As the United States is the leader in many things, we are the world leader in incarceration, we lock up more people per capita than any other nation.

By the end of 2020, there were more than 1.8 million incarcerated Americans.

In  2018,  U.S. incarceration rate is nine times higher than Germany, eight times higher than Italy, five times higher than the U.K., and 15 times higher than Japan. 

There are 700,000 people in jail on any given day, and there are 1.2 million people in prison. What is overlooked is the number of people who are admitted to jail annually, which is roughly around 10 million jail admissions. Another important distinction between the jail population and the prison population is that, of the people who are held in jail, about two-thirds of them are being held pretrial. That means they haven’t been convicted of a crime and they’re innocent unless they’re proven to be guilty.

In many cities and states, money often decides who stays in jail and who gets out.