Data Source: FBI Crime in the United States 2019 and 2020 Table 29; Bureau of Justice Statistics Jail Inmates in 2020 Table 1; Court Statistics Project STAT Criminal (changes calculated by the Prison Policy Initiative include only states that report data for both years); Bureau of Justice Statistics Prisoners in 2020 Tables 8 and 9. (Graph: Wendy Sawyer, 2022)

This graph originally appeared in Untangling why prison & jail populations dropped early in the pandemic.

The reduction in prison admissions, which explains most of the drop in incarceration in the early pandemic, was the effect of temporary changes in arrest and jail practices, court slowdowns, and the refusal of some prisons to accept transfers from jails. However, the data do not allow us to distinguish how much of the drop in admissions was due to a given type of change, such as transfer refusals versus slowdowns.