the potential marketplace for correctional facilities. Revenue is expected to sink at a CAGR of 3.6% to an estimated $7.5 billion over the next five years.

Investigator(s): Bureau of Justice Statistics This series of studies contains a descriptive analysis of federal and state-operated adult confinement and correctional facilities nationwide. The census included prisons, penitentiaries, and correctional facilities; boot camps; community corrections; prison farms; reception, diagnostic, and classification centers; road camps; forestry and conservation camps; youthful offender facilities (except in California); vocational training facilities; prison hospitals; and correctional drug and alcohol treatment facilities. Variables include physical security, age of facilities, functions of facilities, programs, inmate work assignments, staff employment, facilities under court order/consent decree for conditions of confinement, capital and operating expenditures, custody level of residents/inmates, one-day and average daily population counts, race/ethnicity of inmates, inmate deaths, special inmate counts, and assaults and incidents by inmates. The institution is the unit of analysis. The Census of State and Federal Adult Correctional Facilities is produced every 5 years.

In 2022, 0.2 percent of female prisoners in the United States were aged between 18 and 19 years old. In that year, 16.1 percent of male prisoners in the U.S. were between the ages of 30 and 34 years old.

Nationwide, over 1.9 million adults were living in correctional facilities as of the 2020 Decennial Census. Correctional facilities for adults include the following types:Federal detention centers, providing "short term" confinement or custody of adults pending adjudication or sentencing. Includes Immigrations Enforcement (ICE) and Customs inmates and ICE Contract Detention Facilities, among other types of federal detention centers.Federal and state prisons*, where people convicted of crimes serve their sentences. Patients in hospitals operated by or for federal or state correctional authorities are counted in the prison population.Local jails and other municipal confinement facilities*, operated by or for counties, cities, and American Indian and Alaska Native tribal governments. Patients in hospitals operated by or for local correctional authorities are counted in the jail population.Correctional residential facilities. Residents may be allowed extensive contact with the community, such as for employment or schooling, but are obligated to occupy the premises at night. Examples are halfway houses, restitution centers, and prerelease, work release, and study centers.Military disciplinary barracks and jails, managed by the military to hold those awaiting trial or convicted of crimes.*This category may include privately operated correctional facilities.Full documentation of definitions available on pages B-11 and B-12 of the technical documentation for 2020 Census State Redistricting Data (Public Law 94-171) Summary File. Data available for state, county, tract, block group, and block from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 Public Law 94-171 files. State data is symbolized as both a count and a percentage of the adult population. Data for county and below is symbolized to show counts only, as the percentages at lower geography levels are not very meaningful.