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No. 5 – “Loans” search interest index rank

No. 6 – Change in bankruptcy filings from March 2024 to March 2025 rank

No. 7 – Average number of accounts in distress rank

No. 8 – People with accounts in distress rank

No. 13 – Credit score rank and “debt” search interest index rank

While financial hardship affects many across the US, Texas ranks as the number one state struggling the most financially, according to a new WalletHub report.WalletHub conducted a comparison of all 50 US states to identify where residents are experiencing the most financial distress. The analysis considered nine metrics across six key categories, including average credit scores, the percentage of individuals with “accounts in distress” (such as those in forbearance or with deferred payments), the year-over-year change in bankruptcy filings from March 2024, and online search trends for terms like “debt” and “loans. ”Texas, being ranked the most financially distressed state in 2025, may come as a surprise, given that the state boasts a gross domestic product (GDP) larger than that of many countries and continues to have one of the top 10 strongest state economies in the US. Its rank, however, has declined compared to previous years.Despite the state’s strong economy, many Texans are facing serious financial strain in 2025. The study revealed that Texas had the ninth-lowest average credit score in the country in the first quarter of the year.Additionally, the state saw the sixth-largest rise in personal (non-business) bankruptcy filings over the past year, with a 22 percent increase.The report also highlighted that Texas ranked third in the number of accounts per person in forbearance or with deferred payments, and had the seventh-highest percentage of residents with distressed accounts overall, at 7.1 percent.This is the standing of Texas on key indicators of the study, where being first is equivalent to being most distressed.This also pointed to a trend that Texans were frequently searching for terms like “debt” and “loans,” which WalletHub says signals a strong urgency to borrow money, even though many residents are already in debt.Analysing financial stress at the state level is crucial for understanding how Americans are coping with broader economic challenges such as inflation, unemployment, and natural disasters, according to WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo.“When you look at delayed payments alongside factors like bankruptcy rates and shifts in credit scores, it gives a clear view of a state’s overall financial health,” Lupo said.The other end of the list includes states like Hawaii (No. 50), Vermont (No. 49), and Alaska (No.48), as the least financially distressed states in America.The top 10 states with the most people in financial distress in 2025 are:No. 1 – TexasNo. 2 – FloridaNo. 3 – LouisianaNo. 4 – NevadaNo. 5 – South CarolinaNo. 6 – OklahomaNo. 7 – North CarolinaNo. 8 – MississippiNo. 9 – KentuckyNo. 10 – Alabama

At a recent annual senior leadership conference, I led a type of “master class” focused on management lessons for 400 of our top executives. I held this session because we cannot afford to be complacent if we want to continue as one of the great companies in the world. Leadership should always be about learning and questioning. Our company needs to nurture innovation, ambition and discipline while discouraging complacency, arrogance and bureaucracy. Here is a slightly streamlined (I did speak for 90 minutes) and edited version (to protect clients, former colleagues … and myself!) of my actual remarks to our team:

Welcome, everybody. I have a lot to say, and I’ve tried to organize it thoughtfully and intelligently.

I just want to start with: What a great company! I don’t know about you, but when I see this company in action, it just blows me away. The quality of the people, the respect of our clients, and how much they want us in cities and countries around the world – it’s extraordinary. That’s based on the things that you do and how you do them.

Why complacency, arrogance, bureaucracy and BS kill companies.

Part of what I’m always asking is: How do we make sure we stay innovative, ambitious and disciplined while eliminating complacency, arrogance and bureaucracy?

So let’s look at a bunch of things. None of this is out of anger; it’s just thoughtful consideration about reinforcing some basic disciplines.

You know, if you already have 100 people on your team, can you live with 100 people – or fewer – and make that work? This is very important. Everyone in this room, I’m talking to you personally. When I give examples, don’t say that applies to someone else: “That’s not my unit. That doesn’t affect me.”

It does, and I’m going to tell you why. Because all of you are responsible for this company that’s worth around $700 billion, employs 320,000 people and serves so many, including all the clients you’ve seen who depend on you around the world. You, individually, are responsible. And you know more than you think. When you travel around, when you talk to people and when you manage what you do means that you know more than you think.

As you know, we’ve been asking people to achieve a 10% efficiency target. Again, it’s a discipline in business. Think about what you yourself can do to make things better. This is basic business: Can you do more with less? What are your units doing that can be streamlined? Or maybe you are doing things you don’t need to be doing at all.

I apologize, when I’m being specific, if it’s you I’m talking about. I’ve just got to get some things off my chest about what we need to do and some of the things I’ve seen recently or over my career.

I’m going to ask each and every one of you, personally – and I’m going to track it – to send me an email. We’re going to have a little team to take these issues you raise and follow up, and this will be permanent. I kind of like bureaucracy busting to get things done. It could be stupid things you’ve observed, any ideas, almost anything. We’re not trying to limit you to any specific category.

You’ve got something to say? You want to add something? You want to check out something? You think something doesn’t make sense? Please bring it up. Too many people stay in their lane. I’m going to follow up personally with each and every one of you in this room. I’m just asking you to sit down and have a little fun thinking about the stupid stuff we do, the bureaucratic stuff we do – about things you would change if you were able to change them – and you all can be very helpful. I think we should all be thinking about this.

I’ve said speed kills, but I mean slow speed. I didn’t mean fast speed. And I’ve written down some examples of winners and losers from just the last 20 or 30 years that didn’t adapt.

Sears and Kmart, they’re gone. Digital Equipment: Gone. A&P, the best supermarket in the world, disappeared – overtaken by Kroger. BlackBerry practically disappeared, too. Walmart’s done well. Dell did well, Apple obviously has done well, and Amazon has done well. Remember when everyone used to have Nokia phones?

It’s even worse in financial services, where companies can manipulate numbers and over-leverage and stuff like that. Travelers blew up, Citi blew up twice. Bear Stearns failed. Lehman failed. And Bank One – I’m here because, you know, Bank One screwed up a bunch of businesses. The S&L business – the whole business – got wiped out. The whole thing. Savings and loans do not exist anymore. WaMu’s mortgage losses. Whole parts of the mortgage business disappeared, and mortgage brokers disappeared. Kidder disappeared. Drexel disappeared. And then more recently, Silicon Valley Bank’s interest rate mismatch.

Of those that failed, many failed out of complacency, and complacency is a form of bureaucracy. It’s arrogance – it’s being slow to adjust. Complacency allows a lot of negative things to set in: dishonest numbers, failure to set standards, bad people, bad compensation schemes, disincentives, bad incentives, politics – and these things are all the cancers that kill companies. We all have to be very cautious when we see this happening.

And things are faster and more complex now. That means we’ve got to move quicker, coordinate better and do things at a faster speed.

You have to get the numbers right.

I’m a fanatic about proper accounting. Accounting can lead you to the wrong answer. Regulatory rules can lead you to the wrong answer. Regulatory capital can lead you to the wrong answer. Or your own echo chamber can steer you the wrong way. Still, you need to know your numbers: You need to get your numbers right, understand them, analyze them, work them, test them and don’t be rote about it.

McKinsey used strategic business units as a way of segmenting businesses. Always remember that when you have big companies, it’s important to break them down to look at the component parts because the game is fought in the specific units. It’s fought in commercial card. It’s fought in premier card. It’s fought in branch banking. It’s fought in small business. However, it’s not fought in the consumer franchise as a whole.

You must have an actual budget as your barometer. For example, you can’t always compare yourself with the forecast because then you’re always very close. You’ve got to show any deficits or progress against the budget.

Another thing I hate is comparing yourself with the peer average. I mean, really? You should always compare yourself with the best. Where are they, and where are we? Remember that the peer average includes some really crummy companies, too.

You have to – we have to – always understand that a rigorous review of allocated expenses is needed. They are real expenses, but you have the right to question them. You have to question them because seeing through the BS that gets involved in allocating expenses – and then causes misallocation of capital – is really critical.

Zero-based budgeting. I don’t like asking people to do it. It’s too hard. But you’ve got to think that way. For instance, if I start with 100 people doing the same thing, what do I do differently, better, more with the same number of people? Understand that a P&L is not an assessment of a business – you’ve got to do the full assessment with customer metrics, turnover, apps, technology … whatever matters. In fact, the P&L could be the most deceptive thing of all – telling you and giving the wrong answer.

Project reporting. Whenever you have a project, and this is on you, it’s important to do proper reporting. It could be technology cost, it could be anything. I remember coming to J.P. Morgan and, one after another, every project was on course – but from the last forecast. I said, “Show me where it is from the beginning,” and now every single project was a year or two late. It’s just an honest assessment – not to blame yourself or get mad about it. Also, the project often morphed without any discussion. And I think that’s just bad management.

External reporting. External reporting actually matters. So I’m always quite careful. Reporting externally is real, but for a lot of companies, it’s not – they sugarcoat, they make it obscure. And what happens inside those companies is people start running their businesses that way. You’ve never seen me spin analysts. That’s because if I spin analysts, you’re going to spin me. That’s it. You know, I want to honestly show how we compare with competitors.

Honest analysis. In your financial analysis, always evaluate the good, the bad, the ugly. That will make you better. Doing just the good makes you worse. Doing the good, the bad and the ugly makes you get better versus the competition.

Constant investment. You know, the practice of stop-starting investments is a bad idea. Constant transformation in technology and conversions means you can’t have stop-start strategies almost anywhere. Make proper assumptions: What do you do when your spread on deposits is zero, but you’re still opening branches? That’s why I always talk about “through-the-cycle” investments. Think very carefully about the assumptions that go into your budgets because, sometimes, they cause you to do stupid stuff, and sometimes they stop you from doing good stuff.

Watching competitors. This involves comparing yourself with what the competition is doing today. But you always need to show how you’re going to catch up to where things might go. You’ve got to say, “What are the competitors going to do next?” because that shows when you’re getting to the puck and where the puck is going to be – not where things currently stand.

Good expenses/bad revenue. Sometimes great expenses become great investments. The fact that it’s something called an expense means nothing to me. In fact, a lot of businesses capitalize these expenses. You build a plant, you capitalize it. You don’t start expensing it until it’s producing. But when we open a branch, many of the costs are not capitalized. We have a large cash outflow to build it, but after approximately four years when it breaks even, it generates profit for eternity. This is also true for private bankers, investment bankers, Chase wealth managers – our investment in them pays off over time.

In all that we do to grow and innovate, we must do the full analysis – as I’ve said, “the good, the bad, the ugly.” This makes us better. Looking at only the positives is dangerous. We all know there are good revenues and bad revenues, good expenses and bad expenses. We can make a big loan and book lots of revenue in the short term, but those will turn out to be bad revenues if we didn’t do the proper analysis at the beginning. The same reasoning applies to expenses. I hate the concept of cutting costs; instead, the concept should always be cutting waste. If costs are investments that drive healthy growth, then I want more of them.

Expense allocations. I’ve got a heritage JPMorganChase example. The company used to be dominated by the investment bank – because the people on the executive floor cared mostly about the investment bank. Everything was skewed toward the investment bank. They took HR costs, including pension, medical, executive comp, expats – all these costs lumped together – and they charged them out based on headcount across the company, which was not accurate. Expats were 100% in the investment bank. Executive comp was 100% in the investment bank, but their expenses were spread across the whole company. We subsidized capital for the trading floors. In all, subsidizing the investment bank cost $2 billion a year, which I immediately fixed. This was not to punish anyone, but it was a huge misallocation of capital. The big loser in all this was the consumer bank, and I’m still quite sensitive about that.

Here’s another example: Capacity in the computer center was charged out to everybody, whereas the extra capacity, which is quite expensive, was required for only certain businesses but not others. It is not a waste of time to get expense allocation right. You may spend no time on it, but you shouldn’t be paying for capacity. We need payment systems to be paid for by the payment businesses. It’s important to be vigilant when you analyze expenses because things always morph, always go bad. Don’t assume allocations are okay. Businesses sometimes get credit for things they shouldn’t get paid for, and they don’t mention it.

I’ll just give you another example. When I got to JPMorganChase, we paid the treasury salesforce based on estimated revenue going forward. That was it. And almost no adjustments later on. It was staggering.

Investing in branches. When I became CEO, Bank One hadn’t opened a branch in five years. Chase hadn’t opened a branch in five years. Chase had barely refurbished its branches, but at least Bank One did. By the time we did the merger, Bank One was making $1 million-plus profit on each branch every year: 2,300 branches. Chase was making zero, partially because of its allocation practices and partially because no one seemed to care about them.

But these branches should have been hugely profitable. We don’t give a branch credit for credit cards when they create a credit card account that’s worth $600, even though branches create 1.5 million credit card accounts a year. That’s $900 million of value.

We do this NPV (net present value) analysis about why we should close a branch, and we should do this. We should be disciplined. I think, for the most part, NPVs might work, but they don’t always work. You need to use your common sense.

Sometimes banks will say they’re going to close a branch because it’s kind of small. This happened to me recently with our Old Greenwich branch. They were going to close it, and I just looked at some of the numbers … and I went numb. It was making approximately $500,000, all profit, the NPV. And it’s six miles to the next closest branch. I said, if you close that branch, you know what’s going to happen? Eighty percent of the revenues will move elsewhere – to the Wells Fargo down the street, along with most of the local small businesses. Now would you rather have $500,000 a year profit or $1 million in cash in your pocket? I’d rather keep the $500,000 annually. Who’s going to open in the same spot? One of our competitors: Wells Fargo, Bank of America or Citizens. And why does someone want to drive six miles in the winter on those icy roads? And is the branch more profitable than it looks? And to me, this wasn’t thinking about the NPV; it was the pawn blocking the queen.

Judgment calls. Well, while we’re talking about cutting costs, I also did something unusual in 2008: I opened the partners’ dining room. This is just how I think about what you should do, and what you shouldn’t do. You do the right thing anyway, whether it looks good or bad. The whole Operating Committee said, “Don’t do it. The partners’ dining room is going to cost a lot, and it will look like we are spoiling ourselves with good food.” And I was like, “Yeah, but we don’t actually know each other after the merger – and if we don’t do it now, it’ll be years before we get to know each other.” I call it a good expense. It’s a judgment call. You do the right thing and then explain it. Sometimes people don’t do things because they think it’ll look bad for them or hurt morale a little bit. When I got to Bank One, I authorized a partners’ dining room, and I did this at J.P. Morgan, too.

You need a full and constant assessment.

We can learn so much from our competitors, customers and employees if we only open our eyes and ears. I want a full and constant assessment of our competition, including many organizations outside of financial services. We always need to look and learn, assess and evaluate – stringently monitoring market trends and engaging with whoever does something better than us. Visit other companies, see their branches. Go on road trips with your people. Take your management teams to dinner. When you talk with clients and they tell you that you’re making a mistake, thank them. It’s a gift. And if the issue is not in your area, write it down and send it to the person who’s responsible. Get out of your own echo chamber. Hit the road, leave your office and talk with everyone you can – be constantly learning and assessing. Don’t be afraid to admit if you’ve made a mistake or were late to the game on something. It’s okay to be a fast follower. Just do a postmortem and identify what you’d do differently next time.

I mentioned learning from those outside our industry. Take Chick-fil-A as an example. I read they’re using drones to figure out how to move people through the drive-thru line faster. We should always have that mindset of making something easier for our customers.

Ten years ago I said, “I’d like our senior team from the consumer bank to go to China.” I wish I had done more things like that sooner. This goes back to why it’s important to get on the road – to really understand your business and the competition. The team didn’t really want to go, but they did go, and they got to see Alibaba, Ping An and Tencent in action. And it changed the way they thought about digital banking, biometrics, super apps and other technology advancements. It’s amazing what you learn on the road.

You better have great controls.

Honest numbers are critical to having great controls. Make a practice of continually reviewing financial operational detail, project reporting and audit reports. It’s a discipline like exercising – it should be frequent and rigorous. And little things can add up to big things.

Back in the Primerica days, I bought one of those big Xerox copy machines for 2 million bucks. I’m down in Primerica’s printing plant, and the guy there showed me his Xerox copy machine, and I said, “Great, I just bought one of these.” He asked, “How much did you pay for it?” I said, “Two million dollars. How much did you pay?” He said, “Fifty thousand dollars.” You know why? He bought it from a bankrupt company. It was still in the box. That’s all. Let’s do that a little bit every now and then.

Additionally, in terms of risk management, always examine new products and new credit underwriting standards. New products often tend to blow up. That happened with foreign exchange, with mortgage-backed securities, with swaps, derivatives, credit default swaps and others. Often, these new products have not been fully tested and haven’t been used over a long enough period of time. I’m also a fanatic about stress testing, which they quickly learned at J.P. Morgan when I first got there. In their scenarios, they were looking at equity markets down 10% and credit spreads gapping out 40%. Was that sufficient? No! I said let’s look at what would happen if equity markets were down 50%, high yield went to 20% and credit spreads gapped out to the worst ever. That is real stress testing and risk management.

You must kill bureaucracy all the time and relentlessly.

One of the biggest things that can kill a company – or make it slow to adjust or admit problems – is bureaucracy. It comes in a lot of forms, and you have to continuously weed that garden. It’s a mindset.

Take Home Depot: When you walk into the Home Depot global galactic headquarters, the sign above the main entrance says “Store Support Center.” It reminds corporate employees every day that they are there because they support the workers in stores around the country. And we have to remember – all of us, particularly corporate staff – that we are here because we have a customer, a branch or an investment banker in front of a client. That is an important mindset. Then you can use things like war rooms and review customer complaints to hone this thinking.

I always like to read customer complaints. I read them, and when I know the policy behind the complaint, I call up the people in charge and say, “I agree with the customer.” Sure, we “shoulda, coulda, woulda.” But I don’t give a damn whether we’re technically responsible or not. You’ve got to do the right thing; you’ve got to change your mindset.

Let’s take ATMs. When I got to Bank One, this situation happened. My wife called me from Walgreens. The Bank One ATM didn’t work. I tell the people on the ATM side of the bank, and a guy calls me back and says, “No, it’s working.” I say, “My wife called me and says it’s not working.” He replies, “No, it’s working.” So I say, “Do me a favor – get in your car and drive out there.” Then he drives out there – and it’s not working. As it turned out, we had an outside vendor tracking this stuff. So I told the guy that we were firing the vendor and wouldn’t pay him for the last six months. Now we track it ourselves. This stuff can happen all the time.

Then there’s the black car story. You all know the black car story never happened at J.P. Morgan. It did happen when we took over Shearson though. I was going outside one day, and there were, literally, 50 black cars. People were waiting to go home until 7 o’clock so they could take a black car home. They were supposed to take them to the closest train station. And they would pick up their dinner – no one paid attention to it. There was one woman who took a car to Glen Cove or somewhere and back every day. She came in early in the morning. I went back to her boss, who knew about it. And I said to the boss, “You know, I can get her a full-time car and driver for one-third the cost.” And I changed a bunch of rules and stuff like that.

Some years ago, all our branches were receiving tons of stuff, daily and weekly, from Corporate – from HR, Risk, Legal, Compliance, Trading, Audit, Finance – they were overwhelmed. I used to go to branches, and they’d complain about things they didn’t know about. I said, “We sent you a memo that was full of information.” And one of the men in the branch showed me a FedEx box, the really big one, and dropped it in front of me. He said, “This box is what we get every week from you guys.” He had no idea about all the stuff that was in it. So we just changed things up a bit, using common sense, and created a little booklet called, I think, “Since We Last Met” or “You Must Read This.” It had a summary page and listed the important stuff people needed to know. Little things like this are important to get right.

It’s important for leadership to always question what their company does and why. And the answer cannot be, “That’s the way we’ve always done it.” Lots of times bad habits form and people get lazy, take shortcuts or don’t care enough. A good example is from when I came to JPMorganChase more than 20 years ago. I was told we had 500 management coaches. I said, “Five hundred coaches? Really?” Our Operating Committee was slightly annoyed by my question and wondered whether I was going to micromanage every single decision. Of course I said that I wasn’t – and that it was their decision – but the issue really bothered me. I thought about it over the weekend, and on Monday I told the Operating Committee, “You know what? I changed my mind. I’m going to micromanage this one. I want all coaches out by the end of the week.” I didn’t take that step to save money. I did it because it’s a leader’s job to coach, and we basically had outsourced management! I told the committee they could bring back a coach at the end of one year if they truly thought it was necessary and if they personally vouched for the coach’s capabilities. But in my entire career, I’ve rarely seen this kind of outsourcing of responsibility succeed.

Here’s another example of what slows us down: meetings. Kill meetings. But when they do happen, they have to start on time and end on time – and someone’s got to lead them. There should also be a purpose to every meeting and always a follow-up list. Sometimes we think we’re just being nice by inviting people to a meeting who don’t have to be there. Sometimes we overcollaborate. One annoying example of bureaucracy is the meeting after the meeting, where an executive tells me what they didn’t want to say in front of their partners. That’s not acceptable. Don’t bother. I’m not their messenger. Lay it on the table in real time. Shine light on a problem or disagreement. Be transparent with your colleagues. Obviously, it’s different if it involves a private matter, but, usually, this strategy is just a go-around, an end run. We cannot allow these kinds of behaviors.

Mistakes I made.

I also recognize that I don’t always get everything right and that I have made plenty of mistakes myself, and that’s why I want to candidly share some of them – as lessons. It’s important that we all do that. For example, I underestimated the importance of cloud technology, I’ve sometimes left the wrong person in a job for too long and I failed to recognize some early signs of risk.

In sharing these experiences, I always reflect on the anatomy of mistakes and emphasize the need to acknowledge and learn from them. Mistakes happened for a variety of reasons – we didn’t have the right people in the room, we didn’t work hard enough, we didn’t have a thoughtful decision-making process, we didn’t get the right inputs, we made bad assumptions.

The London Whale, where we lost billions of dollars in 2012, is another mistake that’s good to reflect upon. The mistake there wasn’t the complexity of the portfolio; it was that it didn’t get the proper oversight, including from the firm’s risk committees. The idea emerged in a supposedly non-risky part of the bank, and the team overseeing the trades played it close to the vest and didn’t go through our normal risk controls. We didn’t realize that at the time, but we should have, and I had some signs looking back. Frustratingly, the traders wanted to avoid oversight because it was risky. This reminds me of another sin that promotes mistakes in companies – hoarding information, which is a disease.

And here is one of my big mistakes when I got to Bank One. I’d been there for not quite a year, and I was in Louisville, where our business had been shrinking. I was trying to fix all that. I was in a local branch, and I realized that the branch across the street’s hours were 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and our hours were 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. I thought, whoa, that’s not so good. I called up our branch management, and they said, “Well, we’re different – we’re not that kind of bank.” I asked them to do me a favor: Let’s find out for all of our branches – we had about 1,800 at the time – what are our hours compared with the average competitor. And they said, “Well, how are we going to do that?” I said, “Well, email the other branch managers, and ask them for their hours of operation.” And, it turns out, we were open two hours fewer a day.

It was a Friday, and I went home a bit embarrassed. I came in on Monday, and it just so happened that the whole branch management team was there. And here’s what I said to them: “I apologize. I thought I was a pretty good CEO, but I messed up, I made a mistake. I should have recognized this much sooner.” However, not one salesperson, not one branch manager, not one regional manager, not one district manager noticed this or mentioned it. Now that I was aware of the issue, I told them all that we must change our hours. Morale was already bad, and everyone went on and on about morale because we had to change our work hours – and it was difficult and complicated. But I said, “We’ve got to change it. We’re here for customers. Obviously, I care about morale – but morale sucks because we suck. Morale will get better when we’re better as a company.”

What the heck is culture?

What is culture anyway? I struggle with this one a little bit because I think it’s a lot of the things I’m speaking about here. A great culture is created by what you do and not by what you say.

When we talk about the culture of our company, we include the hundreds of thousands of people who work for our company and what they believe in, as well as the role of our company in society. For those people, our employees, we work hard to foster an environment that enables them to thrive as curious, honest, hard-working and empathetic individuals who care not only about each other but about our customers as well – to be people who want to do the right thing – and it’s very important we get this right. Of course, there are good people and bad people, but I like to think we’re almost all good people. Similarly, there can be people you don’t trust: Sometimes you don’t trust them because they lie – or they shape the truth. Or you can’t trust them because you don’t trust their judgment. Watch out for them and don’t follow them.

Unfortunately, sometimes the bad people are our customers. I fire bad clients: corporate clients, individuals. There used to be a wealthy guy who would come into a branch yelling and screaming. He was verbally abusive to our staff multiple times. I finally heard about it and called him and said, “I want you to take all your business out of the bank. And by the way, you’re not going to treat our people that way.” If we have a client who is disrespectful to our people and the way we operate, we will fire them. And life will go on.

And recognition is important. Recognition says someone did something that you didn’t, that they taught you something. I was never particularly good at recognition. But I’ve learned lessons about recognition by watching “Ted Lasso” and observing David Novak, former CEO of Yum! Brands. They taught me that recognition is a form of humility and acknowledgment. And this directly aligns with our company’s values and, importantly, our actions. Organizations build a great culture by recognizing people’s actions day in and day out – not by serving up platitudes.

Creating a good culture is possible only if everyone understands a company’s purpose – in our case, the role of our bank. I think our purpose is to lift up society, to help people, which is an enormous responsibility. We have millions of customers, employees and shareholders who count on us. I think if you don’t share this vision, you don’t belong at our company.

And have a little heart. One example: Many years ago, when I was new to JPMorganChase, I learned that the company’s security guards had been outsourced – to save money. But after outsourcing, the same guards continued coming to work every day at the same salary, and I wondered, “How could this be?” (FYI, this was brought to my attention by the head of a large union, who came to see me personally over the objection of my management team.) The reason we were saving money was because the benefits were cut in half for the guards and their family members (currently worth more than $19,000 a year), and the savings were split with us. This was a heartless thing to do – and the second I found out, I reversed the decision. JPMorganChase’s success will not be built off the backs of our guards – it will be the result of fair treatment of all of our employees – and we’re thankful that many of those guards are still with our company today.

Leading the team.

It’s very important to have regular business reviews and to attack problems by putting all the dead cats, the hard issues, on the table. Emphasize the negatives. Make it fun and foster a collaborative environment when you’re facing tough subjects. Share all the facts and recognize that disagreement is a good thing.

Loyalty is earned when people receive full input and know that they’ve had a chance to offer theirs. Everyone should provide their input, review the facts and then make decisions – but not before that. Sometimes in meetings, colleagues urge others to “stay in your lane.” Absolutely do not stay in your lane! That is a bureaucratic, stupid direction. Our biggest mistakes happen when people think something is kind of a problem, but they are afraid to raise it in the right room where it might be provocative. There’s nothing wrong with disagreement. Ever.

And make it fun. You know, it’s our job to have fun in life and make everything we do fun. Just do it all the time in your unit and ask others to do the same.

For example, see mom and dad when you go on the road. When I went to Kenya this year, I invited two of our senior executives from Kenya who now work for our company in the United States to join me – and we invited their mothers to attend the client reception in Nairobi. It was quite moving to meet their families – what a gift to see what those women had accomplished with those wonderful kids. And moms and dads love to see us. Also, when you take the management teams to dinner, try to include their spouses. It’s a lot of fun, and you learn a lot about each other on the team.

Why it’s hard to achieve good growth and innovate.

Testing and learning are important – there’s nothing that can’t be improved by testing and learning. You can kill innovation with too many resources, too few resources or bureaucracy, and you’ve got to really think through what you are trying to accomplish. Similarly, it’s important to evaluate innovative ideas through testing and learning rather than rote analysis, which can stifle creativity. Companies that want to foster growth through forward thinking need to nurture that effort and support innovation.

The conversions at both J.P. Morgan/Chase and Bank One are good examples. There was resistance to the integration, and the conversions were costly. They took time and different resources. But there were approximately seven loan systems, five deposit systems and 25 general ledgers that all needed to be consolidated to develop the best systems. You just do the tough stuff like this. And then what happens when you get these consolidations done is you make the company better at it over time. Transformation is a constant effort to improve.

In many cases, expansion is fought – and it’s most often fought from within the existing ranks. The current workforce is often resistant to grow the team because they think it’s going to come out of their compensation. That’s not right – the company pays for the additional bankers. I confronted this resistance years ago when we wanted to grow the Global Corporate Bank – again, there was pushback from our current bankers. I saw the same resistance from within when we were growing Chase Wealth Management. But we looked at how big the opportunity was in each of these cases to grow, expand and be able to compete more effectively. And each of these efforts has been a home run for us.

Management tricks and tools

Now I want to talk about some management tricks and tools.

Effective leaders are responsive and treat everyone fairly and with respect. You have to be direct and honest, which is all about respect (though I recognize I get too worked up sometimes!). But I’m not only talking about bosses – I’m talking about people at every level. Treat everyone well, from clerks to CEOs, no matter who they are.

While leaders should celebrate successes, it’s still important to emphasize the negatives and focus on continuous improvement. Be a skeptic but not a cynic. Utilize management techniques that work.

I’m a big fan of this one: Write memos yourself. Don’t always let others write them for you. Similarly, when I ask someone a question, I want to hear directly back from that person, not their boss’s boss up the chain. And if I call that person directly, I want to talk to them. And share all the facts. Don’t hoard facts. The facts don’t lie.

Another tip: Always make follow-up lists. I keep my own follow-up lists with me almost all the time. Regarding communications, avoid management pablum. It’s a pet peeve of mine. Talk like you speak – get rid of the jargon.

And turning to meetings, if one is required, make it count. I ALWAYS do the pre-read. I give it 100% of my attention. I see people in meetings all the time who are getting notifications and personal texts or who are reading emails. This has to stop. It’s disrespectful. It wastes time. Finally, if you’re going to a meeting to present a new product or service, write a press release about it. This exercise forces you to answer lots of questions people are likely to ask. When you write down what you’re going to say, it focuses the mind and helps you explain things better.

Work smarter, not longer. Don’t read the same email two or three times. Most can be addressed immediately. And while this all sounds serious, make work fun. We spend the vast majority of our waking hours at work – it’s our job to try to make it fun and fulfilling.

And another important one: Take care of yourself. If you don’t take care of yourself, it doesn’t work.

Last, always answer this question: “What would you do if you were queen or king for a day?” That’s the big one – what would you do?

I’m going to stop here. Thank you for all the great things you said, for the great things you’ve done. And just so you know, while I may be saying this, I want to be self-critical, too. I’m awed by you all. Thank you for spending time with me.

To see a similarly streamlined video of my session, click here.

Leading cause of death View this page as a PDF. Suicide is death caused by injuring oneself with the intent to die. A suicide attempt is when someone harms themselves with any intent to end their life, but they do not die because of their actions. Many factors can increase the risk for suicide or protect against it. Suicide is connected to other forms of injury and violence. For example, people who have experienced violence, including child abuse, bullying, or sexual violence have a higher suicide risk. Being connected to family and community support and having easy access to healthcare can decrease suicidal thoughts and behaviors.1

Serious public health problem Belonging, safety, dignity, and hope can protect against suicide. Suicide rates increased approximately 36% between 2000–2022. Suicide was responsible for 49,316 deaths in 2023, which is about one death every 11 minutes.2 The number of people who think about or attempt suicide is even higher. In 2022, an estimated 12.8 million adults seriously thought about suicide, 3.7 million planned a suicide attempt, and 1.5 million attempted suicide.3 Suicide affects people of all ages. In 2023, suicide was among the top 8 leading causes of death for people ages 10-64. Suicide was the second leading cause of death for people ages 10-34.2 Some groups have higher suicide rates than others. Suicide rates vary by race/ethnicity, age, and other factors, such as where someone lives. By race/ethnicity, the groups with the highest rates are non-Hispanic American Indian/Alaska Native people followed by non-Hispanic White people.2 Other Americans with higher-than-average rates of suicide are veterans, people who live in rural areas, and workers in certain industries and occupations like mining and construction.14 Young people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual have higher prevalence of suicidal thoughts and behavior compared to their peers who identify as heterosexual.5 Read more about these suicide disparities and why they exist on the Health Disparities in Suicide webpage.

Suicide Prevention Resource for Action Suicide is preventable. Everyone has a role to play to save lives and create healthy and strong individuals, families, and communities. Suicide prevention requires a comprehensive public health approach. CDC developed the Suicide Prevention Resource for Action (Prevention Resource), which provides information on the best available evidence for suicide prevention. States and communities can use the Prevention Resource to help make decisions about suicide prevention activities. Strategies range from those designed to support people at increased risk to a focus on the whole population, regardless of risk. Strengthen economic supports Improve household financial security

Stabilize housing Create protective environments Reduce access to lethal means among persons at risk of suicide

Create healthy organizational policies and culture

Reduce substance use through community-based policies and practices Improve access and delivery of suicide care Cover mental health conditions in health insurance policies

Increase provider availability in underserved areas

Provide rapid and remote access to help

Create safer suicide care through systems change Promote healthy connections Promote healthy peer norms

Engage community members in shared activities Teach coping and problem-solving skills Support social-emotional learning programs

Teach parenting skills to improve family relationships

Support resilience through education programs Identify and support people at risk Train gatekeepers

Respond to crises

Plan for safety and follow-up after an attempt

Provide therapeutic approaches Lessen harms and prevent future risk Intervene after a suicide (postvention)

Report and message about suicide safely

Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2025

By Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner Tweet this

March 11, 2025

Press release

PDF version

Can it really be true that most people in jail are legally innocent? How much of mass incarceration is a result of the war on drugs, or the profit motives of private prisons? Have popular reforms really triggered a crime wave? These essential questions are harder to answer than you might expect. The various government agencies involved in the criminal legal system collect a lot of data, but very little is designed to help policymakers or the public understand what’s going on. The uncertainty that results muddies the waters around our society’s use of incarceration, giving lawmakers and lobbyists the opportunity to advance harmful policies that do not make us safe. As criminal legal system reforms become increasingly central to political debate — and are even scapegoated to resurrect old, ineffective “tough on crime” policies — it’s more important than ever that we get the facts straight and understand the big picture.

Further complicating matters is the fact that the U.S. doesn’t have one criminal legal system; instead, we have thousands of federal, state, local, and tribal systems. Together, these systems hold nearly 2 million people in 1,566 state prisons, 98 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails, 1,277 juvenile correctional facilities, 133 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian country jails, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories — at a system-wide cost of at least $182 billion each year.1 2

This report offers some much-needed clarity by piecing together the data about this country’s disparate systems of confinement. It provides a detailed look at where and why people are locked up in the U.S., and dispels some common myths about mass incarceration to focus attention on overlooked issues that urgently require reform. For the first time, we also include a high-level look at changes to confined populations over the past few years.

Slideshow 1. Swipe for more detailed views. For source dates and links, see the Methodology.

Changes and trends in the data over time Where are carceral populations going up or down? And why? Plus, a table with data for all 50 states Every year, we caution against year-to-year comparisons of our Whole Pie reports because the data for different systems vary in their consistency over time (as we explain further in the Methodology). However, people engaged in policymaking, analysis, and advocacy related to the criminal legal system understandably look for shifts in each year’s Whole Pie report for clues about where to focus their attention. This year, we have added this new section to make that job a bit easier. Notable year-to-year changes, including changes under the Trump administration The biggest takeaway in terms of changes from last year’s Whole Pie is that many systems of confinement are locking up more people, reversing years of downward trends. In particular: State prisons confined about 27,000 (or 2.5%) more people at the end of 2023 (the most recent year for which data are available) than they did at the end of 2022. Since state prison populations nationwide peaked in 2009, their numbers dropped every year but one until 2022, typically by one or two percent, and of course by an unprecedented 15% in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. But in both 2022 and 2023, we have seen year-to-year increases of over 23,000 people per year — more than in any single year since 2006.

(the most recent year for which data are available) than they did at the end of 2022. Since state prison populations nationwide peaked in 2009, their numbers dropped every year but one until 2022, typically by one or two percent, and of course by an unprecedented 15% in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. But in both 2022 and 2023, we have seen year-to-year increases of over 23,000 people per year — more than in any single year since 2006. Local city, county, and regional jail authorities locked up about 12,000 (2%) more people in 2023 than 2022 , 3 which is at least slower than the 5.5% growth we saw in 2022.

, which is at least slower than the 5.5% growth we saw in 2022. Juvenile courts detained and committed over 2,700 (11%) more youth in “residential placement” facilities in 2022 than in 2021 (again, the most recent national data available). This was the first increase in youth confinement after two decades of steady declines ; we don’t yet have answers about what’s behind this reversal, but advocates are anxious to see whether it continues.

; we don’t yet have answers about what’s behind this reversal, but advocates are anxious to see whether it continues. Overall, the total confined population across all of the slices in the “pie” grew by 38,000 (2%). Many readers may be wondering about the effects the second Trump administration is having on mass incarceration. Unfortunately, because of the significant lag between data collection and publication (which was particularly bad under the first Trump administration), we won’t be able to measure the full impact for at least another year — except for certain federal agencies that publish much more timely data and for which policy changes have immediate effects. In one alarming example, we already see a significant increase in immigration detention for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE): in the first month under the current administration (January 25 to February 23, 2025), ICE detention grew by 4,500 (12%) people. But it will likely take longer for other changes to become evident in criminal legal system data. Tracking carceral growth since the early pandemic The trends in the carceral data since 2019 — that is, since before the COVID-19 pandemic — show that many of the drops in confined populations are quickly being erased. Local, state, and federal systems continue to “rebound” from pandemic-related court slowdowns and administrative decisions about expedited releases and diversion. The total confined population is still about 13% smaller than its pre-pandemic size, but new growth across various systems suggests that the savings from reduced confinement — in terms of both financial and social costs — will not be sustained without explicitly decarceral policy changes. Compared to their pre-pandemic levels: The average daily population in local jails is about 10% smaller than it was in 2019, after dropping by 17% in the first two years of the pandemic. 4

ICE detention has already exceeded its early 2020 numbers by 13%.

its early 2020 numbers by 13%. State prisons nationwide hold about 13% fewer people than they did at the end of 2019, after shedding almost 17% of their combined populations between 2020 and 2021. Over 2022 and 2023, however, state prisons have added more than 50,000 people, undoing about a quarter (24%) of the decarceration that was sparked by the pandemic. Divergent state-level trends after pandemic-related population drops When we drill down to the individual state level, it’s clear that some states have made purposeful changes to reduce their prison populations and to maintain those drops beyond the early years of the pandemic. All told, nine states each imprisoned 20% fewer people in 2023 than they did in 2019. Most dramatically, New Jersey holds 37% fewer people in state prisons than it did in 2019. And even as state prison populations grew nationwide, ten states reduced their prison populations between 2021 and 2023; collectively these states reduced their prison populations by about 10,700 people since 2021. California cut its numbers the most, by almost 5,500 people (-5%), followed by Virginia, which cut almost 3,000 (-10%). Oregon and New Jersey both reduced their prison populations by almost 7% over the same time. In contrast, other states appear to be eagerly refilling their prisons after experiencing pandemic-related population drops. Nine states each added over 2,000 people to their prison populations over 2022 and 2023, accounting for 77% of all state prison growth nationwide over that time. Texas alone accounts for almost 31% of all that growth, Florida accounts for 13%, and Georgia 7%. Beyond “rebounding” to near-2019 levels, seven states actually imprisoned more people in 2023 than they did before the pandemic, and another 15 states are quickly closing the gap, all within 10% of their 2019 prison population size: State Prison population change from 2019-2023 2023 population compared to 2019 Prison population change from 2021-2023 Percent change from 2021-2023 Alabama -1,123 96% 2,149 8.6% Alaska 3 100.1% -161 -3.5% Arizona -7,968 81% 559 1.6% Arkansas 744 104% 1,481 8.7% California -26,725 78% -5,479 -5.4% Colorado -2,326 88% 1,594 10.0% Connecticut -1,724 87% 1,210 12.2% Delaware -825 86% 57 1.2% Florida -8,802 91% 6,790 8.4% Georgia -4,391 92% 3,415 7.3% Hawaii -1,337 75% -160 -3.9% Idaho 392 104% 922 10.4% Illinois -8,431 78% 1,353 4.8% Indiana -2,092 92% 372 1.5% Iowa -451 95% 269 3.1% Kansas -1,052 90% 604 7.1% Kentucky -3,907 83% 615 3.3% Louisiana -3,423 89% 2,112 8.1% Maine -312 86% 296 18.8% Maryland -2,359 87% 1,102 7.3% Massachusetts -2,203 73% -146 -2.4% Michigan -5,067 87% 800 2.5% Minnesota -1,257 87% 722 9.0% Mississippi 109 101% 2,194 12.7% Missouri -1,821 93% 801 3.4% Montana 262 106% 672 15.6% Nebraska 249 104% 331 5.9% Nevada -2,377 81% 261 2.6% New Hampshire -576 79% -12 -0.6% New Jersey -6,938 63% -831 -6.6% New Mexico -1,137 83% 432 8.4% New York -10,917 75% 2,245 7.4% North Carolina -3,394 90% 1,690 5.8% North Dakota 105 106% 210 12.4% Ohio -3,808 92% 1,501 3.3% Oklahoma -2,750 89% -108 -0.5% Oregon -2,645 82% -882 -6.7% Pennsylvania -6,842 85% 1,666 4.5% Rhode Island -221 92% 281 12.6% South Carolina -2,155 88% 694 4.4% South Dakota -37 99% 411 12.3% Tennessee -1,941 93% 2,413 11.0% Texas -9,165 94% 15,492 11.6% Utah -269 96% 495 8.4% Vermont -274 83% 47 3.7% Virginia -8,649 76% -2,915 -9.6% Washington -4,820 75% 767 5.6% West Virginia -1,000 85% -47 -0.8% Wisconsin -1,538 94% 2,216 11.0% Wyoming -267 89% 89 4.2% 50 States combined -157,452 87% 50,589 4.8%

This big-picture view is a lens through which the main drivers of mass incarceration come into focus;5 it allows us to identify important, but often ignored, systems of confinement, from immigration detention to involuntary commitment and youth confinement. In particular, local jails often receive short shrift in larger discussions about criminal legal system reform, but they play a critical role as “incarceration’s front door” and have a far greater impact than the daily population suggests.

Jails vs. prisons: What’s the difference? They’ve got a lot in common, but they’re far from the same thing. Prisons are facilities under state or federal control where people who have been convicted (usually of felonies) go to serve their sentences. Jails are city- or county-run facilities where a majority of people locked up are there awaiting trial (in other words, still legally innocent), many because they can’t afford to post bail. To make things a little more complicated, some people do serve their sentences in local jails, either because their sentences are short or because the jail is renting space to the state prison system.

While this pie chart provides a comprehensive snapshot of our correctional system, the graphic does not capture the enormous churn in and out of our correctional facilities, nor the far larger universe of people whose lives are affected by the criminal legal system. In 2022, about 469,000 people entered prison gates, but people went to jail more than 7 million times.6 Some have just been arrested and will make bail within hours or days, while many others are too poor to make bail and remain in jail until their trial ends.7 Only a small number (about 105,000 on any given day) have been convicted, and are generally serving misdemeanors sentences of under a year. At least 1 in 4 people who go to jail will be arrested again within the same year — often those dealing with poverty, mental illness, and substance use disorders, whose problems only worsen with incarceration.

Slideshow 2. Swipe for more detail on pretrial detention.

With a sense of the big picture, the next question is: why are so many people locked up? How many are incarcerated for drug offenses? Are the profit motives of private companies driving incarceration? Or is it really about public safety and keeping dangerous people off the streets? There are a plethora of modern myths about incarceration. Some have a kernel of truth, but these myths distract us from focusing on the most important drivers of incarceration.

Ten myths about crime and mass incarceration

The overcriminalization of drug use, the use of private prisons, and low-paid or unpaid prison labor are among the most contentious issues in the criminal legal system today because they inspire moral outrage. But they do not answer the question of why most people are incarcerated or how we can dramatically — and safely — reduce our use of confinement. Likewise, emotional responses to sexual and violent offenses often derail important conversations about the social, economic, and moral costs of incarceration and lifelong punishment. False notions of what a “violent crime” conviction means about an individual’s dangerousness continue to be used in an attempt to justify long sentences — even though incarceration does not deter crime and more incarceration is not what victims want. At the same time, misguided beliefs about the “services” provided by jails are used to rationalize the construction of massive new “mental health jails.” Finally, simplistic solutions to reducing incarceration, such as moving people from jails and prisons to community supervision, ignore the fact that “alternatives” to incarceration often lead to incarceration anyway. Focusing on the policy changes that can end mass incarceration, and not just put a dent in it, requires the public to put these issues into perspective.

The first myth: Crime is up, and immigration and criminal legal system reforms are to blame

The specter of “rising crime” persists as a central issue among elected officials, political candidates, and in media commentary, and both immigration and popular criminal legal system reforms have been predictably blamed. These explanations and falsehoods about recent crime trends don’t add up, but lies about hard-fought reforms have serious consequences nonetheless.

Given the increasing politicalization of criminal legal system facts in recent years, it bears repeating that we do have up-to-date crime statistics from the FBI that affirm that crime remains at historic lows.8 Preliminary data from the first half of 2024 shows that nationwide, the crime rate for all Index crimes likely hit its lowest point since 1961 last year:9

Contrary to the misinformation spread by national leaders, multiple studies show that, documented or not, immigrants do not commit more crime than native-born Americans. In fact, the available data suggest that non-U.S. citizens account for very little crime. National arrest data are not broken down by citizenship status, but the most recent nationwide data about people in jails — where people are detained after arrest — show that just 3% of people jailed are non-citizens.10 And because most people detained in jails have not been convicted, it’s very likely that only a fraction of that 3% have actually been found guilty of any crime.

Many people have also rushed to blame recent reforms for minor (or imagined) shifts in crime trends in an effort to resurrect the same “tough on crime” policies that failed in the 1980s and 90s. This strategy has even succeeded in rolling back popular reforms that had demonstrated success. While we most commonly hear these arguments from those in law enforcement and on the right, they have gained enough traction that Democrats, too, have pulled back their support for criminal legal system reforms. But in reality, a number of studies have shown:

While crime rates remain near historic lows, what has actually changed most is the public’s perception of crime, which is driven less by first-hand experience or data than by the false claims of reform opponents. These false claims are deliberately stoked to undo the hard-won, evidence supported, common sense reforms that have only begun to put a dent in mass incarceration.

The second myth: Releasing “nonviolent drug offenders” would end mass incarceration

It’s true that police, prosecutors, and judges continue to punish people harshly for nothing more than drug possession. Drug offenses still account for the incarceration of over 360,000 people, and drug convictions remain a defining feature of the federal prison system. Even with recent changes to many state drug laws, police still make almost a million drug arrests each year,12 many of which lead to prison sentences. Drug arrests continue to give residents of over-policed communities criminal records, hurting their employment prospects and increasing the likelihood of longer sentences for any future offenses.

Nevertheless, 4 out of 5 people in prison or jail are locked up for something other than a drug offense — either a more serious offense or an even less serious one. To end mass incarceration, we will have to change how our society and our criminal legal system respond to crimes more serious than drug possession. We must also stop incarcerating people for behaviors that are even more benign.

Slideshow 3. Swipe for more detail on the War on Drugs

The third myth: By definition, “violent crime” involves physical harm

The distinction between “violent” and “nonviolent” crime means less than you might think; in fact, these terms are so widely misused that they are generally unhelpful in a policy context. In the public discourse about crime, people typically use “violent” and “nonviolent” as substitutes for serious versus nonserious criminal acts. That alone is a fallacy, but worse, these terms are also used as coded (often racialized) language to label individuals as inherently dangerous versus non-dangerous.

Offense categories might not mean what you think Reported offense data oversimplifies how people interact with the criminal legal system in two important ways. To understand the main drivers of incarceration, the public needs to see how many people are incarcerated for different offense types. But the reported offense data oversimplifies how people interact with the criminal legal system in two important ways: it reports only one offense category per person, and it reflects the outcome of the legal process, obscuring important details of actual events. First, when a person is in prison for multiple offenses, only the most serious offense is reported.13 So, for example, there are people in prison for violent offenses who were also convicted of drug offenses, but they are included only in the “violent” category in the data. This makes it hard to grasp the complexity of criminal events, such as the role drugs may have played in violent or property offenses. We must also consider that almost all convictions are the result of plea bargains, where people accused of a crime plead guilty to a lesser offense, possibly in a different category or one that they did not actually commit, in exchange for a more lenient sentence. Secondly, many of these categories group together people convicted of a wide range of offenses. For violent offenses especially, these labels can distort perceptions of individual “violent offenders” and exaggerate the scale of dangerous, violent crime. Even the seemingly clear-cut offense of “murder” is applied to a variety of situations and individuals: it lumps together the small number of serial killers with people who participated in acts that are unlikely to ever happen again, either due to circumstance or age. “Murder” also includes acts that the average person may not consider to be murder at all. In particular, the felony murder rule says that if someone dies during the commission of a felony, everyone involved can be as guilty of murder as the person who directly caused the death. Many may be surprised that a person who was acting as a lookout during a break-in where someone was accidentally killed can be convicted of murder.14 We discuss this problem in more detail in The third myth: By definition, “violent crimes” involve physical harm.

In reality, state and federal laws apply the term “violent” to a surprisingly wide range of criminal acts — including many that don’t involve any physical harm. In some states, purse-snatching, manufacturing methamphetamines, and stealing drugs are considered violent crimes. Burglary is generally considered a property crime, but an array of state and federal laws classify burglary as a violent crime in certain situations, such as when it occurs at night, in a residence, or with a weapon present. So even if the building was unoccupied, someone convicted of burglary could be punished for a violent crime and end up with a long prison sentence and a “violent” record.

The common misunderstanding of what “violent crime” really refers to — a legal distinction that often has little to do with actual or intended harm — is one of the main barriers to meaningful criminal legal system reform. Reactionary responses to the idea of violent crime often lead policymakers to categorically exclude from reforms people convicted of legally “violent” crimes. But almost half (47%) of people in prison and jail are there for offenses classified as “violent,” so these carveouts end up gutting the impact of otherwise well-crafted policies. As we and many others have explained before, cutting incarceration rates to anything near international norms will be impossible without changing how we respond to violent crime. To start, we have to be clearer about what that loaded term really means.

The fourth myth: People in prison for violent or sexual crimes are too dangerous to be released

Of course, many people convicted of violent offenses have caused serious harm to others. But how does the criminal legal system determine the risk that they pose to their communities? Again, the answer is too often “we judge them by their offense type,” rather than “we evaluate their individual circumstances.” This reflects the particularly harmful myth that people who commit violent or sexual crimes are incapable of rehabilitation and thus warrant many decades or even a lifetime of punishment.

Recidivism: A slippery statistic How well do different measures of recidivism reflect actual failure or success upon reentry? As long as we are considering recidivism rates as a measure of public safety risk, we should also consider how recidivism is defined and measured. While this may sound esoteric, this is an issue that affects an important policy question: at what point — and with what measure — do we consider someone’s reentry a success or failure? The term “recidivism” suggests a relapse in behavior, a return to criminal offending. But what is a valid sign of criminal offending: self-reported behavior, arrest, conviction, or incarceration? Defining recidivism as rearrest casts the widest net and results in the highest rates, but arrest does not suggest conviction, nor actual guilt. More useful measures than rearrest include conviction for a new crime, re-incarceration, or a new sentence of imprisonment; the latter may be most relevant, since it measures offenses serious enough to warrant a prison sentence. Importantly, people convicted of violent offenses have the lowest recidivism rates by each of these measures. However, the recidivism rate for violent offenses is a whopping 48 percentage points higher when rearrest, rather than imprisonment, is used to define recidivism. The cutoff point at which recidivism is measured also matters: If someone is arrested for the first time 5, 10, or 20 years after they leave prison, that’s very different from someone arrested within months of release. The most recent government study of recidivism over 10 years reported that 82% of people incarcerated in state prisons were arrested at some point in the 10 years following their release. However, the vast majority of people in this group were arrested within the first three years, and more than half within the first year. The longer the time period, the higher the reported recidivism rate — but the lower the actual threat to public safety. A related question is whether the particular post-release offense matters. For example, 69% of people imprisoned for a violent offense are rearrested within five years of release, but only 33% are rearrested for another violent offense in that time; they are much more likely to be rearrested for a public order offense. If someone convicted of robbery is arrested years later for a liquor law violation, it makes no sense to view this very different, much less serious, offense the same way we would another arrest for robbery. Moreover, public order offenses often include “technical” violations, so in many states, recidivism statistics are inflated by these non-criminal infractions. A final note about recidivism: while policymakers frequently cite reducing recidivism as a priority, few states collect the data that would allow them to monitor and improve their own performance in real time. For example, the Council of State Governments asked correctional systems what kind of recidivism data they collect and publish for people leaving prison and people starting probation. What they found is that states typically track just one measure of post-release recidivism, and few states track recidivism while on probation at all: If state-level advocates and political leaders want to know if their state is even trying to reduce recidivism, we suggest one easy litmus test: Do they collect and publish basic data about the number and causes of people’s interactions with the justice system while on probation, or after release from prison?

As lawmakers and the public increasingly agree that past policies have led to unnecessary incarceration, it’s time to consider policy changes that go beyond the low-hanging fruit of “non-non-nons” — people convicted of non-violent, non-serious, non-sexual offenses. Again, if we are serious about ending mass incarceration, we will have to change our responses to more serious and violent crime.

Recidivism data do not support the belief that people who commit violent crimes ought to be locked away for decades for the sake of public safety. People convicted of violent and sexual offenses are actually among the least likely to be rearrested, and those convicted of rape or sexual assault have rearrest rates 20% lower than all other offense categories combined. One reason for the lower rates of recidivism among people convicted of violent offenses: age is one of the main predictors of violence. The risk for violence peaks in adolescence or early adulthood and then declines with age, yet we incarcerate people long after their risk has declined.15

The fifth myth: Some people need to go to jail to get treatment and services

It’s absolutely true that people ensnared in the criminal legal system have a lot of unmet needs. But jails and prisons are no place to recover from a mental health crisis or substance use disorder — they are designed for punishment, not care. Local jails, especially, are filled with people who need medical care and social services, but jails consistently fail to provide these services. For example, while two-thirds of people in local jails have substance use disorders, only a tiny fraction of all jails provide medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for opioid use disorder — the gold standard for care. That means that rather than providing drug treatment, jails more often interrupt drug treatment by cutting patients off from their medications. Between 2000 and 2018, the number of people who died of intoxication while in jail increased by almost 400%; typically, these individuals died within just one day of admission.16

Similarly, jails often put people with mental health problems in solitary confinement, provide limited access to counseling, and leave them unmonitored due to constant staffing shortages. The result: suicide is the leading cause of death in local jails, with death rates far exceeding those found in the general U.S. population. Given this track record, the trend of proposing new “mental health jails” to respond to decades of disinvestment in community-based services is particularly alarming. Jails are not safe detox facilities, nor are they capable of providing the therapeutic environment people require for long-term recovery and healing. Even when other options for providing mental health and substance use treatment are scarce, decisionmakers should not rely on correctional settings to do so.

The sixth myth: Harsh punishments deter crime, making us safer

Many people mistakenly believe that long sentences, paired with austere and even brutal prison conditions, will have a deterrent effect on crime. But research has consistently found that harsher sentences do not work this way. In 2016, the National Institute of Justice summarized the research on deterrence, finding that prison sentences — and long sentences in particular — do little to deter future crime.17 Another study concluded that, compared to punishments that don’t involve prison or jail time, incarceration has either no effect or — even worse — a “mildly criminogenic impact” on future lawbreaking. In other words, incarceration is counterproductive: while a prison sentence can incapacitate a person in the short term, it actually increases the risk that someone will commit a crime after their release.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, the truth is that harsh punishments make everyone less safe. People face extremely poor living conditions in practically every jail and prison, which negatively impacts their odds of success upon release, their families, and public health at large. The routine failure of corrections departments to provide for the medical needs of incarcerated people is harmful (even deadly) for those inside, and strains family resources and healthcare infrastructure after they’re released — and nearly everyone will eventually be released. Poor nutrition compounds health problems, as does contaminated water, pests, and exposure to extreme heat and cold. The physical and psychological effects of incarceration, including the PTSD-like Post-Incarceration Syndrome, make it harder to maintain employment and housing, trapping people in cycles of incarceration. Put simply, when people are released from prison, their health and wellbeing are intertwined with that of the community, so the harms visited upon them inside impact everyone.

The seventh myth: Crime victims support long prison sentences

Policymakers, judges, and prosecutors often invoke the name of victims to justify long sentences for violent offenses. But contrary to the popular narrative, most victims of violence want violence prevention, not incarceration. Again, harsh sentences don’t deter violent crime, and many victims understand that incarceration can make people more of a public safety risk. National survey data show that most victims support violence prevention, social investment, and alternatives to incarceration that address the root causes of crime, not more investment in carceral systems that cause more harm.18 This suggests that they care more about the health and safety of their communities than they do about retribution.

Victims and survivors of crime prefer investments in crime prevention rather than long prison sentences.

Moreover, people convicted of crimes are often victims themselves, complicating the moral argument for harsh punishments as “justice.” While conversations about justice tend to treat perpetrators and victims of crime as two entirely separate groups, people who engage in criminal acts are often victims of violence and trauma, too — a fact behind the adage that “hurt people hurt people.”19 As victims of crime know, breaking this cycle of harm will require greater investments in communities, not the carceral system.

The eighth myth: Private prisons are the corrupt heart of mass incarceration

In fact, just 8% of all incarcerated people are held in private prisons; the vast majority are in publicly-owned prisons and jails.20 Some states have more people in private prisons than others, of course, and the industry has lobbied to maintain high levels of incarceration, but private prisons are essentially a parasite on the massive publicly-owned system — not the root of it.

Nevertheless, a range of private industries and even some public agencies continue to profit from mass incarceration. Many city and county jails rent space to other agencies, including state prison systems,21 the U.S. Marshals Service, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Private companies are frequently granted contracts to operate prison food and health services (often so bad they result in major lawsuits), and prison and jail telecom and commissary functions have spawned multi-billion dollar private industries. By privatizing services like phone calls, medical care, and commissary, prisons and jails are offloading the costs of incarceration onto incarcerated people and their families, trimming their budgets at an unconscionable social cost.

Private prisons and jails hold just 8% of all incarcerated people, making them a relatively small part of a mostly publicly-run correctional system.

The ninth myth: Prisons are “factories behind fences” that exist to provide companies with a huge slave labor force

Simply put, private companies using prison labor are not what stands in the way of ending mass incarceration, nor are they the source of most prison jobs. Only about 4,400 people in prison — less than 1% — are employed by private companies through the federal PIECP program, which requires them to pay at least minimum wage before deductions. (A larger portion work for state-owned “correctional industries,” which pay much less, but this still only represents about 6% of people incarcerated in state prisons.)22

But prisons do rely on the labor of incarcerated people for food service, laundry, and other operations, and they pay incarcerated workers appallingly low wages: our 2017 study found that on average, incarcerated people earn between 86 cents and $3.45 per day for the most common prison jobs.23 In at least five states, those jobs pay nothing at all. Moreover, work in prison is compulsory, with little regulation or oversight, and incarcerated workers have few rights and protections. If they refuse to work, incarcerated people face disciplinary action. For those who do work, the paltry wages they receive often go right back to the prison, which charges them for basic necessities like medical visits and hygiene items. Forcing people to work for low or no pay and no benefits, while charging them for necessities, allows prisons to shift the costs of incarceration to incarcerated people — hiding the true cost of running prisons from most Americans.

The tenth myth: Expanding community supervision — including electronic monitoring — is the best way to reduce incarceration

Community supervision, which includes probation, parole, and pretrial supervision, is often seen as a “lenient” punishment or as an ideal “alternative” to incarceration. But while remaining in the community is generally preferable to being locked up, the conditions24 imposed on those under supervision are often so restrictive that they set people up to fail.25 Long supervision terms, numerous and burdensome requirements, and constant surveillance result in frequent “failures,” often for minor infractions like breaking curfew or failing to pay unaffordable supervision fees.

At last count, at least 128,000 people were incarcerated for such non-criminal “technical violations” of probation or parole.26 These supervision violations accounted for 27% of all admissions to state and federal prisons. In fact, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that almost a quarter (24%) of people in state prisons were on probation at the time of their arrest, underscoring how this “alternative to incarceration” often simply delays incarceration.

In addition to delaying incarceration, newer methods of community supervision actually replicate the experience so closely that they amount to “e-carceration” or “electronic prisons.”27 The use of technologies like electronic monitoring, in particular — whether via ankle shackle, phone app, or other technology — has exploded in recent years, especially in the contexts of pretrial supervision and immigration enforcement.28 Proponents argue the technology improves court compliance and public safety, but a recent study found the practice accomplishes neither of these goals. The technology is unreliable, frequently vulnerable to security breaches and false alarms, and it has created yet another path to incarceration via technical violations.29 Like probation before it, electronic monitoring is touted as an “alternative” to incarceration, but in reality it is an expansion of correctional control, not a viable way to reduce the number of people behind bars.

The high costs of low-level offenses

Most people in the U.S. criminal legal system are not accused of serious crimes; more often, they are charged with misdemeanors or non-criminal violations. Yet even low-level offenses, like technical violations of probation and parole, can lead to incarceration and other serious consequences. Rather than investing in community-driven safety initiatives, cities and counties are still pouring vast amounts of public resources into the processing and punishment of these minor offenses.

Misdemeanors: Minor offenses with major consequences

The “massive misdemeanor system” in the U.S. is an important but overlooked contributor to overcriminalization and mass incarceration. For behaviors as benign as jaywalking or sitting on a sidewalk, an estimated 13 million misdemeanor charges sweep droves of Americans into the criminal legal system each year (and that’s excluding civil violations and speeding). These low-level offenses, along with other non-felony offenses, typically account for about 25% of the daily jail population nationally, and much more in some states and counties. The rampant criminalization of homelessness and aggressive enforcement of these laws — almost all misdemeanors — also contributes to harmful and costly cycles of homelessness and incarceration.

Misdemeanor charges may sound trivial, but they carry serious financial, personal, and social costs, especially for the accused but also for broader society, which finances the processing of these court cases and all of the unnecessary incarceration that comes with them. And then there are the moral costs: People charged with misdemeanors are often not appointed counsel and are pressured to plead guilty and accept a probation sentence to avoid jail time. This means that innocent people routinely plead guilty and are then burdened with the many collateral consequences that come with a criminal record, as well as the heightened risk of future incarceration for probation violations. A misdemeanor system that pressures innocent people to plead guilty seriously undermines American principles of justice.

Probation & parole violations and “holds” lead to unnecessary incarceration

Another driver of mass incarceration that is often overlooked are the various “holds” that keep people behind bars for administrative reasons. A common example is when people on probation or parole are jailed for violating their supervision, either for a new crime or a non-criminal (or “technical”) violation. If a parole or probation officer suspects that someone has violated supervision conditions, they can file a “detainer” (or “hold”), rendering that person ineligible for release on bail. For people struggling to rebuild their lives after conviction or incarceration, returning to jail for a minor infraction can be profoundly destabilizing. The most recent data show that nationally, almost 1 in 5 (19%) people in jail are there for a violation of probation or parole, though in some places these violations or detainers account for over one-third of the jail population. This problem is not limited to local jails, either; in 2019, the Council of State Governments found that nearly 1 in 4 people in state prisons are incarcerated as a result of supervision violations.

A particularly disturbing type of “hold” is becoming increasingly common: people held in jails while awaiting transfer to psychiatric facilities . One recent study reports that “thousands of [people] with serious mental illness languish in jail for months, or even years, waiting for a state hospital bed to open.”30 Typically, these vulnerable adults are in need of evaluation or restoration of their competency to stand trial. But being held in jails puts them at heightened risk of victimization, self-harm, and even additional criminal charges for behaviors that are actually symptoms of their illness. The result of disinvestment in mental health infrastructure and the criminalization of mental illness, these “holds” are not only unnecessary, but unconscionable.

“Low-level fugitives” live in fear of incarceration for missed court dates and unpaid fines

People accused of crimes can end up in jail even if their alleged offense is not punishable with jail time. Why? Because if a person fails to appear in court or to pay fines and fees, the judge can issue a “bench warrant” for their arrest, directing law enforcement to jail them in order to bring them to court. While there is currently no national estimate of the number of active bench warrants, their use is widespread and, in some places, incredibly common. In Monroe County, N.Y., for example, over 3,000 people have an active bench warrant at any time, more than 3 times the number of people in the county jails.

But bench warrants are often unnecessary. Most people who miss court are not trying to avoid the law; more often, they forget, are confused by the court process, or have a schedule conflict. Once a bench warrant is issued, however, people frequently end up living as “low-level fugitives,” quitting their jobs, becoming transient, and/or avoiding public life (even hospitals) to avoid having to go to jail.

Lessons from the smaller “slices”: Youth, immigration, and involuntary commitment

Looking more closely at incarceration by offense type also exposes some disturbing facts about the 34,000 youth in confinement in the United States: too many are there for a “most serious offense” that is not even a crime. For example, there are 3,000 youth behind bars for non-criminal violations of their probation rather than for a new offense. An additional 800 youth are locked up for “status” offenses, which are “behaviors that are not law violations for adults such as running away, truancy, and incorrigibility.”31 About 1 in 12 youth held for a criminal or delinquent offense is locked in an adult jail or prison, and most of the others are held in juvenile facilities that look and operate a lot like prisons and jails.

We also know that for many children, legal system involvement overlaps with other kinds of “systems” involvement, such as the child welfare system: almost half of youth in foster care have an encounter with the criminal legal system by age 17. The criminalization of youth is apparent in the adult prison population: more than one-third (38%) of people in state prisons were first arrested before they turned 16.

Slideshow 5. Swipe for more detail about youth confinement, immigrant confinement, and psychiatric confinement.

Turning to the people who are locked up criminally and civilly for immigration-related reasons, we find that over 6,000 people are in federal prisons for criminal convictions of immigration offenses, and 12,000 more are held pretrial or presentence by the U.S. Marshals Service. The vast majority of people incarcerated for criminal immigration offenses are accused of illegal entry or illegal reentry — in other words, for no more serious offense than crossing the border without permission.32

Another 44,000 people are civilly detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) not for any crime, but simply because they are facing deportation.33 People detained by ICE are physically confined in federally-run or privately-run immigration detention facilities, or in local jails under contract with ICE. ICE has also very rapidly expanded its overall surveillance and control over the non-criminal migrant population by growing its electronic monitoring-based “alternatives to detention” program.34

An additional 4,000 unaccompanied children are held in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), awaiting placement with parents, family members, or friends. While these children are not held for any criminal or delinquent offense, most are held in shelters or even juvenile placement facilities under detention-like conditions.35

Adding to the universe of people who are confined because of criminal legal system involvement, 25,000 people are involuntarily committed in state psychiatric hospitals36 and civil commitment centers37 for underlying criminal charges. Many of these people are not even convicted, and some are held indefinitely. These “forensic patients” include people being evaluated or treated for incompetency to stand trial, as well as those found not guilty by reason of insanity or guilty but mentally ill, who may remain hospitalized for decades or for life.38 Roughly 6,000 are people convicted of sex-related crimes who are involuntarily committed or detained after their prison sentences are complete. While the facilities they are held in aren’t typically run by departments of correction, they are in reality much like prisons. Meanwhile, at least 38 states allow involuntary commitment for substance use disorder treatment, and in many cases, people are sent to actual prisons and jails, which are inappropriate places for treatment. 39

Beyond the “Whole Pie”: Community supervision, poverty, age, and race and gender disparities

Once we have wrapped our minds around the “whole pie” of mass incarceration, we should zoom out and note that people who are incarcerated are only a fraction of those impacted by the criminal legal system. There are another 671,000 people on parole and a staggering 2.9 million people on probation. Many millions more have completed their sentences but are still living with a criminal record, a stigmatizing label that comes with collateral consequences such as barriers to employment and housing.

Far more people are impacted by mass incarceration than the 2 million currently confined. An estimated 19 million people are burdened with the collateral consequences of a felony conviction (this includes those currently and formerly incarcerated), and an estimated 79 million have a criminal record of some kind; even this is likely an underestimate, leaving out many people who have been arrested for misdemeanors. Finally, FWD.us reports that 113 million adults (45%) have had an immediate family member incarcerated for at least one night.

Beyond identifying how many people are impacted by the criminal legal system, we should also focus on who is most impacted and who is left behind by policy change. Poverty, for example, plays a central role in mass incarceration. People in prison and jail are disproportionately poor compared to the overall U.S. population.40 The criminal legal system punishes poverty, beginning with the high price of money bail: The median felony bail bond amount ($10,000) is the equivalent of 8 months’ income for the typical person in jail because they can’t afford a bail bond. As a result, people with low incomes are more likely to face the harms of pretrial detention. Poverty is not only a predictor of incarceration; it is also frequently the outcome, as a criminal record and time spent in prison destroys wealth, creates debt, initiates or perpetuates cycles of homelessness, and decimates job opportunities.41

It’s no surprise that people of color — who face much greater rates of poverty — are dramatically overrepresented in the nation’s prisons and jails. These racial disparities are particularly stark for Black Americans, who make up 41% of the prison and jail populations but only 14% of all U.S residents.42 The same is true for women, whose incarceration rates have for decades risen faster than men’s, and who are often behind bars because of financial obstacles such as an inability to pay bail. As policymakers continue to push for reforms that reduce incarceration, they should avoid changes that will widen disparities, as has happened with juvenile confinement and with women in state prisons.

Finally, while states have made progress in reducing youth confinement — due to developments in adolescent brain research, mounting evidence that confinement leads to worse outcomes, and dogged advocacy to protect youth — the elder population in prison has only grown. Many are stuck serving excessively long sentences, despite the evidence that their incarceration is both extremely costly and unnecessary to ensure public safety.

Slideshow 6. Swipe for more detail about race, gender, and income disparities.

Necessary reforms Equipped with the full picture of how many people are locked up in the United States, where, and why, we all have a better foundation for moving the conversation about criminal legal system reform forward. For example, the data make it clear that ending the war on drugs will not alone end mass incarceration, though the federal government and some states have taken an important step by reducing the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses. Looking at the “whole pie” of mass incarceration opens up conversations about where it makes sense to focus our energies at the local, state, and national levels. For example: How can we effectively invest in communities to make it less likely that someone comes into contact with the criminal legal system in the first place? And what measures can help aid successful reentry and end the vicious cycle of re-incarceration that so many individuals and families experience?

Can we persuade government officials and prosecutors to revisit the reflexive, simplistic policymaking that has served to increase incarceration for “violent” offenses? How can we eliminate policy “carveouts” that exclude broad categories of people from reforms and end up gutting the impact of reforms?

What will it take to embolden policymakers and the public to do what it takes to shrink the second largest slice of the pie — the thousands of local jails? And what will it take to redirect public spending to smarter investments like community-based drug treatment and job training?

While the federal prison system is a small slice of the total pie, how can improved federal policies and financial incentives be used to advance state and county-level reforms? And for their part, how can elected sheriffs, district attorneys, and judges — who all control larger shares of the correctional pie — slow the flow of people into the criminal legal system?

Given that the companies with the greatest impact on incarcerated people are not private prison operators, but service providers that contract with public facilities, how can governments end contracts that squeeze money from those behind bars and their families?

What reforms can we implement to both reduce the number of people incarcerated in the U.S. and the well-known racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal legal system?

What lessons can we learn from the pandemic? Are federal, state, and local governments prepared to respond to future pandemics, epidemics, natural disasters, and other emergencies, including with plans to decarcerate? And how can states and the federal government better utilize compassionate release and clemency powers moving forward? The United States has the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate of any independent democracy on earth. Looking at the big picture of the 2 million people locked up in the United States on any given day, we can see that something needs to change. Both policymakers and the public have the responsibility to carefully consider each individual slice of the carceral “pie” and ask whether legitimate social goals are served by putting each group behind bars, and whether any benefit really outweighs the social and fiscal costs. Even narrow policy changes, such as ending incarceration for “technical” violations, can meaningfully reduce our society’s use of incarceration. At the same time, we should be wary of proposed reforms that seem promising but will have only minimal effect, because they simply transfer people from one slice of the correctional “pie” to another or needlessly exclude broad swaths of people. Keeping the big picture in mind is critical if we hope to develop strategies that actually shrink the “whole pie.”

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How to link to specific images and sections To help readers link to specific images in this report, we created these special urls: How many people are locked up in the United States? https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow1/1 1 in 3 people behind bars is in a jail. Most have yet to be tried in court. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow1/2 Despite reforms, drug offenses are still a defining characteristic of the federal system https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow1/3 Beyond “federal prison,” multiple agencies and thousands of local facilities confine people for the federal government https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow1/4 Pretrial Detention https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow2/1 Pretrial policies drive jail growth https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow2/2 Why are so many people detained in jails before trial? They’re not wealthy enough to afford money bail. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow2/3 1 in 3 people behind bars is in a jail. Most have yet to be tried in court https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow2/4 U.S. crime rates continue to fall, and preliminary data indicate crime likely hit a 60-year low in 2023 https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#crimerates 1 in 5 incarcerated people is locked up for a drug offense https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow3/1 Even with recent changes to drug laws and enforcement, police still make almost a million drug possession arrests each year https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow3/2 Some states have largely ended the War on Drugs. Other states, not so much. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow3/3 Most states track and publish just one measure of post-release recidivism https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#releaserecidivism Very few states track and publish any recidivism data for people on probation https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#probationrecidivism In jails, the most effective treatment options are the least accessible for people with opioid use disorder https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#jailtreatment What do victims of violent crimes really want? https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#victimswant Only 8% of confined people are held in private prisons https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#private_facilities Non-criminal (or “technical”) violations are the main reason for incarceration of people on probation and parole https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow4/1 The growth of electronic monitoring for the criminal legal and immigration systems, 2015-2024 https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow4/2 Electronic monitoring doesn’t reduce jail populations https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow4/3 Most confined youth are held for non-person offenses, and 1 in 4 is held for an act that is not a “crimes” at all https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow5/1 More than 1 in 3 people in state prison were first arrested before their 16th birthday https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow5/2 Almost 67,000 people are confined for immigration reasons https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow5/3 Psychiatric facilities confine 25,000 people every day for criminal legal system involvement https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow5/4 Most people in Indian Country jails are locked up for property, drug, and public order charges https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow5/5 The rapid expansion of ICE’s electronic monitoring program https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#iceexpansion Mass incarceration directly impacts millions of people: But just how many, and in what ways? https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#impacted Incarceration is just one piece of the much larger system of correctional control https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow6/1 Racial and ethnic disparities in correctional facilities https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow6/2 How many women are locked up in the United States? https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow6/3 Most people in prison are poor, and the poorest are women and people of color https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow6/4 Many people in state prisons grew up facing serious family, housing, economic, and educational challenges https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow6/5 The youngest and oldest people in prison https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#slideshows/slideshow6/6

To help readers link to specific report sections or paragraphs, we created these special urls: Changes and trends in the data over time https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#trends Jails vs. prisons: What’s the difference? https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#jailsvprisons Ten myths about mass incarceration https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#myths The first myth: Crime is up, and immigration and criminal legal system reforms are to blame https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#firstmyth The second myth: The second myth: Releasing “nonviolent drug offenders” would end mass incarceration https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#secondmyth The third myth: The third myth: By definition, “violent crime” involves physical harm https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#thirdmyth Offense categories might not mean what you think https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#offensecategories The fourth myth: People in prison for violent or sexual crimes are too dangerous to be released https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#fourthmyth Recidivism: A slippery statistic https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#recidivism_measures The fifth myth: Some people need to go to jail to get treatment and services https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#fifthmyth The sixth myth: Harsh punishments deter crime, making us safer https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#sixthmyth The seventh myth: Crime victims support long prison sentences https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#seventhmyth The eighth myth: Private prisons are the corrupt heart of mass incarceration https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#eighthmyth The ninth myth: Prisons are “factories behind fences” that exist to provide companies with a huge slave labor force https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#ninthmyth The tenth myth: Expanding community supervision — including electronic monitoring – is the best way to reduce incarceration https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#tenthmyth The high costs of low-level offenses https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#lowlevel Misdemeanors: Minor offenses with major consequences /reports/pie2025.html#misdemeanors Probation & parole violations and “holds” lead to unnecessary incarceration https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#holds “Low-level fugitives” live in fear of incarceration for missed court dates and unpaid fines https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#benchwarrants Lessons from the smaller “slices”: Youth, immigration, and involuntary commitment https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#smallerslices Beyond the “Whole Pie”: Community supervision, poverty, age, and race and gender disparities https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#community Each paragraph is also numbered, so you can use urls in this format: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#paragraph1

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#paragraph2

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html#paragraph3

etc… Learn how to link to specific images and sections

Acknowledgments

All Prison Policy Initiative reports are collaborative endeavors, but this report builds on the successful collaborations of the several versions of this report we have produced since 2014. For this year’s report, the authors are particularly indebted to Shan Jumper for sharing updated civil detention and commitment data, Jordan Miner for helping with technical improvements, and Ed Epping for help with one of the visuals. Any errors or omissions, and final responsibility for all of the many value judgements required to produce a data visualization and report like this, are the sole responsibility of the authors.

We thank the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Safety and Justice Challenge for their support of our research into the use and misuse of jails in this country. Finally, we’d like to thank each of our individual donors — your commitment to ending mass incarceration makes our work possible.

About the authors

Wendy Sawyer is the Research Director at the Prison Policy Initiative. Along with directing the organization’s research priorities, Wendy is the author (or co-author) of several major reports, including Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie, Beyond the Count: A deep dive into state prison populations, All Profit, No Risk: How the bail industry exploits the justice system and Arrest, Release, Repeat: How police and jails are misused to respond to social problems. Wendy also frequently publishes briefings on recent data releases, academic research, women’s incarceration, pretrial detention, probation, and more.

Peter Wagner is an attorney and the Executive Director of the Prison Policy Initiative. He co-founded the Prison Policy Initiative in 2001 in order to spark a national discussion about mass incarceration.

About the Prison Policy Initiative

The non-profit, non-partisan Prison Policy Initiative was founded in 2001 to expose the broader harm of mass criminalization and spark advocacy campaigns to create a more just society. Alongside reports like this that help the public more fully engage in criminal justice reform, the organization leads the nation’s fight to keep the prison system from exerting undue influence on the political process (a.k.a. prison gerrymandering) and plays a leading role in protecting the families of incarcerated people from the predatory prison and jail telephone industry and the video visitation industry.