The Marshals Rent 56,000 Jail Beds a Day. Half Their Inspectors Never Finished the Training.
Summary
The U.S. Marshals Service held 56,155 people a day in FY2024 — almost all unconvicted, awaiting federal trial or sentencing — in nearly 1,000 rented state, local, and private facilities. Congress funded that system at $2.24 billion for FY2026 and is now weighing a $2.996 billion request for FY2027. GAO found 46% of the deputies who inspect those facilities had never completed the required training, and 65% of the jails hadn't passed a legally required rape-prevention audit in three years.
The bill is rising faster than the population
The account that pays for this — Federal Prisoner Detention — covers housing, subsistence, medical care, and transportation for every person in Marshals Service custody. Congress held it flat at $2.236 billion for both FY2025 and FY2026, according to the Justice Department's FY2027 budget justification. For FY2027, the department is asking for $2.996 billion — a $760 million, 34% jump in a single year, with $218.8 million of that attributed to rising per diem housing costs alone and $99.7 million to a projected increase in the detained population.
View data as table
| FY2025 Enacted | $2.236B | |
|---|---|---|
| FY2026 Enacted | $2.236B | flat vs FY2025 |
| FY2027 Request | $2.996B | +$760M, +34% |
Where the 56,155 people actually are
The Marshals Service's own Facts and Figures fact sheet puts the fiscal year 2024 average daily detention population at 56,155. Nearly three-quarters of that population — 40,652 people — sits in state and local jails, held under more than 941 active intergovernmental agreements. Another 7,233 are in privately contracted facilities, and 8,079 are in Bureau of Prisons space when nothing else is available. The agency paid an average of $116.38 per person per day to keep this system running in FY2024.
View data as table
| State & local jails | 40,652 | 72% of total |
|---|---|---|
| Bureau of Prisons facilities | 8,079 | 14% of total |
| Private facilities (contracted) | 7,233 | 13% of total |
| Other | 191 | <1% of total |
The inspectors aren't trained to inspect
Because the Marshals Service doesn't run these facilities, its only real lever on conditions is the review: a deputy, assigned the job as a collateral duty on top of their normal caseload, walks a facility and checks it against federal detention standards. 's July 2024 review of that process found the review system itself is failing. The agency stopped offering facility-review training in 2020 and didn't resume it during 2021, 2022, or 2023 — so 46% of the deputies who conducted detention facility reviews in fiscal year 2023, 118 of 256, had never completed the training the agency's own policy requires.
The gap shows up in what those reviews are missing. Of 806 state and local facilities holding Marshals Service detainees, 65% — 520 facilities — had not obtained the Prison Rape Elimination Act audit federal standards require within the past three years. Nearly a quarter had skipped tuberculosis testing at intake, and 1 in 10 hadn't had an outside food-safety inspection in over a year. added Marshals Service detention oversight to its list of findings requiring corrective action and made eight recommendations; the agency concurred with all of them.
View data as table
| Facilities missing required PREA audit (3 yrs) | 65% | 520 of 806 |
|---|---|---|
| Deputies who skipped facility-review training | 46% | 118 of 256 |
| Facilities that skipped TB testing at intake | 24% | 190 of 806 |
| Facilities unaudited for food safety in 12 months | 10% | 84 of 805 |
The takeaway
- The federal government doesn't build detention capacity — it rents it, and the rent is rising 34% in a single year while the population it's meant to cover grows far more slowly.
- Almost everyone in this system is legally unconvicted. The 56,155 people held on an average day are awaiting a trial date or a sentencing hearing, not serving a sentence — pretrial detention, at federal scale.
- The only real check on conditions — the deputy review — is broken. Training lapsed for three straight years, and the facilities themselves are skipping legally required safety and abuse-prevention audits at rates called out by name.
Figures span fiscal years 2023 through 2027 across two independent sources — 's own budget submission and 's oversight review — each cited at first use; see Sources for exact reporting periods.
Sources
- U.S. Department of Justice, 2027 Performance Budget — United States Marshals Service, Federal Prisoner Detention Exhibits — the FY2025 Enacted, FY2026 Enacted, and FY2027 Request appropriation figures and the housing/population cost-driver breakdown. justice.gov/jmd/media/1434371
- U.S. Marshals Service, Facts and Figures fact sheet (Prisoner Operations, fiscal year 2024 data) — the 56,155 average daily population, its breakdown by facility type, the 941+ intergovernmental agreements, and the $116.38 average daily detention cost. usmarshals.gov
- U.S. Government Accountability Office, U.S. Marshals Service: Actions Needed to Better Identify and Address Detention Condition Concerns, -24-106348 (July 2024) — the "nearly 60,000" daily population estimate, the deputy training-completion rate, and the facility-level compliance gaps (PREA audits, tuberculosis testing, food-safety inspections). gao.gov/products/gao-24-106348
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The U.S. Marshals Service owns no jails. It runs no cellblocks. Its job is to hold roughly 56,000 people a day — almost none of them convicted of anything, most simply waiting for a federal trial date or a sentencing hearing — inside cells that belong to someone else: a county sheriff, a private contractor, or, when there's no other room, the Bureau of Prisons. That arrangement is a rental market, financed by a federal appropriation and policed by deputies who, per the Government Accountability Office, have mostly stopped being trained to inspect what they're renting.