Loaded on
July 15, 2025
published in Prison Legal News
July, 2025, page 12
The U. S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has long collected and published statistics on local jails nationwide, including the number of such facilities and how many people are booked into them each year. Who are these people and why are they jailed? On November 17, 2024, the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), a data-driven criminal justice reform organization, released a report that addressed those questions.
To delve beyond the raw numbers of jail admissions, PPI collaborated with the Jail Data Initiative (JDI) for more detailed demographic information. They found that an estimated 7.6 million people were booked into jails in 2023; however, only around 5.6 million were unique admissions. The rest were people jailed multiple times that year, which puts the total number of bookings into better perspective.
In regard to racial data, PPI reported that “Black people are overrepresented in every part of the criminal legal system, including jails, and this new data reveals that not only are Black people jailed at alarmingly high rates, but they are jailed again and again.” According to data compiled by JDI directly from online jail records, 32% of unique admissions and 29% of repeat admissions were of Black people—far above their 14% share …
