Back in 2009, the Pew Center on the States released a bombshell report with a stunning title: "One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections." The findings revealed that more than 7.3 million American adults—roughly 1 in every 31—were under some form of correctional supervision. That meant they were either behind bars in prison or jail, or living in their communities on probation or parole.

To put that in perspective, imagine a sold-out NFL stadium. If you filled it with a representative sample of American adults from 2009, about 2,500 of them would have been in the corrections system.

The Hidden Majority

Here's what made the statistic even more eye-opening: most of these people weren't locked up. While the year before, Pew had reported that 1 in 100 American adults was in jail or prison, this new report showed that more than double that number were in the system but living on the outside—on parole after being released from prison, or on probation as an alternative to incarceration.

Despite this reality, state corrections budgets told a different story. A whopping 90% of corrections dollars went to prisons, even though the vast majority of people under supervision were in community-based programs.

The Decline

The good news? Those numbers have been dropping steadily. The U.S. correctional supervision rate peaked in 2007 at 3,210 per 100,000 adults, and has declined every single year since. By 2022, the rate had fallen to about 1 in 48 adults—still significant, but a major improvement from the peak.

Several factors contributed to this decline:

Criminal justice reforms reducing sentences for nonviolent offenses
Decreased crime rates across most categories
Growing awareness of mass incarceration's social and economic costs
Shifts toward alternative sentencing and diversion programs

What Changed?

Between 2012 and 2022, the total adult community supervision population fell 23%, from 4.79 million to 3.67 million people. Probation populations dropped below 3 million for the first time in decades. The incarceration rate itself, which peaked at about 1 in 100 in 2008, also declined significantly.

The 2020 pandemic accelerated some trends, causing a sharp drop in jail and prison populations as facilities released people to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks. While incarceration numbers have ticked back up since then, they haven't returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Still a Global Outlier

Even with these improvements, the United States remains one of the most heavily incarcerated nations on Earth. As of 2025, the U.S. had the fifth-highest incarceration rate globally at 541 per 100,000 people. When you add in probation and parole, America still supervises a larger percentage of its population than virtually any other country.

The "1 in 31" statistic may be outdated, but it remains a powerful reminder of how the U.S. correctional system expanded to unprecedented levels—and how far there still is to go in reforming it.

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