Rhode Island has an incarceration rate of 289 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 Rhode Island and why.
Additionally, the number of people impacted by county and city jails in Rhode Island is much larger than the graph above would suggest, because people cycle through local jails relatively quickly. Each year, at least 19,000 different people are booked into local jails in Rhode Island.
Also see these Rhode Island graphs:
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 Rhode Island prisons.
We gave Rhode Island a failing grade in September 2021 for its response to the coronavirus in prisons, noting that Rhode Island 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: