In Spring 2024,
1.8 million
people were incarcerated in the United States.
People are sent to jails and prisons more than 8 million times each year.
Updated: August 5, 2026 7:01 PM UTC
After decades of growth in incarceration across the United States, the number of people in jail and prison decreased in recent years. However, these national declines mask significant differences in jail and prison trends across counties, states, and regions. Use the map below to explore how your county compares to others along five key incarceration metrics.
Jail Incarceration by Geography
Although jail populations in the nation’s biggest cities began to decline in the early 2000s, jail incarceration has risen dramatically in smaller cities and rural areas. Today, roughly half of all people incarcerated in local jails are in smaller cities and rural communities. The smaller city and rural jail boom has been fueled, in part, by federal- and state-level policies. But mass incarceration is also a local problem, driven by the policies and operations of over 3,000 local jails and justice systems.
Jail population per 100,000 residents ages 15 to 64
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Rural countiesSmall/midsize metro areasSuburban countiesUrban countiesU.S. total
Note: Vera's analysis of the urban-rural continuum collapses the six categories defined by the National Center for Health Statistics' (NCHS) Urban-Rural Classification Scheme for Counties into four. A county is labeled “urban” if it is one of the core counties of a metropolitan area with a million or more people and “suburban” if it is within the surrounding metropolitan area. Vera collapses the remaining four categories into two. Vera combined medium and small metropolitan areas into one category—“small and mid-sized metros”—comprising counties in metropolitan areas with populations under a million people. Vera combined micropolitan (an urban area with a population of at least 10,000 but less than 50,000) with noncore areas (all other areas not considered metropolitan or micropolitan) into another category—“rural.” Rural areas are the most numerous, with more than 1,900 counties. For more information, see the methodology.