About 650,000 inmates sit in local jails around the U.S. each day. A new publication of the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), collaborating with the Jail Data Initiative, gives a demographic profile of jail populations and highlights incarceration's burden on vulnerable groups. The analysis build's on PPI's 2019 report Arrest, Release, Repeat. It uses 2021-2023 data from more than 600 jails. Among the findings:
Of the 5.6 million people jailed every year, 1.2 million go to jail multiple times, showing how jails play an outsized role in mass incarceration. Bookings for "nonviolent" charges were far more common than bookings for "violent" charges. The most common charges were "public order" offenses, such as disorderly conduct and trespassing. At least 4% of people in the sample were unhoused and they reported higher rates of jail re-bookings within a single year. This number is likely a significant undercount, as people's housing information is self-reported and many jails do not collect this information. Black and Indigenous people are overrepresented in jails, and Indigenous people are more likely than people of any other racial group to end up in jail multiple times in a year.
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