This report summarizes data from several collections of the U.S. Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics on populations supervised by adult correctional systems in the United States during 2019.
At year-end 2019, an estimated 6,344,000 persons were under the supervision of adult correctional systems in the United States. This was about 65,200 fewer persons than in 2019. The adult correctional system includes persons incarcerated in prisons and jails, as well as persons on probation and parole in the community. This was the first time since 1999 that the correctional population decreased to less than 6.4 million. The correctional population declined by 1.0 percent in 2019 and has declined an average of 1.3 percent each year since 2009. About 1 in 40 adult U.S. residents (2.5 percent) were under some form of correctional supervision at the end of 2019. This was a decline from 1 in 32 (3.1 percent) a decade earlier. The 1.0 -percent decline in the correctional population during 2019 was due to decreases in the community supervision, a 0.9-percent decline, and incarcerated populations, down 1.7 percent. Since 2009, the correctional population decreased by 12.4 percent (down 895,200 persons), with an average of 1.3 percent annually. By the end of 2019, the community-supervision population had decreased to 4,357,700, its lowest level in the last two decades. This was due to a decline in the probation population (decrease of 47,100). The decline in the incarcerated population during 2019 was primarily in the prison population. From 2009 to 2019, the parole population increased by 6.6 percent and was the only correctional population with an overall increase during this period. 9 tables and 1 figure