Decarceration in the United States involves government policies and community campaigns aimed at reducing the number of people held in custodial supervision. Decarceration, the opposite of incarceration, also entails reducing the rate of imprisonment at the federal, state and municipal level. The 2025 version of the Prison Policy Initiative’s flagship report, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie states that there are nearly 2 million people incarcerated in the United States. The United States on average incarcerates more people per capita than any other independent democracy. The 2025 report shows that State Prisons currently have 1,098,000 people incarcerated; local jails have 562,000, Federal Prisons & Jails 204,000 and Immigration Detention Centers have 48,000 incarcerated.
As of 2019, the US was home to 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners. Until the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. possessed the world's highest incarceration rate: 655 inmates for every 100,000 people, enough inmates to equal the populations of Philadelphia or Houston. The COVID-19 pandemic has reinvigorated the discussion surrounding prison reduction as the spread of the virus poses a threat to the health of those incarcerated in prisons and detention centers where the ability to properly socially distance is limited. As a result of the push for criminal justice reform in the wake of the pandemic, as of 2022, the incarceration rate in the United States declined to 505 per 100,000, resulting in the United States no longer having the highest incarceration rate in the world, but still remaining in the top five.
