Most People in County Jail Have Not Been Convicted of Anything

A county jail is supposed to be a waystation: people pass through on the way to a plea, a trial, a sentence, or a release.▸ Look at who is actually inside one today and the waystation has become the destination. At midyear 2023, local jails held 664,200 people, and 70% of them — 467,600 people, per the Bureau of Justice Statistics — had not been convicted of anything. They were awaiting a court date, a bail hearing, or a trial. The jail isn't punishing them for a verdict. It's holding them while one is still pending.

Corrections is the function that pays for jails — as distinct from police protection, which pays to arrest people, and judicial and legal functions, which pay to try them.▸ In the most recent year the Census Bureau published a full breakdown, local governments spent $153.6 billion running their justice systems, and corrections was the third-largest slice: $30.0 billion, behind police protection ($99.1 billion) but ahead of the courts and public defense combined ($24.6 billion).

Of that $30.0 billion, per the same BJS bulletin, counties carried $25.2 billion — 84 cents of every corrections dollar spent by local government — with municipalities picking up most of the rest.▸ That county-level figure lines up almost exactly with an independent Pew Charitable Trusts / Vera Institute analysis of the same Census data, which put local jail spending specifically at $25 billion and found staff payroll alone eats 73% of it. And 2017 is not a typo for "recent" — it is the newest year the federal government has published a complete functional breakdown of what police, courts, and jails cost local taxpayers. Nobody has kept the receipts current since.

The population side of the ledger is current — through midyear 2023 — and it tells a sharper story than the spending side.▸ The jail population fell 9.2% over the decade, from 731,200 to 664,200. That sounds like a system shrinking. But split the population by conviction status and the shrinkage is entirely on one side: the convicted population fell 29.3%, from 278,000 to 196,600, while the unconvicted population grew 3.2%, from 453,200 to 467,600. A smaller jail system now spends a larger share of its capacity on people the courts haven't gotten around to.

The churn underneath those totals fell even faster.▸ Local jails booked 7.6 million admissions in the 12 months ending June 2023, down 35% from 11.7 million a decade earlier, according to the same BJS report. Fewer people are cycling through — but the ones who stay, stay longer: average time in custody rose from about 25 days in 2015 to 32 days in 2023. Staffing didn't keep pace with that shift toward longer, pretrial holds — local jail staff fell slightly, from 213,000 in 2015 to 211,700 in 2023, and correctional officers specifically dropped 2.7% over the same span. The jails themselves grew: rated bed capacity rose 4.9% from 2013 to 2023, even as the share of those beds actually occupied fell from 84% to 73%. Counties built more room for a population that, on the numbers, didn't need more room — it needed a faster docket.

Population, admission, and staffing figures are the Bureau of Justice Statistics' Annual Survey of Jails and Census of Jails, reported for the 12-month period or midyear reference date noted in each figure. Spending figures are Census Bureau Census of Governments data for fiscal year 2017 as extracted by BJS; no more recent full functional breakdown of local corrections spending has been published as of this writing.