“How many women and men are released from each state’s prisons and jails every year?”

The question in the title of this post is the title snd topic of this new Prison Policy Initiative briefing authored by Leah Wang.  The subtitle highlights the contents: “We’ve drilled down into 2019 data to show prison and jail releases by sex in each state and made our best estimates of how many women and men were released from prisons and jails nationwide in 2022.”  These data are fascinating, both the state-by-state numbers and other breakdowns as well as the cumulative data, and they serve to highlight the massive number of people who are subject to some form of incarceration over the course of a year in the US.  

I recommend clicking through to see all the numbers, but I was especially struck that Texas had over a million total releases from prisons and jails in 2019 and California had just shy of a million total releases from prisons and jails that same year.  As a point of comparison, this means that each of these two big states likely had more persons emerging from incarceration than the entire population of states like Vermont and North Dakota.  (I say “likely” because I suspect there are some persons sent to and released from jail multiple times that get double counted in the data on releases.)

For another set of notable numbers, this PPI briefing calculates a total of nearly 11 million releases in 2019 (10,817,398 to be exact), with the total released estimated to have declined in 2022 to “only” 7,659,492.  Even that lower number for estimated 2022 releases is larger than the population of about 35 states; the higher number from 2019 represents a population large enough to be one of the 10 biggest states in the US.  Put another (silly?) way, if all persons released from incarceration in a year were aggregated into a single new state, that new state would get apportioned a whole lot of representatives and electorial votes.