The National Reincarceration Rate Has Dropped 20% in a Decade

It's easy to only hear the bad numbers in this space. Here's a good one: according to the Council of State Governments Justice Center, the national reincarceration rate has fallen by roughly 20% over the past decade — from about 35% down to around 28%.

That's not a small shift. It reflects years of policy change: more states investing in reentry programming, more agencies rethinking how they respond to technical violations instead of defaulting to reincarceration, and more attention paid to the specific, practical barriers — IDs, housing, transportation, employment — that used to send people back for reasons that had nothing to do with committing a new crime.

The same CSG Justice Center research that tracks this improvement is also blunt about what's still broken: 44% of state prison admissions still come from probation or parole violations, and technical violations alone — not new offenses — accounted for more than 93,000 admissions in 2021, costing states over $10 billion.

Progress and a long way to go can both be true at once. This is one of the numbers we'll keep watching.

Source: Council of State Governments Justice Center, "Supervision Violations and Their Impact on Incarceration," 2024.