Indiana has an incarceration rate of 765 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 Indiana and why.
49,000 people from Indiana are behind bars
Additionally, the number of people impacted by county and city jails in Indiana is much larger than the graph above would suggest, because people cycle through local jails relatively quickly. Each year, at least 122,000 different people are booked into local jails in Indiana.
Rates of imprisonment have grown dramatically in the last 40 years
Today, Indiana’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
See also our detailed graphs about Whites
and Blacks
in Indiana prisons and jails.
Indiana's criminal justice system is more than just its prisons and jails
The high cost of being incarcerated in Indiana
Prisons and jails in Indiana are increasingly shifting the cost of incarceration to people behind bars and their families, hiding the true economic costs of mass incarceration:
Indiana suspended its $5 medical copays in prisons at the beginning of the pandemic for flu related medical visits — but should eliminate them completely.
If a person in Indiana prisons has more than $15 in their commissary account they do not qualify for assistance to purchase essentials like hygiene items and postage for legal mail.
Indiana is one of only 8 state prison systems that did not offer free phone calls at any point during the pandemic.
Indiana 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: