Preliminary Data Release - Jails | Bureau of Justice Statistics

Zhen Zeng, PhD,
BJS Statistician

September 2023, NCJ 307412

The Bureau of Justice Statistics provides key jail statistics prior to release of the annual jail report. The statistics below include the number of inmates held in local jails, by inmate demographics and conviction status; the number of admissions to jail; and jail incarceration rates, between 2012 and 2022.

Statistics from 2022, the latest data year, are preliminary and may be updated once BJS publishes the final data in Jail Inmates in 2022 - Statistical Tables, which is scheduled for release in November 2023.

Key findings

At midyear 2022, local jails held 663,100 persons in custody, 4% more than the year before.
Jails reported 7.3 million admissions from July 2021 to June 2022. While this represents a 6.6% increase over the 6.9 million admissions the year before, annual admissions were 37% lower than 10 years ago (11.6 million).
Local jails held 92,900 females at midyear 2022, accounting for 14% of the inmate population. From 2021 to 2022, the number of females in jail increased 9%, while the number of males increased 3%.
At midyear 2022, 30% of the jail population (197,000) were convicted, either serving a sentence or awaiting sentencing on a conviction, while 70% of the population (466,100) were unconvicted, awaiting court action on a current charge or held in jail for other reasons.