Incarceration rates in the United States have grown drastically in the last 40 years.
In that amount of time, the U.S. prison population has increased in size by 500%. Mouse over the chart to see the size of the prison population over time.
But what does the prison population itself look like? In the following visual, we hope to help answer that question, providing some insight into which forces influence who ends up in prison, and why they end up there.
In 2016, the Bureau of Justice Statistics conducted a lengthy survey of nearly 25,000 inmates kept in various federal and state prisons throughout the United States.
The panel will update over time, reflecting various demographics.
Each icon represents approximately 157,763 U.S. citizens.
The United States has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world.
Nearly 1 in 147 adults are imprisoned in the U.S.
Some states, such as Louisiana, have an even higher percent of their population imprisoned.
In Louisiana, around 1 in 85 adults are in prison.
Explore the incarceration rates for other U.S. states.
Over 21% of prisoners in the U.S. are imprisoned for drug crimes.
That's over 40,000 people in prison for drug crimes in 2016.
There were 3,928 people sentenced to life in prison for non-violent drug crimes from 1988-2018.The Buried Alive Project is working to free people incarerated for outdated drug laws.
People are in prisons for a wide variety of other crimes as well.
There are many organizations working to reform the criminal justice system, and the Center for Prison Reform has a compiled list of organizations who are working on the cause here. You can also keep scrolling to explore the data.
Keep scrolling, and you can click buttons to color the icons by various filters, and clicking the move button will make the icons line by category.