In 2023, 5.6 million individuals were booked into U.S. jails. Because approximately 1.2 million of those people — more than one in five — were jailed at least twice, there were a total of 7.6 million bookings across the nation.
These numbers, which come from an analysis by the Prison Policy Initiative in collaboration with the Jail Data Initiative, offer new insight into repeat jail bookings, a statistic the U.S. Bureau of Justice does not track or report.
The Jail Data Initiative automatically collects publicly available daily booking data from more than 1,000 of the nation’s 2,850 jails.
From JDI’s database, Prison Policy Initiative researchers examined data from a nationally representative group of 648 jails over two years, between July 1, 2021, and June 30, 2023.
Like most other reports exploring incarceration in the United States, this data revealed that people of color are jailed more frequently than white people.
Black people made up 32% of all people jailed, and 29% of people incarcerated more than once. These rates are more than double the percentage of Black people in the total U.S. population.
Indigenous people are also severely overrepresented in jails, making up 1% of people in the U.S., but 3% of people in jails. Indigenous people are also the most likely of all racial and ethnic groups to be booked into jail multiple times.
Meanwhile, a much smaller percentage of white people are in jails than in the general U.S. population.
While PPI has conducted more in-depth examinations of the incarceration of women over the years, this latest report shows that women made up approximately one-quarter of jail bookings. Report authors Emily Widra and Wendy Sawyer point out that while women are less likely than men to be incarcerated, at least 80% of incarcerated women are mothers. Locking women up has “serious and long lasting consequences for women, their families, and their communities,” Widra and Sawyer write. Incarcerated women often suffer severely negative mental health outcomes, and are more likely to commit suicide, suffer from food insecurity, or become homeless after incarceration than men.
PPI was also able to analyze data regarding the incarceration of unhoused people from 140 jails that collected housing status information.
The data showed that 4% of people in jails were listed as unhoused, a number that PPI says is “almost certainly a significant undercount.” Additionally, more than 40% of incarcerated people listed as unhoused were jailed at least twice in 12 months. “While this is a relatively small portion of all bookings, unhoused people were the most likely to be jailed multiple times across all the demographic categories we looked at,” Widra and Sawyer wrote. The researchers attributed the disparity to “law enforcement’s ineffective but disproportionate and deliberate targeting of people experiencing homelessness.”
Most people, the data shows, are booked into jail for non-violent charges. For the vast majority of jailed individuals, their most serious charges were for public order, drug, or property offenses.
Between July 2021 and June 2023, 14% of people booked into jail were held for drug charges, 19% of people were held for property charges, and 31% of people were incarcerated on public order charges, like loitering, public intoxication, and disorderly conduct.
While jail bookings for drug and property crimes decreased over the last 20 years, public order charges increased, according to the report.
Violent charge rates have remained relatively the same, accounting for 25% of jail bookings according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics survey from 2002, and 26% of jail bookings based on the 2021-2023 data collected by the Jail Data Initiative.
The report authors point out that one-third of people sent to jail multiple times were charged with violent crimes. The rest were jailed for non-violent charges.
This data, the researchers wrote, “fills a serious gap in our knowledge about the demographics and charges of people booked into jails, given that comparable data has not been collected or published from the Bureau of Justice Statistics in over twenty years.”