New York Criminal Legal System Data Hub

New York Criminal Legal System Data Hub

Important decisions about New York State’s criminal legal system must be driven by data, not political rhetoric. To that end, this data hub centralizes and organizes key indicators relating to arrests, bail, pretrial release, jails, prisons, and parole and presents them with other data points of interest to policymakers, media, advocates, and the public. The Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) retrieved the majority of this data from publicly available state agency websites, where it is often available only in raw and difficult to use formats.

Jail

NYC
Statewide

When the New York City Council voted in 2019 to shutter Rikers Island, it approved a plan to replace the complex with smaller, borough-based jails. Downsizing the jail population is fundamental to the success of this plan. New York City jails saw substantial decarceration following the implementation of reforms to the state’s bail laws and, shortly after that, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic with its associated pretrial releases. Since then, New York City’s jail population has started to increase. The vast majority of people in the city’s jails are held pretrial, legally presumed innocent, and are detained because they cannot afford bail.

Snapshot of the NYC jail population ()

Total
Pretrial

Black People
Women
Brad H Status

Jail admissions, total,  to 

Total
Change (#)
Change (%)
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Jail population, by 
 and   on 
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Related resources

Why New York City Needs a Blueprint to Rightsize the Department of Correction (Vera)

Additional data

About the data

Vera obtains New York City jail data from the Daily Inmates in Custody dataset on NYC OpenData. The New York City Department of Correction (DOC) updates this file daily to reflect the people that are currently in custody. Vera has been collecting this data since August 2017 to retain a historical record of the daily population snapshot. The variables available in this file include race, age, gender, custody status, top charge, and Brad H status (a designation given to people who have met with mental health staff at DOC and are deemed to have at least some symptoms of mental illness). The dataset does not include ethnicity information, and the “other” race group would include Latinx people who are not categorized as Black or white. Vera combined Indian American or Indigenous people with the “other” category due to small numbers. Please note that daily jail admission counts may not include people who were booked and released on the same day. Also, sometimes recording of bookings can be delayed.

Statewide, jail populations were declining even before the state passed reforms to its bail laws in 2019, but they showed a notable decrease during the implementation of bail reform and the onset of COVID-19 in early 2020. However, since then, the jail population has started to increase. This is particularly true for the pretrial population, which comprises approximately 75 percent of the state’s jail population. Racial disparities continued to persist in New York’s jails, with Black people comprising 18 percent of the state’s population and 48 percent of the state’s jail population.

Snapshot of the New York State jail population

Total
Pretrial
Black People
Women

Note: The most current data for the total jail and pretrial jail population is obtained from DCJS Monthly Jail Population Reports . However, these reports do not include data disaggregated by race and gender. Vera therefore obtained that information through Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests, for which the most recently available data is from June 2021.

Incarceration affects every county. Although most attention is paid to New York City, smaller counties across the state continued to show the most pronounced incarceration rates and racial disparities.

People in jail, by county and

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Related resources

Additional data

  • Downloadable dataset (TK)

About the data

Vera researchers collected statewide jail data from multiple sources. The researchers obtained statewide jail population numbers disaggregated by incarceration status were from monthly jail population data published by the New York Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) in “Monthly Jail Population Trends.” Because the “Monthly Jail Population Trends” reports do not include data disaggregated by race and gender, Vera researchers analyzed 54 county-level jail admission and release datasets, which contained demographic and charge information for people in jail. Vera obtained these datasets from (a) Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests (for 47 counties); (b) data-sharing agreements with sheriff’s departments (two counties); and (c) “Daily Inmates In Custody” from New York City Department of Correction (DOC), accessed through the NYC OpenData site (five counties). Vera excluded data from eight counties (Chemung, Genesee, Hamilton, Jefferson, Nassau, Putnam, Rockland, and Ulster) because either complete data was not provided or there was a large discrepancy between the monthly jail population estimated from the data and the monthly jail population reported by DCJS. The most recently available FOIL data is from June 2021.

This data hub uses county population data obtained from Vera's Incarceration Trends Project (ITP). Rates are computed per 100,000 residents ages 15 to 64. The population data used in ITP comes from the National Center for Health Statistics’ Bridged-Race Population Estimates. Population data for 2020 was used to compute rates for the period since 2020.


Credits

Design and development: Jill Hubley
Data analysis: Emma Delaporte, Christopher Gernon, Jaeok Kim, Selina Ho, and Sara Lanclos

Charts: Selina Ho, Sara Lanclos, Jill Hubley, and Christian Henrichson

Writing: Brian King, Jaeok Kim, and Christian Henrichson
Editing: Léon Digard

The photograph by Jack Norton originally appeared in No One is Watching: Jail in Upstate New York.