Population Items
Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2018
With growing public attention to the problem of mass incarceration, people want to know about women’s experience with incarceration. How many women are held in prisons, jails, and other correctional facilities in the United States? And why are they there? How is their experience different from men’s? While these are important questions, finding those answers requires not only disentangling the country’s decentralized and overlapping criminal justice systems, but also unearthing the frustratingly hard to find and often altogether missing data on gender.
Quick Facts - United States
QuickFacts provides statistics for all states and counties, and for cities and towns with a population of 5,000 or more.
About datasets used in this table
Value Notes
Estimates are not comparable to other geographic levels due to methodology differences that may exist between different data sources.
2018 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects
Today, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 68% by 2050. Projections show that urbanization, the gradual shift in residence of the human population from rural to urban areas, combined with the overall growth of the world’s population could add another 2.5 billion people to urban areas by 2050, with close to 90% of this increase taking place in Asia and Africa, according to a new United Nations data set launched today.
Prisoners in 2017
The United States prison population declined from 1,508,129 at the end of 2016 to 1,489,363 at the end of 2017, a decrease of 1.2%. During the same period, the number of prisoners under the jurisdiction of federal correctional authorities decreased by 6,100 (down 3%), and the number of prisoners under the jurisdiction of state correctional authorities fell by 12,600 (down 1%). The imprisonment rate for sentenced prisoners was the lowest since 1997, at 440 prisoners per 100,000 U.S. residents of all ages and 568 per 100,000 U.S. residents age 18 or older.
Federal Justice Statistics, 2015-2016
This report describes persons processed by the federal criminal justice system. Data are from the Federal Justice Statistics Program (FJSP). The FJSP collects, standardizes, and reports on administrative data received from six federal justice agencies: the U.S. Marshals Service, Drug Enforcement Administration, Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, U.S. Sentencing Commission, and Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Jail Inmates in 2017
County and city jails in the United States reported a total confned population of 745,200 inmates at midyear 2017. About 65% (482,000) of the confned inmates were awaiting court action on a current charge. The remaining 35% (263,200) were sentenced or convicted ofenders awaiting sentencing. The jail incarceration rate at midyear 2017 was 229 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents, down from 259 per 100,000 at midyear 2007 and 237 per 100,000 at midyear 2012.
Capital Punishment, 2016
This report includes data on persons under sentence of death, persons executed, and the status of the death penalty at the state and federal level. Data on prisoners under sentence of death were obtained from the department of corrections in each jurisdiction that authorized the death penalty on December 31, 2016. Information on the status of death penalty statutes was obtained from the office of the Attorney General in each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government.
Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2018
Can it really be true that most people in jail are being held before trial? And how much of mass incarceration is a result of the war on drugs? These questions are harder to answer than you might think, because our country’s systems of confinement are so fragmented. The various government agencies involved in the justice system collect a lot of critical data, but it is not designed to help policymakers or the public understand what’s going on. Meaningful criminal justice reform that reduces the massive scale of incarceration, however, requires that we start with the big picture.
7 demographic trends shaping the U.S. and the world in 2018
Millennials are projected to outnumber Baby Boomers next year.
A record number of Americans live in multigenerational households, part of a broader trend toward more shared living.
The institution of marriage continues to change.
After decades of decline, motherhood and family size are ticking up in the U.S.
There are more than 250 million migrants worldwide.
New refugee arrivals are down in the U.S. and their religious composition has changed.
International arrivals to the U.S. have risen among some groups.
Correctional Populations in the United States, 2016
Prisoners in 2018
Capital Punishment, 2017: Selected Findings
Jail Inmates in 2018
Probation and Parole in the United States, 2016
An estimated 4,537,100 adults were under community supervision as of December 31, 2016 (year-end), a decline of 1.1% from 4,586,900 on January 1, 2016. An estimated one in 55 adults in the United States were under community supervision at year-end 2016. Persons on probation accounted for the majority (81%) of adults under community supervision.
Youth Confinement: The Whole Pie 2019
On any given day, over 48,000 youth in the United States are confined in facilities away from home as a result of juvenile justice or criminal justice involvement. Most are held in restrictive, correctional-style facilities, and thousands are held without even having had a trial. But even these high figures represent astonishing progress: Since 2000, the number of youth in confinement has fallen by 60%, a trend that shows no sign of slowing down.
To Safely Cut Incarceration, States Rethink Responses to Supervision Violations
Recent research from The Pew Charitable Trusts found that about 4.5 million people in the United States are on community supervision as of 2016. Probation and parole provide a measure of accountability while allowing those who would otherwise have been incarcerated or have already served a term behind bars to meet their obligations to their families, communities, and victims.
Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019
Can it really be true that most people in jail are being held before trial? And how much of mass incarceration is a result of the war on drugs? These questions are harder to answer than you might think, because our country’s systems of confinement are so fragmented. The various government agencies involved in the justice system collect a lot of critical data, but it is not designed to help policymakers or the public understand what’s going on.
U.S. Prison Population Trends: Massive Buildup and Modest Decline
By yearend 2017, 1.4 million people were imprisoned in the United States, a decline of 7% since the prison population reached its peak level in 2009. This follows a nearly 700% growth in the prison population between 1972 and 2009.
Immigration, Citizenship, and the Federal Justice System, 1998-2018
What the rest of the world can learn from Norway's prison system
Early research on the effects of prison concluded that prisoner rehabilitation programmes do not work (Martinson 1974). This research was influential in rehabilitation gradually taking a back seat in favour of prison policies emphasising punishment and incapacitation. Subsequent scholars questioned the evidence base for this conclusion (Cullen 2005), but as Nagin et at. (2009) summarise, “Remarkably little is known about the effects of imprisonment on reoffending.
Mapping America’s Futures
What will America look like in 2030?
We can already see that the population is aging and becoming more diverse, but how will those trends play out at the local and regional levels? And what if, in the future, we live longer or have more babies? How would those trends affect the population in different cities and states?
QuickFacts - United States
QuickFacts provides statistics for all states and counties, and for cities and towns with a population of 5,000 or more.
About datasets used in this table
Value Notes
Estimates are not comparable to other geographic levels due to methodology differences that may exist between different data sources.
Some estimates presented here come from sample data, and thus have sampling errors that may render some apparent differences between geographies statistically indistinguishable. Click the Quick Info icon to the left of each row in
Global Peace Index 2019
The Global Peace Index 2019 report finds that the average level of global peacefulness improved very slightly in the 2019 GPI. This is the first time the index has improved in five years. The average country score improved by -0.09 per cent, with 86 countries improving, and 76 recording deteriorations. The 2019 GPI reveals a world in which the conflicts and crises that emerged in the past decade have begun to abate, but new tensions within and between nations have emerged.
Housing Crunch Sends Bigger Populations to Smaller Towns
Cities with fewer than 200,000 residents grew faster than larger metropolises between 2017 and 2018 as high housing prices chased many people away from big cities and their closest suburbs.
The biggest cities grew by a collective 326,000 people, less than half the number earlier in the decade, and less than the number for smaller cities — 421,000 for cities with populations between 10,000 and 50,000.