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): United States. Bureau of Justice Statistics Produces annual national- and state-level data on the number of prisoners in state and federal prison facilities. Aggregate data are collected on race and sex of prison inmates, inmates held in private facilities and local jails, system capacity, noncitizens, and persons age 17 or younger. Findings are released in the Prisoners series and the Corrections Statistical Analysis Tool (CSAT) - Prisoners. Data are from the 50 states departments of correction, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and until 2001, from the District of Columbia (after 2001, felons sentenced under the District of Columbia criminal code were housed in federal facilities).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
This series covers male prisoners only and appears to have been created to provide easy access to the Male Prisoner Classification Files (VPRS 8818) and Individual Management of Prisoner File (VPRS 11760).
The series appears to have commenced in 1985. It is not known who created the record (whether it was the Classification Office or a division within Pentridge) or whether it contains a complete list of prisoners within the series date range.
Each entry contains the name of the prisoner, their relevant Corrections Record Number (CRN) and the date the prisoner was first received.
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.
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.
This page covers weekly estate summary data. View monthly prison breakdown.
In France, the prison population has steadily increased over the studied period, rising from 36,913 inmates in 1980 to 91,647 in 2023, an increase of more than double over 43 years.
https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/studies/9165/termshttps://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/studies/9165/terms
This data collection includes tabulations of annual adult admissions to federal and state correctional institutions by race. Data are provided for the years 1926 to 1986 and include tabulations for prisons in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as federal prison totals and United States totals. The figures were derived from a voluntary reporting program in which each state, the District of Columbia, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons reported summary and detailed statistics as a part of the National Prisoner Statistics series. Individual state and United States population figures according to racial categories also are provided.
Collection of statistics on prisons and crime. The data are on an annual basis and relate to the period from 2007 onwards. The following tables are included in the compilation: A. TIME SERIES A1. PRISON POPULATION BY OCCUPATION, NATIONALITY, AGE AND GENDER A2. ADMISSION OF SENTENCED PERSONS BY AGE AND SEX A3. ADMISSION OF SENTENCED PERSONS FOR CRIMINAL OFFENCES AGAINST AGE AND SEX A4. ADMISSION OF SENTENCED PERSONS BY CRIMINAL GROUP A5. ADMISSION OF SENTENCED PERSONS BY PENALTIES IMPOSED A6. CONTRIBUTIONS BY SEX AND MOTHER OF SORTS, FROM 1980 A7. MONTHLY CONTRIBUTIONS AND EXEMPTIONS FROM 1980 A8. REMOVAL OF DETAINEES DURING THE ACTUAL PERIOD OF STAY IN THE BOOKLET A9. EXEMPTIONS FROM DETAINEES BY ABORTION A10. TEMPLATES A11. TIME SPAN BETWEEN ADMISSION AND PREVIOUS REMOVAL FROM THE BOOKLET, FROM 1980 B. ANNUAL DATA B1. ADMISSION OF SENTENCED PERSONS BY CRIMINAL GROUP AND NUMBER OF PREVIOUS PRISON SENTENCES B2. ADMISSION OF SENTENCED PERSONS BY MONTH, AGE AND SEX B3. ADMISSION OF SENTENCED PERSONS FOR CRIMINAL OFFENCES BY ONE MONTH, AGE AND SEX B4. SENTENCED PERSONS WHO HAVE PREVIOUSLY BEEN SENTENCED TO IMPRISONMENT, THIS AND PREVIOUS INDICTMENT B5. REMOVAL OF DETAINEES ON A MONTHLY BASIS AND ACTUAL DURATION OF STAY IN THE BOOKLET B6. REMOVAL OF MONTHLY DETAINEES AND MEANS OF REMOVAL B7. STANDARD-BY MONTH
The total number of inmates in prisons in Venezuela dropped significantly from 2017 to 2023. During that last year, the number of prisoners was 50.25 percent lower than in 2017, going from over 54,000 to 27,022 people.
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License information was derived automatically
This dataset shows the Number of Prisoners by State, Prison Centre and Gender, 2017-2021 Source: Royal Malaysia Police No. of Views : 329
Prisoner numbers and capacity by district in 2011.
In 2019, *** inmates in state prisons in the United States were aged 17 or younger. This is a decrease from the previous year, when there were *** inmates aged 17 or younger in state prisons. The number of minors in state prisons has been decreasing since 2000.
Prison Education and Accredited Programme in Custody Statistics 2021 - 2022 is based on data collected through the new Curious database which covers prisoner initial assessments, participation and achievement in courses. These are analysed by course level and prisoner characteristics, including learning difficulty / disability. It also covers Accredited Programmes for prisoners in custody.
The Prison Education Statistics report is produced and handled by the Ministry of Justice’s (MOJ) analytical professionals and production staff.
Pre-release access of up to 24 hours is granted to the following persons at Ministry of Justice and Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS):
Private Secretary x 4, Press Officer x 1, Head of Prisoner Outcomes x 1, Head of Prison Education Policy x 1, Reduce Re-offending Lead x 1, Directorate Lead Psychologist
Prison Education Statistics 2019 - 20 is based on data collected through the new Curious database which covers prisoner initial assessments, participation and achievement in courses. These are analysed by course level and prisoner characteristics, including learning difficulty / disability.
Prisoner Education statistical tables for 2018 - 19 contain data based on the old Offender Learning Skills Service (OLASS) system. This is the final year data were collected through OLASS before switching to Curious.
The Prison Education Statistics report is produced and handled by the Ministry of Justice’s (MOJ) analytical professionals and production staff.
Pre-release access of up to 24 hours is granted to the following persons at Ministry of Justice and Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS):
Assistant Private Secretary x 2; Chief Press Officer; Deputy Director and Chief Statistician; Deputy Director, Reducing Reoffending - HMPPS; Deputy Private Secretary; Digital learning and data officer; Head of Custodial Contracts; Head of Digital Learning; Head of Education; Head of Education contracts; Head of Future Prison Policy; Head of People Performance; HMPPS Reducing Reoffending Strategic and Delivery Programme Lead; Operational Researcher x 2; Policy Advisor; Policy Lead; Press officer x 2; Prison Education Senior Contract Manager; Prison Performance analyst; Private Secretary; Senior Policy Advisor; Senior Press Officer x 2; Senior statisticial officer x 2; Service Users Equalities Performance Lead;
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.