Incarceration Trends: What County Jail Data Reveals, 2000–2019
This report covers jail and prison populations for nearly 3,000 U.S. counties from 2000 through 2019, drawn from the Vera Institute of Justice's Incarceration Trends dataset. Over those two decades, local jails grew even as state prisons leveled off, a stark and only slowly narrowing racial gap persisted in who gets jailed, rural counties and the South jailed people at far higher rates than cities and the Northeast, and a growing majority of the people held in jail on any given day had not been convicted of a crime.
Local jails grew even as state prisons leveled off
Between 2000 and 2019, the average daily jail population nationwide rose 19.4%, from 613,162 to 732,033 people. Over the same period, the state and federal prison population grew far more slowly, 7.2%, from 981,582 to 1,052,607.
The story of incarceration growth in this century is increasingly a story about county jails, not state prisons.
A stark racial gap in who is jailed
In 2019, Black adults were jailed at a rate of 822 per 100,000, more than three times the White rate of 265 per 100,000. Native American adults were also jailed at an elevated rate of 575 per 100,000, while Latinx adults were jailed at about the same rate as White adults (262 per 100,000), and AAPI adults were jailed at a much lower rate of 41 per 100,000.
These rates are per 100,000 adults age 15–64 of each group, not raw counts, so they are directly comparable across groups of very different sizes.
The Black–white jail gap has narrowed, but slowly
The ratio between Black and White jail incarceration rates fell from 5.56× in 2000 to 3.11× in 2019. The gap has closed steadily over two decades, but Black adults were still jailed at more than three times the White rate as of the most recent complete year.
Rural counties jail people at more than double the urban rate
In 2019, rural counties jailed people at a rate of 581 per 100,000 adults, more than double the urban rate of 271 per 100,000. Small and mid-sized counties sat in between at 415 per 100,000, while suburban counties had the lowest rate of the four, 267 per 100,000.
This pattern is well documented in criminal justice research: rural areas tend to have fewer pretrial services and diversion alternatives, so jail is used more often as a default.
Geography matters: the South jails at twice the Northeast's rate
In 2019, the South had a jail incarceration rate of 476 per 100,000 adults, roughly double the Northeast's rate of 232 per 100,000. The West (295) and Midwest (285) fell in between.
Nearly a quarter of counties are jailing more people than their jails are built for
Comparing 2019 jail populations to each jail's rated capacity, 23.0% of the 2,796 counties reporting a rated capacity exceeded it, and the national average utilization was 88.4% of rated capacity.
Each icon is 1 out of every 100 counties reporting a rated capacity in 2019.
A handful of counties post incarceration rates far above the national average
The national incarceration rate (jail plus prison) was about 797 per 100,000 adults in 2019. Among counties with at least 50,000 working-age adults, the highest rate was in Bowie County, TX at 3,787 per 100,000 — nearly 5 times the national rate.
About this data
The data comes from the Vera Institute of Justice's Incarceration Trends dataset, compiled from the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics along with state and local agencies. One row is one U.S. county in one year, holding that county's jail population, prison population, and demographic breakdowns of each.
The published file spans 1970–2026 across 3,075 counties (128,507 rows), but reporting is inconsistent outside a reliable core window. This report uses only 2000–2019: 67,576 rows fell outside that window and were dropped, and a further 3,150 rows inside the window were dropped because the county did not report a jail population figure that year. That leaves 57,781 county-year rows across 2,986 counties and 20 years.
How every rate, ratio, and share in this report is computed:
- Rate per 100,000
- (sum of a group's jail or incarcerated population ÷ sum of that group's population age 15–64) × 100,000, summed across whatever counties/years are in view — not an average of each county's individual rate.
- Ratio (e.g. Black:White)
- one group's rate per 100,000 ÷ another group's rate per 100,000.
- Share / percentage
- (sum of the subgroup, e.g. pretrial or female, ÷ sum of the total jail population) × 100.
- Capacity utilization
- total jail population ÷ jail rated capacity, for counties reporting a rated capacity greater than zero.