Following the Money of Mass Incarceration 2026

By Jacob Kang-Brown and Peter Wagner   Tweet this
February 11, 2026
Black and white version of infographic

The costs of funding the police — especially the bloated budgets of militarized federal agencies in the Department of Homeland Security — have become a recurring theme in discussions about criminal legal system policy. At the same time, crime has declined and fewer people are incarcerated, yet spending on the criminal legal system has still increased faster than inflation. All parts of the system, from local jails to fines and fees and prison industries, deserve a clear accounting and a hard look. Understanding more clearly who benefits and who pays can help re-orient budgets away from punishment and exclusion and toward public health and safety.

In an update to our 2017 report, we find that the broad system of mass incarceration costs the government and families of system-involved people at least $445 billion every year.

In this report:

  • We provide the most significant1 costs of the nation’s globally-unprecedented system of mass incarceration and criminalization,
  • We show the relative scale of the various parts of that system,
  • We explain how funding for policing has rapidly increased, including the recent influx of federal dollars to immigration enforcement,
  • We highlight some of the costly yet often overlooked parts of the system, and then
  • We share all of our sources so that journalists and advocates can build upon our work.

The expenses covered in this report do not include a full accounting of the current, ongoing economic harms of mass incarceration. For example, we do not include recent estimates of income lost when people get sent to jail or prison ($111 billion per year) or income lost by children of incarcerated parents during their working years ($215 billion per year).2 For that reason, our estimate — as massive as it is — should be viewed as a limited one.


Graph showing the $445 billion system of mass incarceration and the relative size of its component parts from policing to courts to private companies. Private prisons are a very small part of the total.


Our goal with this report is to give the “big picture” view of the economic incentives that help shape the criminal legal system, by identifying some of the key stakeholders and quantifying their “stake” in the status quo. Our data visualization shows how wide and how deep mass incarceration and criminalization have spread into the U.S. economy. We find:

  • Policing is a massive public expense and its spending has grown faster than other parts of the system in recent years.
  • Federal expenditures related to policing and the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda now make up 25% of all government spending on the criminal legal system.
  • Almost half of the money spent on running the correctional system goes to paying staff. These employees form an influential lobby that sometimes blocks reform and whose jobs are often protected even when prison populations drop.3
  • The criminal legal system is overwhelmingly a public system, with private prison companies acting only as extensions of the public system. The government payroll for corrections employees is over 100 times higher than the private prison industry’s profits.
  • Individuals who come into contact with the system — and their loved ones — pay over $27.7 billion a year in fines and fees, bail premiums, commissary payments, and telecommunications costs. This is over five times the amount that goes to private prisons and detention centers.
  • Despite the fact that the Constitution requires counsel to be appointed for defendants unable to afford legal representation, the government spends only $7.9 billion on this right.
  • Feeding and providing health care for nearly 2 million people, even as inadequately as they do behind bars, is expensive at $18 billion per year.

What’s changed since 2017

Public funding for the criminal legal system has increased in recent years, even as the number of people involved in the system has declined, reflecting changes in priorities as well as economic factors like inflation. The largest total increase has been funding for policing, but the most rapid funding increase came in 2025 for ICE, Border Patrol and other agencies involved in the criminalization of immigration and immigration detention.4

Chart comparing 2017 and 2025 costs of policing, corrections, courts, and immigration policing and detention after adjusting for inflation. Government spending for policing and immigration policing and detention both grew dramatically, while the increased spending on corrections and courts was outpaced by inflation.

The 31% inflation from 2017 to 2025 can disguise some of the changes in spending, so this visual adjusts the 2017 figures to their value in 2025. For the unadjusted figures and sourcing, see the text and methodology.

Spending on policing rose by $58.3 billion (a 40% increase) between 2017 and 2025. Expanded federal budgets account for about one-third of that increase ($19.3 billion), while state and local policing budgets grew by $38.5 billion. In contrast to the steep funding increase for police agencies, spending on public libraries grew only 22% in this same time period, from $12.7 to $15.4 billion, not even keeping pace with inflation (which was 31.5% between 2017 and 2025).5

Corrections spending, a category that includes local jail, prison, probation, and parole systems, shot up $24.8 billion (a 27% increase) between 2017 and 2025, even as correctional populations shrank by over 1 million people (15%). Even as prison and jail populations have dropped, correctional payrolls continue to swell; agencies rely on overtime to meet staffing requirements and offer increasingly generous pay in vain attempts to relieve chronic understaffing.

Judicial and legal expenses connected to criminal law enforcement, such as spending on prosecution and defense, grew by $10.7 billion (a 32% increase). While still under-funded compared to prosecution, increased funding for indigent defense has narrowed the gap in some states.6

Finally, federal immigration- and border-related policing and immigration detention totaled $54.3 billion in 2025, up from $20 billion in 2017, making this the fastest-growing public expense in the sector.7 The 2025 budget, 2.7 times larger than in 2017, now makes up 13% of all government spending on the criminal legal system.

Conclusions

This report and infographic are a step toward better understanding who benefits from mass incarceration and why some stakeholders might be more resistant to reform. We have no doubt that we missed some costs, and we did not include some costs because they are currently unknowable or are relatively small in the big picture. But, by following the money, one can see that private prison corporations aren’t the only ones who benefit from mass incarceration. By far, the public agencies and public employees are the key beneficiaries. Some of the lesser-known major players in the system of mass incarceration and criminalization include:

  • Bail bond companies that collect $1.65 billion in nonrefundable fees from defendants and their families. The industry also actively works to block or rollback reforms that threaten its profits, even though reforms have been shown to reduce wealth-based pretrial detention while maintaining public safety.
  • Commissary vendors and specialized telecommunications companies that sell goods, tablets, and phone calls to incarcerated people — who rely largely on money sent by loved ones — is an even larger industry that brings in $5.6 billion a year.
  • Correctional health care providers that provide, at great cost, inadequate staffing, medicine, and care to people behind bars.

A graphic like this shows the relative economic cost of different parts of mass incarceration, but it can also obscure the fact that we don’t have a single monolithic “system.” Instead, we have 50 state systems, thousands of local government systems, and a federal system. The federal system includes both criminal law enforcement and a bloated federal immigration system oriented towards criminalization and detention. Sometimes these local, state, and federal systems work together, but often they do not, and looking at one “national” picture can obscure the importance of state and local policy decisions. For example, while state government spending makes up the majority (57%) of corrections costs, local governments make up close to a third (31%).8 Local governments are largely enforcing state law, and local discretionary arrest and bail policies can have tremendous influence on both the state budget and legal system outcomes. For example, most of the cost of running local jails is spent detaining people who have not been convicted. Similarly, in some places, fines and fees are a major source of local revenue and thus incentivize both criminalization and unfair taxation. In turn, these fines and fees contribute to mass incarceration.

This report serves as a starting point for those ready to look at these systems anew, given the astronomical economic, social, and human costs of mass incarceration. To be sure, there are ideological as well as economic reasons for mass incarceration and criminalization. But at this moment, when crime is near record lows and federal policymakers seek to criminalize large numbers of people, we need a far more expansive view of how our criminal legal system works, whom it hurts, and whom it really serves.

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Methodology

While this report asks a very simple question about the financial costs of criminalization and incarceration, a comprehensive answer is not available from the government, because they don’t collect or organize these statistics in one place. Like our report Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie, which looks at who is behind bars and why, this report aggregates economic data to offer a “big picture” view of who pays for and who benefits from policing and mass incarceration.

In this update of Following the Money of Mass Incarceration, we calculate many of the top-level expenditure numbers directly from the U.S. Census source data and the federal budget, rather than relying on out-of-date Bureau of Justice Statistics reports.9 We follow the methods used by the Bureau of Justice Statistics to classify federal spending as either policing, judicial and legal, or corrections, but make improvements where necessary for accuracy. 10 We also split out federal spending that is primarily for the criminalization of immigration, the detention of immigrants and asylum seekers, ICE and Border Patrol and other Department of Homeland Security funding connected to those aims.

Before we explain our sources and methodology, it might be helpful to explain our goals and how this report’s finding that mass incarceration consumes at least $445 billion each year is different than the two more commonly cited Bureau of Justice Statistics figures:

  • $89 billion11 addressing only the cost of running corrections systems (jails, prisons, probation, and parole), which misses the policing and court costs, as well as all of the other costs that families have to pay to support their incarcerated loved ones.
  • $305 billion,12 which includes the costs of federal, state, and local corrections and the entire police and court systems. This figure does not separate out the civil parts of court systems (as ours does), nor does it address the collateral costs paid by the families of incarcerated people, making it at turns both over- and under-inclusive.

This report’s goal is to identify the total cost of criminalization and incarceration and the comparative investment that each part of that system has in the status quo. We wanted to take a holistic view without also exaggerating our findings by including, for example, court expenses dedicated to civil caseloads.

Like our first report in 2017, this report develops national estimates of spending where none existed before. But our approach does have a few weaknesses that other researchers building on this work should be aware of:

  • We decided not to include any expenses that do not appear to add up to at least $1 billion a year, for example, the money transfer industry, prison banking, or the release card industry.
  • Our effort to separate out the civil components of judicial and legal expenditures cannot be considered complete, and some technically civil costs are included in our report. As we explain in the sections on the judicial and legal system below, our adjustment is both rough and subject to definitional weaknesses. For future reports, we would be very interested in seeing studies that estimate the civil vs. criminal breakdown in individual jurisdictions in order to improve our national estimates. Further, we do include the cost of civil immigration detention. While these facilities and the confinement there are technically civil, in reality they are quite like prisons. We also include civil asset forfeiture, a mechanism by which law enforcement agencies can seize and retain property on the suspicion that the property is connected to a crime.
  • There are other categories where the information is incomplete and therefore undercounts the costs. For example, as we discuss in the public employees section below, the figure for public employees doesn’t include state and local contributions to retiree pensions because many governments make lump-sum contributions to retirement systems and cannot separate out legal system employees. Because existing data systems were never designed to give this kind of holistic view, this report may significantly understate the total fiscal cost. Another cost not included in this report are the payouts that result from people suing criminal justice agencies for civil rights, personal injury, and employment claims. We did not include this cost because the only reliable way to quantify these expenses would be to check jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction. Many jurisdictions use special funds or risk retention pools to pay this type of legal liability, and all payouts are budgeted to that centralized fund rather than the agency that is responsible for the underlying claim.13
  • We don’t fully track how money paid by families or seized from defendants is then used by the system. For example, private telephone and commissary companies often kickback a portion of their revenue to the government entity that awarded the contract. While important, this revenue often goes to the state or county’s general fund, so we chose not to include that complication.14 Similarly, revenue from civil asset forfeiture is generally used to benefit the police or district attorney’s offices.
  • Due to austerity at federal statistical agencies, some of the available data are significantly older than others. In particular, the only known data for the costs of correctional food (2001), utilities (2001) and health care (2015) are particularly outdated and surely result in a significant understatement of current costs, so we adjusted for inflation using conservative estimates wherever possible. (The sources and years for the data are provided below.)

This report includes a brief discussion of spending changes between 2017 and 2025. Because inflation has been relatively high in recent years, for the graphic display of change, we adjusted 2017 expenditures into 2025 dollars. But government budgets are generally not directly tied to inflation, and changes reflect multiple decisions made year over year by elected officials to address increased wages and costs but also to increase spending on mass incarceration. Thus, here we provide both adjusted and unadjusted numbers for reference.

Government spending on mass incarceration grew from 2017 to 2025

Table 1. Estimated government spending on mass incarceration, with and without inflation adjustment to make 2017 directly comparable to 2025 (in billions).
Area 2017 un-adjusted 2017 adjusted 2025
Policing $144.9 $190.4 $203.2
Corrections $90.9 $119.5 $115.8
Immigration Policing & Detention $20.0 $26.3 $54.3
Judicial & Legal $33.1 $43.5 $43.8
Total $288.9 $379.8 $417.1

What follows is a description of the data sources and assumptions used for each part of the infographic. Each circle’s area is in proportion with the value being represented. We welcome ideas on newer data sources, more precise estimates, and information on costs that we missed.

Judicial and legal:

Our calculations using the latest data from the Office of Management and Budget’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget and the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2023 Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances indicate that the combined total of federal, state, and local expenditures on the judicial and legal system is $87.6 billion annually.15 Because these figures include both criminal and civil law aspects of the court system, we reduced this figure using the late criminologist Nils Christie’s estimate that 50% of court expenditures are criminal law related.16 With rounding, our figure is $43.8 billion.

While our calculations are aimed at excluding costs associated with the civil legal system, it is important to recognize that mass incarceration has substantial economic impacts on civil courts. First, a material portion of the federal courts’ workload consists of habeas corpus petitions, motions to vacate sentences, complaints involving prison and detention conditions and cases concerning the civil rights of people in prisons and detention centers. These are all reported as civil matters, even though they are driven by the system of mass incarceration and immigration detention. Data from the federal court system shows that such matters constituted 18% of district court civil filings and 38% of appellate court civil filings in the year ending in June 2025.17 Second, criminal caseloads can “squeeze out” civil cases.18 Since 1986, workloads for federal judges have increased, driven by the increase in criminal cases. Unlike civil cases, criminal defendants have a right to a speedy trial, which means that as criminal workload increases, judges are sometimes forced to prioritize criminal cases, resulting in a slower pace for civil matters and imposing opportunity costs on civil litigants. Presumably this dynamic is even more acute in state courts, which handle more criminal cases than the federal system.

Judicial and legal expenditures include expenses for prosecutors ($8.5 billion in our estimate from recent data)19 and for indigent defense ($7.9 billion in 2023).20 The indigent defense expenses include both public defender agencies and private counsel appointed by the courts, but it would not include the currently unknown billions paid by individuals and families to private defense and appellate attorneys. The prosecutor number does not include prosecutors in municipal courts, where City Attorneys and other local prosecutors handle many misdemeanors. Including misdemeanor prosecutor’s budgets would lead to a higher number for prosecutors, meaning that this $8.5 billion is an underestimate. For example, to account for just one city: the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Criminal and Special Litigation Division handling misdemeanor prosecution has an FY 2025 budget of $67 million.

And notably, judicial and legal costs do not include monetary payments paid by governments when they are sued in a judicial or administrative proceeding.

Policing:

Our calculations use the latest data from the Office of Management and Budget’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget and the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2023 Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances.21 We find $153.8 billion in state and local spending, and federal policing funding approved through the regular budget process in FY 2025 was $48.5 billion. We also include the additional funding from Congress under P.L. 119-21, also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill, for federal policing agencies (the Secret Service received an additional $1.47 billion, averaged to $290 million a year).22 Also in 2025, President Trump deployed thousands of members of the National Guard to cities like Los Angeles, Memphis, and Washington, D.C., supposedly to address crime. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the costs for deploying National Guard personnel to be $496 million in 2025. Thus, we estimate that the combined total of federal budgets and state and local expenditures on policing was $203.2 billion.

In a change from the 2017 version of this report, we include the full cost of policing, and no longer separate out costs for criminal and civil components of police work. Previously, we relied on Nils Christie’s estimate that 50% of police expenditures are related to the enforcement of the criminal law to reduce the policing total by half,23 reasoning that the other aspects of policing were unrelated to the system of mass incarceration. In the years since, we have changed our thinking about that, particularly in light of how much “civil” policing results in criminalization, such as jailing people for nonpayment of fines and fees. There is some evidence of how police spend their time: responses to medical situations or non-criminal calls for service can be substantial, and immigration- and border-related policing by federal agencies is generally considered civil law enforcement (which is currently funded at very high levels). There is an urgent need for more precise data on police expenditures for projects like this report and, more importantly, to help state and local governments make useful, comparative policy decisions about what are and what are not appropriate duties for law enforcement. In addition, note that because in most states, sheriffs’ departments are multifunctional agencies providing police protection, judicial, or correctional services, the U.S. Census divides expenditures by function to corrections, policing, and judicial and legal rather than source agency.24

Government payroll data across local and state agencies for March 2024 indicated 952,690 full-time equivalent police protection employees, and an annual payroll figure of $91.96 billion.25 This figure doesn’t include all state and local contributions to retiree pensions because many governments make lump-sum contributions to retirement systems and cannot separate out justice employees. It also does not include federal employees.

While we do not include it in this report because of the private nature of the funding, in some cities, police receive significant funding from donations. Private donations to police generally flow through third-party police foundations, and are not included in public budgets. Police foundations offer wealthy donors and corporations privacy and favorable tax treatment.26 Cop City, the controversial militarized police training facility in Atlanta, has been largely funded by private donations. In terms of national scale, a 2025 academic paper using data from 2014 to 2019 found 961 police finance organizations that collectively spent at least $461 million during that period (and this includes only partial-year data for 2017 and 2019). More research is needed on the scale of private donations to police post-2019, when elite support consolidated in the face of social movement demands to defund the police.

Immigration policing and detention:

In this report, we call special attention to the work of ICE, Border Patrol, and other agencies involved in the criminalization of immigration and immigration detention. These estimates are a lower bound because they do not include the portions of regular budgets at federal policing agencies like the DEA, FBI, ATF, or U.S. Marshals that have dedicated their agents to immigration raids and arrests, or the routine costs of federal prosecutors involved in criminalizing immigration, or the expenses of detention for people charged with immigration-related crimes in federal courts. Further, our estimates do not include the costs that local police agencies incur when they deputize officers to serve ICE via the 287(g) program. Our calculations use the latest data from the Office of Management and Budget’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget as well as additional funding from Congress under P.L. 119-21, also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill, for federal policing agencies and grants for state and local government.27

Federal funding approved through the regular budget process in FY 2025 was $30.12 billion, and P.L. 119-21 made an additional $125.24 billion available over multiple fiscal years, mostly until FY 2029.28 Because P.L. 119-21 appropriated funding that can be used over multiple fiscal years, we created annual averages for these amounts, although they could be spent in a single fiscal year, or unspent amounts could be clawed back and rescinded by subsequent congressional action. To support criminalization of immigration, P.L. 119-21 includes funding for recruitment for ICE and Border Patrol, expanded detention capacity, and expanded federal law enforcement training.29 We do not include the $46.5 billion appropriated for wall-related infrastructure near the U.S.-Mexico border, which would add $9.3 billion annually through FY 2029. Of the money in P.L. 119-21, $13.5 billion is meant to support state criminalization of immigration.30 The annualized impact of P.L. 119-21 from FY 2025 through FY 2029 is a $24.22 billion increase in spending on immigration policing and detention each year, bringing the annual total to $54.3 billion.

Regarding immigration detention specifically, ICE is the primary agency responsible.31 Custody Operations, a unit within ICE responsible for detention, was appropriated $3.9 billion through the regular process in FY 2025 and received $45 billion through FY 2029 via P.L. 119-21. We also include $470 million appropriated in FY 2025 for Alternatives to Detention, which primarily pays for electronic monitoring conducted by a subsidiary of The GEO Group, B.I. Incorporated. This means immigration detention accounts for $13.4 billion a year.32 We have found that in 2025, $2.4 billion went to private prison companies that operate immigration detention (discussed below).

Direct costs to families and individuals:

We estimate that at least $27.7 billion is paid directly into the criminal legal system by people who are involved or their families. These costs range from court-imposed fines and fees, bail fees paid to bondsmen, bail forfeiture, and civil asset forfeiture, as well as costs that families pay to support loved ones in prison for things like telecommunications and commissary.

  • State and local fines, fees, and bail forfeitures: The U.S. Census Bureau sheds light on criminal legal system fines, fees, and bail forfeitures through the Census of State and Local Governments. The Census measure of revenue related to fines and forfeitures amounted to $15.1 billion in 2023.33 States collected $6 billion, and local governments collected $9.1 billion. The Census defines these fines and forfeitures as follows:
    Revenue from penalties imposed for violations of law; civil penalties (e.g., for violating court orders); court fees if levied upon conviction of a crime or violation; court-ordered restitutions to crime victims where government actually collects the monies; and forfeits of deposits held for performance guarantees or against loss or damage (such as forfeited bail and collateral).
    This definition explicitly excludes civil asset forfeiture, library fines, or penalties related to delinquent taxes.

    The existing research makes the heavy burden of fines and fees on families clear.34 At the local level in particular, criminal legal system fines and fees can be a substantial portion of government revenue.35 Even when fines and fees make up lower shares of local revenue, however, researchers have shown reliance on fines and fees is associated with more police killings: just 1% more in fines and fees revenue than the typical municipality is associated with 4% more police killings.

    In a 2025 report, the Fines and Fees Justice Center collected data from 24 states and estimated almost $14 billion in fines and fees were imposed over five years, from FY 2018 to FY 2022. Only a fraction of that is collected, of course; the rest results in criminal legal debt. A 2021 report by the Fines and Fees Justice Center that covered 25 states indicated that outstanding criminal legal debt was over $27.6 billion.36 The insidious system of fines and fees should remain a priority for research to drive policy reform.
  • Federal civil asset forfeiture: Civil asset forfeiture is a mechanism by which local, state, or federal law enforcement agencies can seize and retain property on the suspicion that the property is connected to a crime. In our 2017 report, we used an estimate based on the net assets of the Department of Justice and Treasury forfeiture funds as reported in the Institute for Justice’s 2015 report, Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Forfeiture, 2nd Edition.37 We calculated these numbers directly from the sources used by the Institute for Justice to reach $5.3 billion in FY 2024.38

    There is likely some overlap between the $5.3 billion net assets of the Department of Justice and Treasury forfeiture funds and the expenditures reported for the policing and judicial and legal systems. We didn’t adjust the policing and judicial and legal system figures because it is likely impossible to figure out how much overlap there is and to determine how the money is distributed among the various government agencies. The federal government and states vary in what percentage of the seized property can be kept by the law enforcement agency that seized the property.
  • Bail fees: Defendants and their family members typically pay 10% to commercial bail bond agencies as a nonrefundable fee or “premium.” Estimates for the bail bond industry revenues are generally produced by financial data firms with opaque, proprietary methodologies that do not disclose their sample frame or underlying data. A 2023 report by AM Best, a financial firm serving the insurance industry, indicated that face amounts of bail bonds written in 2021 reached $16.5 billion. With 10% of face value as a nonrefundable fee, this comes out to $1.65 billion actually paid by detained people and their families in 2021 ($1.92 billion in inflation adjusted 2025 dollars). Reports by IBISWorld, another financial services firm, provide varied estimates of bail bond industry revenues for 2025 ($3.5 billion), 2024 ($2.6 billion), and 2023 ($2.4 billion).39 It is unclear whether IBISWorld’s reports reflect changes in actual data collected by the firm, or are estimates based on assumed increases due to other factors like inflation, so we prefer the AM Best estimate of close to $2 billion.
  • Telecommunication and commissary costs: In a 2025 report, We Can’t Afford It: Mass Incarceration and the Family Tax, researchers with FWD.us used a large-scale survey to understand the wide range of costs and income impacts facing families with incarcerated loved ones. Their annual estimate of family direct spending included payments for telephone calls, video calls, tablets, messages, as well as putting money on people’s “books” or commissary accounts. In many prisons and jails, these accounts are used to buy food, clothing, shoes, and toiletries, and may also be used to pay fees for required programming or medical treatment. Families report direct spending of $5.55 billion (in 2023 dollars).40

    A large portion of this cost to the families feeds back into the $115.8 billion correctional budgets via the corrupt commission system — wherein contracts are awarded not on the basis of the best price and service to the consumer but on the revenue paid to the government authority that awards the monopoly contract. In this way, it’s possible we are counting these dollars twice in our total estimate, although our decision to ignore costs under a billion dollars more than makes up for any double counting in this respect.

These direct costs to families do not include other ways that loved ones may pay to ensure care for incarcerated people. Families also spent an additional $98.2 million per year on packages to send to incarcerated loved ones, $1.8 billion on visitation expenses (transportation, lodging, food), $2.3 billion on care for minor children of incarcerated parents, and $412 million on reentry expenses (all 2023 dollars). In sum, according to the We Can’t Afford It report, families pay $10.2 billion a year. (This does not include their share of bail fees.) Because many of these expenses are not paid into criminal legal system agencies, we do not include them here.

Public Corrections Agencies:

Our calculations using the latest data from the Office of Management and Budget’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget and the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2023 Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances indicate that the combined total of federal, state, and local expenditures on corrections, which includes prisons, jails, juvenile facilities, probation, and parole, was $114.8 billion. The Trump administration’s 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill, PL 119-21, section 100056 appropriated an additional $5 billion for the Bureau of Prisons (at least $3 billion for staffing and not more than $2 billion for facility repairs and maintenance) for the FY 2025-2029 period. Thus, we add an additional $1 billion, bringing the total $115.8 billion.41

Within this cost, we provide more detail:

  • Public employees: For state and local employees, we multiplied the March 2024 payroll amount of $4,165,824,278 for the 648,020 full-time equivalent corrections employees at the state and local levels by 12 months to get an annual figure of $50 billion.42 This figure doesn’t include contractors; nor does it include state and local contributions to retiree pensions, because many governments make lump-sum contributions to retirement systems and cannot separate out legal system employees.43 We also include relevant parts of the Department of Justice’s FY 2025 budget to include the salaries and benefits payments of $5.63 billion associated with 35,940 full-time equivalent employees at the Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Parole Commission, and detention and transportation parts of the U.S. Marshals Service.44
  • Health care in the private and public prison systems costs an estimated $15.3 billion per year, based on data from 2015 that we adjusted for inflation. The Pew Charitable Trusts report, Prison Health Care: Costs and Quality, appendix table C.1, uses data from 49 states that reported total health care expenditures in 2015 to calculate a national per capita cost of $6,147 in 2015 dollars; we adjusted this figure for inflation to $7,985 in 2025 dollars.45 We multiplied that estimate by 1.9 million incarcerated individuals to arrive at a national figure. For our data visualization, we proportionally applied this $15.3 billion health cost to the population in private and government-run prisons, finding that the private prison operators are responsible for $0.707 billion ($707 million) in costs, which we considered too small to include on the visualization, and that the government-run systems are responsible for $14.6 billion in costs. We share several cautions to researchers interested in building from this work:
    • This data is from 2015 and medical costs rose slower than the overall consumer price index to 2025; since we adjusted this amount using the lower inflation rate for medical costs, this figure could actually be higher. If correctional health care costs have risen at the same rate as inflation, this cost could be $16.2 billion today (and $15.4 billion for the government-run systems).
    • There is tremendous variation in the data, raising some questions about both the quality of care being provided and how different states calculate their data. We note that the highest per capita cost (in 2015 dollars) was in California at $19,796 and the lowest was in Louisiana of $2,173. By these figures, 29% of the national correctional health care expenditures were in the California state prison system in 2015.
    • For our national estimate, we used state prison costs to estimate jail costs. Because of medical costs of screening and treating the 5.6 million people booked into jails each year, this figure could be a significant understatement. Some jails spend one-third of their budget on health care.
    • It is possible that some of these costs are also reflected in the correctional employee payroll, but we think this overlap would be minimal. Medications and medical supplies would be in health care and not labor, and a lot of medical care is provided by contractors — either individual contractors or private health care companies like YesCare (formerly Corizon) — so those workers would not also be reflected in the public employees category.46
  • Construction: Because construction costs are highly variable, we averaged across several years of data to reach our estimate of $5.9 billion. For federal corrections construction expenses, we use an audit by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General covering FY 2018-2023, finding an average of $250 million annually.47 For state and local governments, we averaged across state and local estimates for 2017-2023.48 Also, we adjusted our estimates to address undercounting in census sources for state and local correctional construction costs. The Census of Governments for 2022, a year with complete coverage of all local and state budgets, listed $2.3 billion in correctional capital outlay expenditures for state and local governments. This is likely a significant undercount: comparing the budgets for the four largest states (California, Florida, New York, and Texas) with the 2022 Census of State and Local Governments shows some substantial differences. The census had $554 million listed for these states, while we found $1.278 billion in budget documents. In these states, the real construction and capital outlay expenditures were 2.3 times higher than those reported in the Census.49 For that reason, we multiply the average state and local construction costs from 2017 to 2023 ($2.46 billion) by 2.3 to reach our state and local estimate of $5.65 billion. With the $250 million in federal construction costs, we reach a total of $5.9 billion.50

    It’s worth nothing that many prisons, jails, and detention centers are built with borrowed money. When governments borrow money, they usually issue bonds that pay interest to investors (typically wealthy people, but also institutional investors that manage retirement savings, such as mutual funds or pension funds). The principal amount of any borrowing is already included in the construction-cost segment of our graphic. But interest payments typically amount to a large share of the total expenses of a project, and may not be included (around 45% of total expense could be interest only). There is no reliable source of information on public borrowing for prison, jail, and detention construction, and while interest payments were included in our last report, we have been unable to find any updated estimates.
  • Food: Food is another large expense for which the data is hard to access, due to a lack of transparency and austerity at the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In 2004, the last time the Bureau of Justice Statistics published a report with detailed breakdowns for State Prison Expenditures, the per capita food cost in 2001 was $955 per incarcerated person, or $2.62 per day. Adjusting this number for 25 years of inflation results in an estimate of $1,751 a year, or $4.80 a day.51 If the actual expenditures for food in jails and prisons have not increased by at least this much, then they have not kept up with inflation, indicating the food in prisons and jails has decreased in quality and/or quantity. Multiplying the adjusted per capita cost by 1.9 million incarcerated people produces a total expenditure of $3.4 billion. This figure can be reduced slightly by 4.6% to reflect the estimated portion of incarceration that is in private prisons52 and thus counted separately. This brings our estimate to $3.2 billion.
  • Utilities: Like food, utilities are another cost for which the Bureau of Justice Statistics has not provided an updated estimate in two decades. The last time the Bureau of Justice Statistics published a report with detailed breakdowns for State Prison Expenditures, the per capita utilities cost in 2001 was $795 per year. Adjusting this number for inflation results in an estimate of $1,458 a year; multiplying this figure by 1.9 million incarcerated people produces a total expenditure of $2.8 billion. Again, this can be reduced slightly by 4.6% to reflect the estimated portion of incarceration that is in private prisons and thus counted separately, bringing the portion in public facilities to $2.7 billion. Utility costs should not be ignored because, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore explains in Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California, prisons and large jails are essentially small cities with the water, heating and electrical demands of — as you would expect once you begin to see the facilities that way — small cities.

Private prisons and private immigration detention:

To illustrate both the scale of the private prison industry and the critical fact that this industry works under contract for government agencies — rather than arresting, prosecuting, convicting and incarcerating people on its own — we displayed these companies as a subset of the public corrections system and the public immigration detention system.

In 2025, private prison and detention companies had almost $5.5 billion in revenue. The criminal legal system provided around $3.1 billion in revenue, while $2.4 billion in revenue came from ICE detention. This industry is still dominated by two large publicly traded companies — CoreCivic (which was called Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) until 2016) and The GEO Group — as well as four companies with smaller roles: LaSalle Corrections, Management & Training Corporation (MTC), Akima Global, and Immigration Centers of America. Each has substantial business contracts with ICE. Other firms with experience supporting Texas’s Operation Lone Star are not included in our estimate, although many have become involved in the construction of the new ICE detention facilities in Texas and elsewhere.

It’s quite common for journalists and advocates to conflate revenue and profits, so we’ll try to draw the distinction clearly. Revenue is the total payments coming into the private prison company, and covers all of the company’s expenses: paying guards, operating prison buildings, and feeding and otherwise caring for people who are locked up. Profits, also called net income, are any money left over after all expenses, including debt service, taxes, CEO bonuses, accounting gimmicks, and stock buy-backs.53 In recent years, private firms have preferred to transfer capital to their wealthy owners by creating higher asset prices, in part through stock buy-backs, but that cuts into net income reported in financial statements.

While revenues are up in 2025 for CoreCivic and The GEO Group, profits are lower than in past years. In 2024 GEO Group reported net income of only $1.6 million on $2.4 billion in revenue; in 2023, they reported $81.6 million in net income. CoreCivic reported $109.8 million net income in 2024, and expect to have roughly similar income in 2025 according to documents provided to investors. As publicly traded private prison companies, The GEO Group and CoreCivic break out revenue from ICE specifically in their annual reports by reporting what percent of total revenues came from specific federal agencies. Based on the 2024 annual reports, we know that ICE made up $1.006 billion of GEO Group’s total revenue, and $568 million of CoreCivic’s, and using quarterly reports for 2025, we estimate that ICE revenue grew to $1.2 billion of The GEO Group and $742 million for CoreCivic.54

For smaller private prison and detention companies, we cobble together revenue estimates from a variety of sources: U.S. Marshals and ICE statistics, federal budgets, PREA audits, and private industry estimates. Akima Global and Immigration Centers of America only work with ICE. For both LaSalle Corrections and Management and Training Corporation (MTC), we have information on the average daily population in their custody for both ICE and the U.S. Marshals, and that covers the majority of their business. To get additional revenue estimates, we use the most recent available Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) audit reports posted by the firms, which provide information on people held in state or local contract facilities, as well as information on payments by the state of Florida to MTC.55 For MTC and LaSalle Corrections, ICE makes up a larger share of their average daily detention population than the U.S. Marshals. We have some evidence of the rates that they charge the U.S. Marshals (ICE is currently redacting information about rates paid on contracts received via public records requests). For the purposes of our estimate, we assume that ICE pays similar rates. Both companies appear to primarily contract with federal agencies, but have some state or local incarceration contacts. Additionally, MTC has expanded to provide for-profit prisons and immigration detention in the United Kingdom and Australia, although these are not included in our estimates.

Based on various data sources, we estimate the following: Private prison companies have $5.5 billion in revenue, with ICE providing $2.4 billion in revenue and $3.1 billion coming from the criminal legal system.56

How much revenue did private prison companies take in during 2025?

Table 2. Private prison and detention companies’ revenue by source: ICE or the criminal legal system.
Firm Estimated revenue from ICE Estimated revenue from criminal legal system Total revenue
The GEO Group $1,211,000,000 $1,186,000,000 $2,398,000,000
CoreCivic $742,000,000 $1,446,000,000 $2,188,000,000
Management and Training Corporation (MTC) $120,000,000 $272,000,000 $392,000,000
LaSalle Corrections $213,000,000 $174,000,000 $387,000,000
Akima Global Services $105,000,000 $0 $105,000,000
Immigration Centers of America $24,000,000 $0 $24,000,000
Total $2,415,000,000 $3,078,000,000 $5,493,000,000

There is some uncertainty to these estimates, and as mentioned above, we lack information on the firms cropping up and collecting contracts for ICE detention space for new camps like Camp East Montana on an army base outside of El Paso, Texas.57 For the most part, however, those contracts appear to not yet have much in the way of actually transferred payments by the federal government.58

Read our detailed methodology in full

 

For further reading

Additional reading and resources on some of the topics not fully explored in this report:

  • Institute for Advancing Justice Research and Innovation, The Economic Burden of Incarceration in the U.S., which finds the aggregate burden of incarceration is $1 trillion by including costs like the criminogenic nature of imprisonment, child welfare, and homelessness of formerly incarcerated persons.
  • Who Pays: The True Cost of Incarceration on Families, a 2015 report from The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in collaboration with Forward Together and Research Action Design, which offers a comprehensive view of the harms of incarceration on families. With particular emphasis on the disparate impact on women and the poor, the report illustrates the extreme financial burden and emotional strain caused by incarceration: families, not defendants, typically pay for court-related costs, phone calls and visitation, and continue to support people upon their release. The report also outlines the barriers formerly incarcerated people and their families face when it comes to housing, public assistance, employment and educational opportunities. No other report we know of gives such a complete picture of the far-reaching consequences of incarceration on families.
  • A 2025 report by FWD.us builds on themes explored in Who Pays and The Economic Burden of Incarceration in the U.S. with We Can’t Afford it: Mass Incarceration and the Family Tax, which includes survey research and estimates detailing the additional economic harms of mass incarceration.
  • Imposing Instability: How Court Fines and Fees Destabilize Government Budgets and Criminalize Those Who Cannot Pay, a 2025 report on the fiscal and social impacts of government reliance on fines and fees by the Fines and Fees Justice Center.
  • The Vera Institute of Justice’s reports on the full taxpayer costs of corrections (not including policing or the judicial and legal system): Price of Jails and Price of Prisons. Price of Prisons is particularly useful for advocates and researchers who want to learn more about how correctional spending works in a particular state. Based on surveys sent to 40 states and 35 jail jurisdictions, the reports provide figures for the corrections costs that are often overlooked because they are paid by non-correctional government agencies or centralized government accounts.
  • Research on nascent industries that exploit incarcerated people and their families:

See additional readings



Footnotes

  1. We excluded costs of less than $1 billion from our infographic.  ↩

  2. See We Can’t Afford It: Mass Incarceration and the Family Tax, a 2025 report by FWD.us for more information on these estimates which are in 2023 dollars, and partially based on research on economic costs of pretrial detention by Will Dobbie and Crystal Yang, and estimates of imprisonment impacts on income via the IRS Statistics of Income Division’s Joint Statistical Research Program.  ↩

  3. See the following for examples of prison and jail population declines not being followed by proportional staffing reductions: California, New York State and New York City.  ↩

  4. Our estimate for the cost of the immigration policing and detention system, $54.3 billion in 2025, should be seen as a lower bound because it does not include all relevant parts of the system. More specifically, these estimates do not include the portions of federal policing agencies like the DEA, FBI, ATF, or U.S. Marshals that have dedicated their agents to immigration raids and arrests, or the costs of federal prosecutors involved in criminalizing immigration, or the expenses of detention for people charged with immigration-related crimes in federal courts. Further, these do not include the complete costs that local police agencies incur when they deputize officers to serve ICE via the 287(g) program.

    Relatedly, $125.2 billion has been authorized via P.L. 119-21 (the One Big Beautiful Bill) and most of that is available to spend until FY 2029. On average, this funding for immigration policing and detention agencies amounts to $24.2 billion a year over the next 5 fiscal years above and beyond annual appropriations ($30.1 billion in 2025). Thus, large amounts can be used in the current fiscal year, outside of the annual budget process, and much more than $54.3 billion could be spent in FY 2026 even with no further annual appropriations.  ↩

  5. For library spending trends, we used federal budget documents from the Office of Management and Budget to get information on spending for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) ($227 million 2017, and $313 million in 2025), and state and local spending on libraries from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of State and Local Government Finances in 2017 and 2023. See “State and Local Government Finances by Level of Government: U.S. and States: 2017 - 2023,” Public Sector, PUB Public Sector Annual Surveys and Census of Governments, Table GS00LF01, 2025.  ↩

  6. Amidst unequal funding and high caseloads for public defenders in Oregon, the state supreme court affirmed that the right to counsel means that it must be provided in a timely fashion or prosecutors must drop the cases. The ruling is expected to cause more than 1,400 criminal cases to be dismissed.  ↩

  7. Immigration detention expenses went from $2.4 billion to 13.4 billion, an increase of almost $11 billion.  ↩

  8. Together, the federal government’s Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Marshals federal prisoner detention are responsible for (12%) of correctional expenditures. These percentages are based on the direct expenditures provided in the 2023 Census of State and Local Government and the FY2025 federal budget. For more information, see the methodology.  ↩

  9. With the 2021 publication of a report covering budget data through fiscal year 2017, the federal government stopped releasing analytic publications on the money behind policing and mass incarceration. Instead, the Bureau of Justice Statistics publishes limited additional data on states and local governments only, ignoring federal funding and the federal criminal legal system. Even these data are not published in an analytic report, but are instead available via a dashboard. The dashboard is currently out-of-date: it was last updated to cover state and local fiscal year 2021 expenditures, but the underlying data produced by the U.S. Census Bureau’s Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances are available through FY 2023 (published in July 2025).  ↩

  10. For example, we include the roughly $2 billion detention budget of the U.S. Marshals Service under correctional spending rather than under judicial and legal, because they manage federal detention while criminal cases are pending — an expense akin to local jails, which are counted under correctional costs.  ↩

  11. See the corrections data in Bureau of Justice Statistics, Justice Expenditure And Employment in the United States, 2017, table 1, based on data from the Census Bureau’s 2017 Census of Governments and the 2017 Federal Budget.  ↩

  12. See the total justice system data in Bureau of Justice Statistics, Justice Expenditure And Employment in the United States, 2017, table 1.  ↩

  13. See Governmental Accounting Standards Board, Statement No. 10, “Accounting and Financial Reporting for Risk Financing and Related Insurance Issues” (Nov. 1989), pages 13, 64-72.  ↩

  14. For a comprehensive review of statutes controlling where telephone revenue goes, see Exhibit H in the Reply Comments of the Wright Petitioners to the FCC on April 22, 2013. For broader discussion of how funds restricted to “Inmate Welfare” are often misused, see our 2024 report on these funds: Shadow Budgets: How mass incarceration steals from the poor to give to the prison.  ↩

  15. See Office of Management and Budget, Object Class Analysis FY 2026, and U.S. Census Bureau, State and Local Government Finances by Level of Government: U.S. and States: 2023. As with policing and corrections, we also include the additional judicial and legal funding from Congress under P.L. 119-21, also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill. Because P.L. 119-21 appropriated funding that can be used over multiple fiscal years, we created annual averages for these amounts, although they could be spent in a single fiscal year, or unspent amounts could be clawed back and rescinded. Judicial- and legal-related expenses in P.L. 119-21 amounted to $1,250,000 per year.  ↩

  16. According to Nils Christie in Crime Control as Industry, 3rd edition (2000), page 141 fn 4, this is a low estimate. But like Christie, we think it better to under-estimate than over-estimate. We could identify only one other way to isolate the portion of judicial and legal expenditures that were criminal law in nature: the National Center for State Courts’ Court Statistics Project finds that, in 2024, state court caseloads were 46% traffic, 23% criminal, 24% civil, 6% domestic relations, and 1% juvenile. See Court Statistics Project, Trial Court Caseload Overview: Incoming Caseload Composition, S. Gibson, N. Waters, M. Hamilton, E. Stevens, M. Novitt, H. Caspers, E. Taylor, eds. National Center for State Courts, 2024. But given that the data on court caseloads by type includes traffic offenses and other types of cases that would require far less time, attention, and resources than criminal cases, it did not seem possible to base our estimate on the court caseload statistics.  ↩

  17. See Administrative Office of U.S. Courts, Federal Judicial Caseload Statistics: 2025 tables C-3 and B-7.  ↩

  18. See Patricia W. Hatamayer Moore, The Civil Caseload of the Federal District Courts, 2015 U. of Ill. L. Rev. 1177, 1187-91 (2015).  ↩

  19. For the estimate of $6.5 billion for felony prosecutors in state courts from 2020, see George E. Browne and Mark A. Motivans, Prosecutors in State Courts, 2020, 2024, table 4. Federal criminal prosecution budget data from FY 2024 and FY 2025 is $2 billion, see U.S. Department of Justice, Justice Management Division, Fiscal Year 2026 Budget and Performance Summary, June 13, 2025.  ↩

  20. See the Sixth Amendment Center’s report, The State of the Nation on Gideon’s 60th Anniversary, providing a national estimate of $6.5 based on a survey of local and state expenditure data. According to Administrative Office of the Courts Budget documents, Federal public defender expenses were $1,382,680,000 in fiscal year 2023.  ↩

  21. See Office of Management and Budget, Object Class Analysis FY 2026, and U.S. Census Bureau, State and Local Government Finances by Level of Government: U.S. and States: 2023. We depart from the OMB classification in determining that some specifically federal police expenses should not be considered “judicial and legal” like capitol police and park police.  ↩

  22. Funding for ICE, Border Patrol, and other agencies is discussed below.  ↩

  23. Nils Christie, Crime Control as Industry, 3rd edition (2000), page 138.  ↩

  24. For example, see the how the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2025 data collection form distinguishes between policing and corrections functions within a single agency.  ↩

  25. U.S. Census Bureau, “State and Local Government Employment and Payroll Data: U.S. and States: 2017 - 2024,” Public Sector, PUB Public Sector Annual Surveys and Census of Governments, Table GS00EP01, 2025, accessed on September 15, 2025.  ↩

  26. For more information on this, see Police Foundations: A corporate-sponsored threat to democracy and Black lives.  ↩

  27. See Office of Management and Budget, Object Class Analysis FY 2026. We depart from the OMB classification in determining that some specifically federal police expenses should not be considered “judicial and legal” like capitol police, and park police.  ↩

  28. Some reporting initially discussed this funding as available over a four-year period, leading to higher annual estimates.  ↩

  29. We included sections 90002-90007 — the non-border wall parts of the “Homeland Security Provisions” from the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee — and sections 100051-100055, 100057 under “Immigration and Law Enforcement Funding” from the Judiciary Committee. Section 100056, with additional funding for the Bureau of Prisons, is counted under corrections. In P.L. 119-21, ICE received $45 billion for detention expansion in section 90003, and $29.85 billion for hiring, recruitment, and bonuses for ICE agents in section 100052. In P.L. 119-21, Customs and Border Protection received $6.15 billion for hiring, retention, and bonuses for Border Patrol and other field agents in section 90002, with $5.85 billion for vehicles and facilities and $6.17 billion for surveillance technology in section 90004. As recent events demonstrate, these agencies have begun to use this funding to deploy officers across the United States.  ↩

  30. P.L. 119-21, Section 90005 provides $10 billion in funding for state efforts like Texas’s Operation Lone Star or Florida’s immigration detention camps, and this money is available until September 30, 2034. Section 100055 authorizes $3.5 billion to the Attorney General to reimburse state and local governments for the criminalization of immigrants and asylum seekers from FY 2025 to FY 2028. Together, these are an additional $1.875 billion a year. Most of the money is expected to go to Texas.  ↩

  31. Other agencies and funding streams are involved, but we do not count them at this point: In P.L. 119-21, section 20011, the Department of Defense was given $1 billion to use for border-related activities over a five-year period, including “the temporary detention of migrants” on military bases.  ↩

  32. Some reporting initially discussed this funding as available over a four-year period instead of the five-year period in the bill, leading to higher annual estimates of $14 billion.  ↩

  33. For the underlying data, see U.S. Census Bureau, “State and Local Government Finances by Level of Government: U.S. and States: 2017 - 2023,” Public Sector, PUB Public Sector Annual Surveys and Census of Governments, Table GS00LF01, 2025.  ↩

  34. See the groundbreaking 2015 report Who Pays: The True Cost of Incarceration on Families, produced by Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Forward Together and Research Action Design, which surveyed 1,080 formerly incarcerated people and their family members to find that families paid an average of $13,607 in court-related costs. Given the high costs and pervasiveness of fines and fees, the harm to impoverished families can hardly be seen as an unintended consequence of reasonable policies. Also see the persuasive argument that these costs amount to a system of “seizure” that taxes poor families of the incarcerated “to subsidize the carceral state.” Katzenstein, Mary Fainsod, and Maureen R Waller, Taxing the Poor: Incarceration, Poverty Governance, and the Seizure of Family Resources, Perspectives on Politics 13.03 (2015): 639.  ↩

  35. In 2012, at least 38 towns and cities in the U.S., more than 10% of all revenue is collected from court fines and fees. In St. Louis County, five towns generated more than 40% of their annual revenue from court fines and fees in 2013. This was the policy context for the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. While subsequent efforts have limited municipal reliance on fines and fee revenue in Missouri, this remains a problem in many places across the U.S.  ↩

  36. In many places, bench warrants are issued for failure to pay, and people get arrested and sent to jail.  ↩

  37. According to the Institute for Justice, net assets are a more stable metric than annual deposits into the forfeiture funds because net assets measure the funds remaining after the government pays various obligations like payments to agencies for investigations with asset forfeiture components, refunds to people that had their assets wrongly taken, and payments to victims.  ↩

  38. The Department of Justice audit indicates net assets of $2.429 billion at the end of fiscal year 2024. The Treasury Department’s audit shows net assets of $2.884 billion at the end of fiscal year 2024.  ↩

  39. Researchers with FWD.us used IBISWorld’s 2023 $2.4 billion revenue number for their estimate of bail paid by families in their 2025 report, We Can’t Afford It: Mass Incarceration and the Family Tax.  ↩

  40. In the 2017 version of this report, we estimated the revenues generated by commissary and telecom companies ourselves. For this update, we relied on the FWD.us report not only because it covers a wider range of costs, but because we were unable to provide specific new revenue estimates for commissary (estimated at $1.6 billion in 2016) or telecom companies ($1.3 billion in 2015). While advocacy and regulation had brought down phone rates in prisons and jails, recent steps by the FCC have reopened avenues to profiteering.  ↩

  41. State and local government expenditures for 2023 have not been adjusted for inflation to 2025 dollars, which means that this number may be an underestimate. Jail budgets in many localities have increased rapidly recently: a recent local news survey of jail budgets in Pennsylvania, found increases of 15% to 23% since 2023, with much of the costs being driven by health-related expenses. CPI inflation was 5.64% between December 2023 and December 2025. If adjusted for inflation, the state and local share of corrections would rise to $107 billion from $101.3 billion, and the total correctional number would be $123.9 billion.  ↩

  42. See U.S. Census Bureau, “State and Local Government Employment and Payroll Data: U.S. and States: 2017 - 2024,” Public Sector, PUB Public Sector Annual Surveys and Census of Governments, Table GS00EP01, 2025.  ↩

  43. For more information on corrections retiree pension and health care costs by state, see Vera Institute of Justice, Price of Prisons.  ↩

  44. The included figures come from the Bureau of Prisons (Salaries and Expenses, Building and Facilities, and Federal Prison Industries); U.S. Marshals (Federal Prisoner Detention and Justice Prisoner Air Transportation System), and U.S. Parole Commission. From each unit’s Exhibit K, Summary of Requirements by Object Class, we included compensation and personnel benefits, and counted the Direct FTE under 2025 Enacted.  ↩

  45. To adjust health care expenses for inflation, we use historical data on the Consumer Price Index for medical care, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to increase by 29.9%. This is a slightly lower estimate than the general CPI for the period from 2015 to 2025, which increased by 37%.  ↩

  46. The Annual Survey of Public Employment and Payroll provides the underlying data, and instructs respondents to exclude contractors and their employees.  ↩

  47. These include both new construction funding and modernization and renovation funding. See Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, Audit of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Efforts to Maintain and Construct Institutions, Table 5, New Construction Funding FY 2018-22; Figure 2, Modernization & Renovation Funding, 2019-23.  ↩

  48. See U.S. Census Bureau, “State and Local Government Finances by Level of Government: U.S. and States: 2017 - 2023,” Table GS00LF01, 2025.  ↩

  49. In California, the state provides capital funding for both state prisons and local jails. Jail construction is funded via grants awarded by the Board of State and Community Corrections, and those grants are funded via state public works board bonds. This does not cover all county and local expenditures on jails, but it would cover a substantial portion. These partial-view budget document based numbers indicated $501 million across state prisons and local jails, 80% higher than the $278 million in census numbers.

    In Florida, the state provided capital funding for lease purchase agreements, as well as new construction projects, and funding for local jail facilities totalling $100 million, or 4.37 times higher than the state expenses in the Census of Governments of $22.9 million.

    In New York, state prison capital plan expenditures were $331 million, 3.5 times higher than $94.5 million in the census. New York State local jail capital expenditures in the census were $90.7 million. Yet, the New York City Department of Corrections capital outlay in 2022 was $265.5 million — much higher — indicating that even without attempting a statewide data collection the census was missing substantial expenditures.

    In Texas, the capital plan expenditures at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice were $80.7 million, 19% higher than the $68 million in the 2022 census.  ↩

  50. We have some theories about why the Census might undercount correctional expenditures. A large number of local jails may have not been counted in corrections construction budgets. In 2024, researchers found that since 2002, more than 1,300 counties have allocated a total of $62.5 billion in public dollars for jail construction (measured in 2024 dollars). This is an average of $2.8 billion a year over the 22-year period, so it is entirely plausible that the Census of Governments has an undercount, and that the more accurate number is closer to $6 billion. Many places run the municipal bonds for jails or prisons through a state public works board or local community development funding body, and this appears to lead to miscategorization of correctional capital expenditures.  ↩

  51. Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI inflation calculator, prices were 1.89 times higher in December 2025 compared to December 2001.  ↩

  52. The Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that 88,618 people were held in private prisons at the end of 2023, and so we divide this by the 1,921,000 people incarcerated.  ↩

  53. When companies buy back their stock shares, it tends to raise the stock price (or moderate a decline in the stock price). This allows shareholders to make more money when they loan or sell their shares.  ↩

  54. To reach 2025 revenue estimates for The GEO Group and CoreCivic we use quarterly supplemental financial information providing year-to-date revenue through September 30, as well as full-year revenue estimates. These documents also provide the proportion of revenue from ICE and other parts of the criminal legal system. Together, these pieces of information allow one to calculate quarterly revenue by agency. We then make an annual estimate by using the agency-specific revenue from quarter 3, and assume that is the same as quarter 4.  ↩

  55. Both MTC and LaSalle Corrections post PREA information on their websites, but the most recent information can be found on the PREA resource center’s directory of PREA audits. MTC’s payments from Florida for operating facilities with capacity for 4,290 beds are available from the Florida Department of Financial Services contract tracking system, and summed to $85 million the 2024-2025 fiscal year. We estimate that MTC received an additional $165 million in revenue for operating facilities with capacity of 8,290 beds across Mississippi, Ohio, and Texas. We estimate MTC received just under $22 million from the U.S. Marshals. LaSalle received an estimated $121.5 million from the U.S. Marshals, and roughly $52 million from operating facilities primarily in Louisiana and Texas on behalf of local and state authorities.  ↩

  56. Donations to politicians by private prison firms, while deeply troubling, appear to amount to just over $560,000. This is $1 for every $10,000 in annual revenue.  ↩

  57. For example, see this news coverage.  ↩

  58. For example, Acquisition Logistics LLC’s $1.3 billion award for constructing a detention facility has only had payments of $62.2 million as of February 4, 2026  ↩

See all the footnotes

Acknowledgements

All Prison Policy Initiative reports are collaborative endeavors, but this report was particularly so. The original version of this report, released in 2017, was authored by Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy. Essential to that first report were the feedback and insights of Alex Friedmann, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, James Kilgore, John Pfaff, Stephen Raher, Bruce Reilly and Chris Sturr, who helped us understand and quantify many previously unaddressed aspects of the punishment system. We are also grateful to designer Bob Machuga for developing the initial visual design we used to tell the story of how the various financial costs of mass incarceration add up. For this 2026 version, the authors thank Wendy Sawyer for editorial and graphic assistance.

We are grateful to our funders and donors who make this work possible.

About the authors

Jacob Kang-Brown is a Senior Researcher at the Prison Policy Initiative. He is the author of the report Hiding in Plain Sight: How local jails obscure and facilitate mass deportation under Trump as well as a follow-up briefing providing updated ICE arrest data. He is the author of several briefings on topics including the public health impacts of county jail incarceration and the jailing of people who miss court dates. In addition to his publications, Jacob provides support for the research team’s use of large datasets and quantitative analysis.

Peter Wagner is an attorney and the Executive Director of the Prison Policy Initiative. He co-founded the Prison Policy Initiative in 2001 to spark a national discussion about mass incarceration. He is a co-author of two of the organization’s landmark reports on the dysfunction in the prison and jail phone market — Please Deposit All of Your Money in 2013 and the State of Phone Justice report in 2022 — and one of the principal authors of our flagship report Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie.

About the Prison Policy Initiative

The non-profit, non-partisan Prison Policy Initiative was founded in 2001 to expose the broader harm of mass criminalization and spark advocacy campaigns to create a more just society. Alongside reports like our Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie that help the public more fully engage in criminal justice reform, the organization leads the nation’s fight to keep the prison system from exerting undue influence on the political process (a.k.a. prison gerrymandering) and has played a leading role in protecting the families of incarcerated people from the predatory prison and jail telephone industry and the video visitation industry.



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