New Jersey has an incarceration rate of 341 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 New Jersey and why.
24,000 people from New Jersey are behind bars
Additionally, the number of people impacted by county and city jails in New Jersey is much larger than the graph above would suggest, because people cycle through local jails relatively quickly. Each year, at least 86,000 different people are booked into local jails in New Jersey.
Using 2020 census data, we looked at where people in New Jersey prisons come from. We found they come from all corners of the state, but disproportionately from the state's largest and smallest communities.
Rates of imprisonment have grown dramatically in the last 40 years
Today, New Jersey’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,
Hispanics,
and Blacks
in New Jersey prisons and jails.
New Jersey's criminal justice system is more than just its prisons and jails
The high cost of being incarcerated in New Jersey
Prisons and jails in New Jersey are increasingly shifting the cost of incarceration to people behind bars and their families, hiding the true economic costs of mass incarceration:
New Jersey suspended its $5 medical copays in prisons at the beginning of the pandemic for flu related medical visits — but should eliminate them completely.
New Jersey 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 New Jersey a "C" grade in September 2021 for its response to the coronavirus in prisons, noting that:
New Jersey reduced their population the most out of all 50 states, and had the second highest vaccination rate.
Nevertheless, New Jersey 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: