At year-end 2019, an estimated 6,344,000 persons were under the supervision of adult correctional systems in the United States, about 65,200 fewer persons than in 2018. The adult correctional system includes persons incarcerated in prisons and jails and persons supervised in the community on probation and parole. This was the first time since 1999 that the correctional population dropped to less than 6.4 million. The correctional population declined by 1.0% in 2019 and has declined an average of 1.3% each year since 2009.
About 1 in 40 adult U.S. residents (2.5%) were under some form of correctional supervision at the end of 2019. This represented a drop from 1 in 32 (3.1%) a decade earlier.
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- The incarceration rate dropped each year during the last decade, from 980 per 100,000 adult U.S. residents held in state or federal prisons or local jails at year-end 2009 to 810 per 100,000 at year-end 2019.
- By the end of 2019, the incarceration rate had dropped to the same rate as 1995 (810 per 100,000 adult U.S. residents).
