Iowa has an incarceration rate of 582 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 almost any democracy on earth. Read on to learn more about who is incarcerated in Iowa and why.
Additionally, the number of people impacted by county and city jails in Iowa is much larger than the graph above would suggest, because people cycle through local jails relatively quickly. Each year, at least 40,000 different people are booked into local jails in Iowa.
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, and Blacks in Iowa prisons and jails.
Prisons and jails in Iowa are increasingly shifting the cost of incarceration to people behind bars and their families, hiding the true economic costs of mass incarceration:
We gave Iowa a failing grade in September 2021 for its response to the coronavirus in prisons, noting that:
For more detail, see our report States of Emergency. Or check out these other resources: