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:
- 50% of counties exceeded in-county jail capacity for at least one month in 2018; and
- 64% of counties exceeded 90% of in-county jail capacity for at least one month in 2018.