Local jails are an important part of the state’s criminal justice system. Jails house, among others, individuals held pretrial, serving sentences, and held for federal and other authorities. In this report and in the accompanying spreadsheet (here), we provide information about North Carolina jail occupancy rates. Among other things, we find that:
- 40.6% of counties[1] exceeded in-county jail capacity for at least one month in 2019; and
- 56.3% of counties exceeded 90% of in-county jail capacity for at least one month in 2019.
Our report relies on information reported to state authorities. Specifically, the North Carolina Administrative Code requires the sheriff or the administrator of a regional jail to submit a monthly report to the Jail and Detention Section of DHHS’ Division of Health Service Regulation.[2] Police chiefs likewise are required to report monthly on the occupancy of municipal lockups.[3] According to DHHS, those required to report do not include a count of inmates housed in other counties; rather they count only individuals physically present in the facility.[4] A jail that is housing individuals for another county would include those persons in its count.[5] We obtained a compilation of reported data from DHSS and it serves as the basis for this report.