In addition to social and economic factors, our analysis also shows that people who are arrested and booked more than once per year often have underlying health issues, many of which can lead to police contact. People with multiple arrests have greater health needs The vast majority (88%) of people who were arrested and jailed multiple times had not been arrested for a serious violent offense in the past year.
Most people arrested multiple times don’t pose a serious public safety risk. People with multiple arrests are 4 times more likely to be unemployed (15%) than those with no arrests in the past year (4%). Two-thirds (66%) of people with multiple arrests had no more than a high school education, compared to half (51%) of those who were arrested once and a third (33%) of people who had no arrests in the past year. Low educational attainment increases the likelihood of arrest, especially multiple arrests. In contrast, about a third (36%) of people arrested only once, and only one in five (21%) people who had no arrests, had incomes below $10,000. Nearly half (49%) of people with multiple arrests in the past year had individual incomes below $10,000 per year. Poverty is strongly correlated with multiple arrests. This is partly reflective of persistent residential segregation and racial profiling, which subject Black individuals and communities to greater surveillance and increased likelihood of police stops and searches. Despite making up only 13% of the general population, Black men and women account for 21% of people who were arrested just once and 28% of people arrested multiple times in 2017. Black Americans are overrepresented among people who were arrested in 2017. This suggests that instead of incarceration, which diminishes economic prospects, public investments in employment assistance, education and vocational training, and financial assistance would help mediate the conditions that lead marginalized individuals to police contact in the first place. Moreover, the vast majority are arrested for non-violent offenses. Our analysis shows that people with multiple arrests are disproportionately: Black, low-income, less educated, and unemployed. Most broadly, we find important demographic differences between people with multiple arrests in the past year and those with no arrests or just one arrest. People with multiple arrests disproportionately come from marginalized populations Of those 4.9 million individuals, 3.5 million were arrested only once in 2017 930,000 were arrested twice and 430,000 were arrested three or more times. Using nationally representative data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), we find that at least 4.9 million individuals were arrested and booked in 2017 3. 
Furthermore, even with this limitation, this data allows us to better understand people who cycle in and out of jail, the social, economic, and health problems that are correlated with repeated arrests, and what effective policies can break this cycle. Because of these exclusions, the estimate of 4.9 million individuals arrested represents a minimum. 4 It was not possible to estimate how many people arrested in 2017 were excluded from the survey (see methodology section for details). This data set fills an important gap in the existing knowledge of jails and arrests: The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ reports on jail data only offer one-time “snapshots” that can’t account for the high turnover in jails over the course of a year, and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program counts annual arrest events, not the number of unique individuals who are arrested, nor how many times each is arrested.Įven as the NSDUH fills some important data gaps, it is important to note that the survey methodology excludes several groups, two of which are likely to be arrested: people in “group quarters” (like jails, prisons, and hospitals) and people who are homeless and do not use shelters (it does include homeless individuals who use shelters).
The data offers important insights on individuals who have been arrested once or multiple times in a given year, which at the national level - and often, even at the county level - is not collected, analyzed, or published. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) surveys a nationally representative sample with a wide range of variables on demographics, drug use, health, and criminal justice involvement.
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