How many people are locked up in the United States?

pie chart

Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie
A Prison Policy Initiative Briefing By Peter Wagner and Leah Sakala March 12, 2014
This briefing presents the first graphic we’re aware of that aggregates the disparate systems of confinement in this country, which hold more than 2.4 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 2,259 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails, and 79 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories.
While the numbers in each slice of this pie chart represent a snapshot cross section of our correctional system, the enormous churn in and out of our confinement facilities underscores how naive it is to conceive of prisons as separate from the rest of our society. In addition to the 688,000 people released from prisons each year, almost 12 million people cycle through local jails each year. Jail churn is particularly high because at any given moment most of the 722,000 people in local jails have not been convicted and are in jail because they are either too poor to make bail and are being held before trial, or because they’ve just been arrested and will make bail in the next few hours or days. The remainder of the people in jail — almost 300,000 — are serving time for minor offenses, generally misdemeanors with sentences under a year.
Offense figures for categories such as “drugs” carry an important caveat here, however: all cases are reported only under the most serious offense. For example, a person who is serving prison time for both murder and a drug offense would be reported only in the murder portion of the chart. This methodology exposes some disturbing facts, particularly about our juvenile justice system. For example, there are almost 15,000 children behind bars whose “most serious offense” wasn’t anything that most people would consider a crime: almost 12,000 children are behind bars for “technical violations” of the requirements of their probation or parole, rather than for a new specific offense. More than 3,000 children are behind bars for “status” offenses, which are, as the U.S. Department of Justice explains: “behaviors that are not law violations for adults, such as running away, truancy, and incorrigibility.”
Turning finally to the people who are locked up because of immigration-related issues, more than 22,000 are in federal prison for criminal convictions of violating federal immigration laws. A separate 34,000 are technically not in the criminal justice system but rather are detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), undergoing the process of deportation, and are physically confined in special immigration detention facilities or in one of hundreds of individual jails that contract with ICE .
Now that we can, for the first time, see the big picture of how many people are locked up in the United States in the various types of facilities, we can see that something needs to change. Looking at the big picture requires us to ask if it really makes sense to lock up 2.4 million people on any given day, giving us the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in the world.

 

Celebrating 25 Years at Mary House!

Celebrating 25 years of work days
Friends form the Madison Mennonite Church have been coming to help out at Mary House for nearly all of our 25 years, and this summer was no exception.  Faith Bauman, inspecting the foundation above, has spent much of her life working in India and now lives in Madison Wisconsin.  She  has been part of the group on many of their summertime monthly visits wrote the following reflection on their last visit.

“Sometimes there is a certain amount of fun, even while working, with others in a group, even while we scrape and bruise our hands and end up with aching arms and shoulders!
That was our experience at Mary House as all seven of us along with Cassandra did volunteer jobs around the house on July 5th.  We volunteers are from the Madison Mennonite Church, which has sponsored monthly work days during the summer at Mary House for over 20 years!
Two of our volunteers were young women from Taiwan, who are boarding with Mark and Janice Bauman for a few months while taking studies in language.  Some of the volunteers lined up in a straight line digging a very deep trench next to the outside wall so they could place concrete there to prevent animals from making a home under the porch.  One volunteer cleared out numerous fern leaves and weeds that were leaning over the sidewalk to the front door.  After a good hearty lunch we all returned to Madison, happy to have met a need, and thanking God for this opportunity to serve.”  –Faith Bauman

Holiday Greetings from Mary House

We at Mary House wish all of you a peaceful and wonder-filled holiday season.  We’re looking forward to welcoming the families who will stay with us on the coming weekends — we’ll meet some new children and welcome a few familiar faces.

Thanks to the generous help of our small family of supporters, we made it through the installation of a new well this summer!  It left us with a small loan from a supporter to pay off, but we are immeasurably relieved and grateful to have wonderful, clear, good-tasting water and lots of it for our guests to use! Thank you to all of our friends who made donations to help us through this challenge.  The new well is 180 feet deep, and cost more than we had hoped, and the project so consumed the summer that other fundraising fell behind, so we are EXTREMELY grateful to all of you who helped us, both to start the project and to finish it!!  THANK You!