Kentucky’s total correctional population in 2022 was 95,479 people, including 32,351 incarcerated people and another 63,128 on supervision, probation or parole, according to a new Kentucky Center for Economic Policy website.
This week, the left-leaning policy released UnlockKY.org, aimed at tracking incarceration in Kentucky.
Produced by the criminal legal experts at KyPolicy, the site includes more than three decades of data on Kentucky’s correctional population, along with details on the causes and harms of mass incarceration and the policy solutions available to Kentucky’s leaders.
The centerpiece of UnlockKY.org is more than three decades of data on Kentucky’s total correctional population. This data show that the number of incarcerated Kentuckians increased for the second consecutive year in 2022 after dropping to a 17-year low in 2020 due to pandemic-related measures.
Kentucky incarcerated 32,351 people in 2022 in both local jails and state prisons. That’s a 10% increase from the pandemic low of 28,892 in 2020 and a 250% increase from the 9,247 incarcerated in 1985.
“If Kentucky’s correctional population was counted as a city it would be the state’s third largest, behind only Louisville and Lexington,” the group said in a release. “Many thousands more Kentuckians are held in federal prisons and owe fines or fees and are not counted in the total.”
In addition to the data tracker, UnlockKY explains the inequities of the system — Black people make up 8.6% of the state’s population but 21% of the prison population — along with the harms of incarceration, the circumstances that led to Kentucky’s obscenely high incarceration rate and the policy solutions available to lawmakers who seek to take on this crisis.
UnlockKY contains information on:
- The drivers of incarceration, including especially punitive state laws, the inequitable cash bail system and mandatory minimum sentences.
- The harms of incarceration, which makes it harder for people to recover from mistakes, fails to improve community safety, does nothing to address underlying community problems and costs Kentucky an immense amount of money that could be better spent on actually improving people’s lives.
- Policy solutions to this ongoing crisis, including bail reform, cannabis legalization, the elimination of persistent felony offender laws and investments in community supports.
The website is a resource for academics, journalists, students, lawmakers and advocates and will be updated as new data becomes available.