Arizona has an incarceration rate of 868 per 100,000 people (including prisons, jails, immigration detention, and juvenile justice facilities), meaning that it locks up a higher percentage of its people than any democracy on earth. Read on to learn more about who is incarcerated in Arizona and why.
Additionally, the number of people impacted by county and city jails in Arizona is much larger than the graph above would suggest, because people cycle through local jails relatively quickly. Each year, at least 117,000 different people are booked into local jails in Arizona.
Also see these Arizona graphs:
In the U.S., incarceration extends beyond prisons and local jails to include other systems of confinement. The U.S. and state incarceration rates in this graph include people held by these other parts of the justice system, so they may be slightly higher than the commonly reported incarceration rates that only include prisons and jails. Details on the data are available in States of Incarceration: The Global Context. We also have a version of this graph focusing on the incarceration of women.
See also our detailed graphs about Whites, Hispanics, Blacks, and American Indians/Native Americans in Arizona prisons and jails. Additionally see our graph about Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders who are overrepresented in Arizona prisons because Hawaii outsources a significant portion of its incarcerated population to a private prison in Eloy, Arizona.
Prisons and jails in Arizona are increasingly shifting the cost of incarceration to people behind bars and their families, hiding the true economic costs of mass incarceration:
We gave Arizona a failing grade in September 2021 for its response to the coronavirus in prisons, noting that Arizona is one of 13 states that did not implement any policies to accelerate releases, promote medical parole or compassionate release, prevent incarceration for technical violations of probation and parole, or hasten releases for people incarcerated on minor offenses.
For more detail, see our report States of Emergency. Or check out these other resources: