Report: Kentucky has higher incarceration rate than all but 1 country in the world

LEXINGTON, Ky. ( FOX 56 ) — A new report from the Prison Policy Initiative is putting Kentucky at the top for its incarceration rate.

The study, released Tuesday, suggests that Kentucky is among the nine U.S. states leading the world for its incarceration rate. The only country to beat out those nine states was El Salvador.

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Prison Policy Initiative’s States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2024 said the United States has the highest incarceration rate of any independent democracy in the world with every state incarcerating more people per capita than most nations.

The report said Kentucky has an incarceration rate of 889 per 100,000 people , including prisons, jails, immigration detention, and juvenile justice facilities. This means Kentucky has the sixth highest incarceration rate in the U.S., with Louisiana being the highest, at 1,067 per 100,000 people.

The latest information from Kentucky’s Department of Corrections from June 6 shows Kentucky had 32,334 people in custody. These numbers aren’t collective and only provide a snapshot of the people in custody at the time of the report.

Number of people in custody in Kentucky:

• Federal inmates: 1,781
• Non-state inmates:12434
• County inmates: 10653
• State inmates: 7466

“Additionally, the number of people impacted by county and city jails in Kentucky is much larger than the graph above would suggest, because people cycle through local jails relatively quickly. Each year, at least 89,000 different people are booked into local jails in Kentucky,” reads the study.

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A second report from Prison Policy Initiative found Kentucky, the 26th largest state in population came in at 20th for the number of unique annual jail admissions.

Kentucky’s incarceration rate is higher than the United States as a whole, 608 per 100,000. To compare, the Prison Policy Initiative compared states to the founding NATO countries, of those the United Kingdom was second with 144 per 100,000, still well below Kentucky’s rate.

The Prison Policy Initiative is a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that produces research to ‘expose the broader harm of mass criminalization.”

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