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.
17,000 people from Iowa are behind bars
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.
Rates of imprisonment have grown dramatically in the last 40 years
Today, Iowa’s incarceration rates stand out internationally
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.
People of color are overrepresented in prisons and jails
Iowa's criminal justice system is more than just its prisons and jails
The high cost of being incarcerated in Iowa
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:
The cost of incarcerating older people is incredibly high, and their risk of reincarceration is incredibly low, yet 12% of people in Iowa prisons are over the age of 55. Why is the state keeping so many older people locked up?
Iowa is one of 20 states that locks up some people convicted of sex offenses in shadowy "civil commitment" facilities, long after their sentences are over — and often indefinitely
We gave Iowa a failing grade in September 2021 for its response to the coronavirus in prisons, noting that:
Iowa is one of 15 prison systems that had not yet vaccinated more than 60% of the incarcerated population.
Iowa failed to utilize one of the most obvious, and easiest, tools for reducing the prison population — stopping prison admissions for technical violations of probation and parole (which are not crimes).
For more detail, see our report States of Emergency. Or check out these other resources: