Prison Population of Illinois

As of December 2021, the Illinois prison population was comprised of 27,468 adults and 101 juveniles.  These figures are very low due to the COVID-19 pandemic and largely based upon emergency temporary measures taken to halt and dramatically reduce admissions from county jails.

IDOC held 6,000 incarcerated people in 1974; approximately five times this many people are being held in IDOC today. This has created a situation of severe overcrowding and under-resourcing, resulting in substandard living conditions and programmatic deficits across the Department.

Illinois’ costly overreliance on prison has substantially increased in the last four decades, resulting in a peak of the adult prison population in 2013 at more than 49,000 people incarcerated in IDOC.

In 2015, Governor Bruce Rauner issued Executive Order 14, which established the Illinois State Commission on Criminal Justice and Sentencing Reform. This body has the goal of reducing the State’s current prison population by 25% by 2025. This Executive Order was issued in part due to the work of the John Howard Association, which is named specifically in the order as a reason (amongst others) for its creation: "WHEREAS, the John Howard Association and other outside entities have demonstrated that the Department of Corrections is experiencing severe overcrowding, which threatens the safety of inmates and staff and undermines the Department’s rehabilitative efforts."