The prison population has been creeping back upward. New laws in some states instituting harsher punishments threaten to further fill prisons, many of which are already understaffed and overcrowded.

These charts show the extent of racial disparities ... Black prisoners are overrepresented in the US prison population compared to their share of the total US population. According to the Bureau ...

In the decade that followed, the state’s prison population went from 13,000 to more than 30,000. Most of the people newly convicted for non-violent drug charges were Black and brown men.

Any way you define it, the U.S. prison population is getting grayer — and fast. The proportion of state and federal prisoners who are 55 or older is about five times what it was three decades ago.

An April 2023 study credited the continued rise in the women’s prison population to “more expansive law enforcement efforts, stiffer drug sentencing laws, and post-conviction barriers to re ...