Fascinating data on state court criminal cases from the Court Statistics Project

I just came accross this recent data document from the Court Statistics Project, which collects annual caseload data from state courts. The document has notable data on all sorts of notable aspects of state court work, and here are just some of the criminal case highlights and the broader context:

In 2022, state courts handled 64.6 million incoming cases, a 2% increase from 2021, but caseloads are still down by 18.7 million cases when compared to the 2019 total of 83.2 million. As previously reported, 2020 represented a historic low for incoming caseloads. Courts started seeing a rebound in 2021 and 2022. Incoming civil cases were up 5% from 2021 to 2022, domestic relations and criminal cases were up 2%, and incoming traffic cases increased by 1%. Juvenile cases, in contrast to the overall trend, experienced a further decline in incoming cases from 2020 to 2021, before showing a 7% increase in 2022.

Criminal cases saw a slight increase in 2022.  They were up 2% from 2021, although still down 14% from 2019. In total, 46 states reported 13.7 million incoming criminal cases in 2022.  Ten million incoming misdemeanor cases (defined as those crimes with a maximum punishment of one year in jail and/or fines) were reported for 44 states, an increase of 1% from 2021 and a 16% drop from 2019.  Felony cases showed a 4% decrease from 2021 to 2.9 million cases. This is 10% below 2019 levels for incoming felony cases.

I often find it hard to fully wrap my head around these large numbers, and so I sometimes think about what these caseload numbers mean on a daily basis. In rough terms, these annual data mean that on each and every average work day there are 12,000 incoming felony cases and 40,000 incoming misdemeanor cases.