Policing & Incarceration — checked October 17, 2026
The former CSV's three unsourced incarceration/police-rate rows were replaced, not retained as verified history.
Annual series: BJS Correctional Populations in the United States, 2023, Tables 1 and 3; published September 30, 2025. Download: https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cpus23st.zip . Extracted original CSV files cpus23stt01.csv and cpus23stt03.csv. Counts: columns 11, 13, 15 (zero indexed); all-ages combined incarceration rate: column 9. Years 2013–2023. Counts rounded to 100; rates rounded to 10. Prison records are year-end; local jails are midyear. Combined total adjusts for prison-jail overlap. Do not add the two columns or recalculate rounded published rates. Probation/parole are not included in these totals. The combined series includes limited numbers under age 18 in adult systems.
Latest jail snapshot: Jail Inmates in 2024, final web report published September 2026, replacing the preliminary release. Midyear custody 658,700; unconvicted 68%; Black rate 566 and White rate 149 per 100,000 residents of each group, both non-Hispanic categories. Jail-only, not total incarceration.
Historical prison-only checkpoints: 1970 rate 96 from BJS Prisoners 1925–81 (December 1982), Table 1. The 1970 definition covers adults serving felony sentences in state/federal institutions; custody basis. In 1971 the sentenced series adopted the more-than-one-year definition, and in 1977 shifted from custody to jurisdiction. The HTML and CSV flag this comparability break. Other checkpoints: 1980 rate 139 from Prisoners in 1981 (uses revised 1980 figure; the preliminary Prisoners in 1980 report showed 140). 1990 rate 292 and 2000 rate 478 from Prisoners in 2000. 2010 rate 500 from Prisoners in 2010, revised February 9, 2012. 2023 rate 360 from Prisoners in 2023. The 1980-and-later rows cover sentenced prisoners with more than one year under state/federal jurisdiction per 100,000 residents of all ages. These are published checkpoints, not a newly harmonized annual dataset; do not splice them into the combined table.
International: Public Safety Canada, 2024 Corrections and Conditional Release Statistical Overview, Table A18, 2024 column. Its World Prison Brief retrieval date is April 2, 2025. These are mixed-date underlying counts, not synchronous 2024 measurements; includes pretrial/remand and sentenced populations. 15 countries/jurisdictions reproduced, with exact published rates. The U.S. 541 must not be substituted for the BJS 2023 rounded combined rate of 550. This is a dated comparison, not latest live rates.
Police: 473,000 local full-time sworn officers in 2020 from BJS; excludes sheriffs and other agency types. No unsupported annual police-rate column.
Law summaries describe historical enactments and mechanisms, not quantitative causal estimates. State laws differ. Presidency at signing is context, not sole authorship or responsibility for trends.
All tables are static HTML and remain readable without JavaScript. Old JS loader replaced with a no-op to prevent legacy sample data rendering.

Batch387: added 1970 checkpoint and short 1970s/1980s policy context. State-reform discussion draws on BJS Setting Prison Terms and the NIJ-sponsored Impacts of Sentencing Reforms on Prisons and Crime Rates; avoids attributing a uniform effect to all reforms. Combined modern table and international comparison unchanged.

Batch388 additions (checked October 17, 2026):
State/federal split: BJS Prisoners in 2023 Table 1, December 31 jurisdiction counts, all sentence statuses. State 1,097,597 + federal 156,627 = total 1,254,224; calculated shares 87.5% and 12.5% rounded to one decimal. Exact counts are distinct from the rounded combined report. Includes D.C. felony sentences in the federal system. Excludes local-jail-only population from this comparison.
Pretrial explanation: NCSL statutory framework and constitutional right-to-bail resources; U.S. Courts federal release/detention and speedy-trial history. State variation explicit; federal standards not presented as a universal state rule. No claim that all unconvicted detainees cannot afford bail.
Reentry: NIJ Reentry, Recidivism, and Five Things About Reentry. Rearrest, reconviction, and reincarceration distinguished; follow-up period and population matter. No unsupported universal recidivism rate added.