The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. At the end of 2019, there were just under 2.1 million people behind bars in the U.S., including 1.43 million under the jurisdiction of federal and state prisons and roughly 735,000 in the custody of locally run jails. In 1972 the US prison population was approximately 200,000 persons and reached its peak in 2009.

Mass incarceration, whether it be through first time offenses or repeated offenses carries enormous fiscal responsibility for states and taxpayers. Costs perincarceratedperson varies from state to state with expenditures ranging from $14,000 to $70,000 meaning many states are spending more money to incarcerate than to educate both K-12 and in-state higher education students. Critics believe that the benefits of prison reform and the development of robust wrap-around rehabilitation programs would ease the economic stress on state budgets, and research also indicates that inmates who participate in correctional education programs are 43 percent less likely to re-enter prison (Department of Justice Archives, 2017).