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Ohio has an incarceration rate of 659 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 Ohio and why.


71,000 people from Ohio are behind bars

Pie chart showing that 79,000 Ohio residents are locked up in federal prisons, state prisons, local jails and other types of facilities

Additionally, the number of people impacted by county and city jails in Ohio is much larger than the graph above would suggest, because people cycle through local jails relatively quickly. Each year, at least 150,000 different people are booked into local jails in Ohio.


Rates of imprisonment have grown dramatically in the last 40 years

graph showing the number of people in state prison and local jails per 100,000 residents in Ohio from 1978 to 2015 Also see these Ohio graphs:


Graph showing the number of people in Ohio jails who were convicted and the number who were unconvicted, for the years 1978, 1983, 1988, 1993, 1999, 2005, and 2013.


Today, Ohio’s incarceration rates stand out internationally

graphic comparing the incarceration rates of the founding NATO members with the incarceration rates of the United States and the state of Ohio. The incarceration rate of 664 per 100,000 for the United States and 659 for Ohio is much higher than any of the founding NATO members 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

2021 graph showing incarceration rates per 100,000 people of various racial and ethnic groups in Ohio

racial and ethnic disparities between the prison/jail and general population in OH as of 2021


Ohio's criminal justice system is more than just its prisons and jails

Pie chart showing that 331,000 Ohio residents are in various types of correctional facilities or under criminal justice supervision on probation or parole


The high cost of being incarcerated in Ohio

Prisons and jails in Ohio are increasingly shifting the cost of incarceration to people behind bars and their families, hiding the true economic costs of mass incarceration:


Prison-based gerrymandering in Ohio


Our other articles about Ohio



Other resources


Data on COVID-19 in Ohio jails and prisons

We gave Ohio a failing grade in September 2021 for its response to the coronavirus in prisons, noting that:

  • Ohio is one of 13 states that did not explicitly mention incarcerated people in their vaccination rollout plan, and is one of 15 prison systems that has not yet vaccinated more than 60% of the incarcerated population.
  • Ohio was one of 15 prison systems that did not have a policy making hand sanitizer widely available or providing free hygiene products — like soap — to incarcerated people.

For more detail, see our report States of Emergency. Or check out these other resources:

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