The total correctional population consists of all offenders under the supervision of the adult correctional systems, which includes offenders supervised in the community under the authority of probation or parole agencies and those held in the custody of state and federal prisons or local jails. Several different data collections are used to estimate the total correctional population; they include the National Prisoner Statistics, Annual Survey of Jails, Census of Jail Inmates, and Annual Probation Survey and Annual Parole Survey (listed under data sources). The basic count for the correctional population is updated annually in the Correctional Populations in the United States series.
| Community corrections |
Community corrections refers to the supervision of criminal offenders in the resident
population, as opposed to confining them in secure correctional facilities. The two
main types of community corrections supervision are probation and parole. Community
corrections is also referred to as community supervision. |
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| Incarcerated population |
Incarcerated population is the population of inmates confined in a prison or a jail.
This may also include halfway-houses, bootcamps, weekend programs, and other entities
in which individuals are locked up overnight. |
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| Jail inmates |
Jail inmates are offenders confined in short-term facilities that are usually
administered by a local law enforcement agency and that are intended for adults but
sometimes hold juveniles before or after adjudication. Jail inmates usually have a
sentence of less than 1 year or are being held pending a trial, awaiting sentencing,
or
awaiting transfer to other facilities after a conviction. |
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| Parole |
Parole refers to criminal offenders who are conditionally released from prison to
serve the remaining portion of their sentence in the community. Prisoners may be
released to parole by a parole board decision (discretionary release/discretionary
parole), according to provisions of a statute (mandatory release/mandatory parole),
through other types of post-custody conditional supervision, or as the result of a
sentence to a term of supervised release. In the federal system, a term of supervised
release is a sentence to a fixed period of supervision in the community that follows a
sentence to a period of incarceration in federal prison, both of which are ordered at
the time of sentencing by a federal judge. Parolees can have a number of different
supervision statuses including active supervision, which means they are required to
regularly report to a parole authority in person, by mail, or by telephone. Some
parolees may be on an inactive status which means they are excluded from regularly
reporting, and that could be due to a number of reasons. For instance, some may
receive a reduction in supervision, possibly due to compliance or meeting all required
conditions before the parole sentence terminates, and therefore may be moved from an
active to inactive status. Other supervision statues include parolees who only have
financial conditions remaining, have absconded, or who have active warrants. Parolees
are also typically required to fulfill certain conditions and adhere to specific rules
of conduct while in the community. Failure to comply with any of the conditions can
result in a return to incarceration. |
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| Prison |
Compared to jail facilities, prisons are longer-term facilities owned by a state or by
the Federal Government. Prisons typically hold felons and persons with sentences of
more than a year; however, the sentence length may vary by state. Six states
(Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, Delaware, Alaska, and Hawaii) have an integrated
correctional system that combines jails and prisons. There are a small number of
private prisons, facilities that are run by private prison corporations whose services
and beds are contracted out by state or federal governments. |
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