Study: New Mexico, Georgia had highest jail rates in US

Officials say reforms have been enacted since data collected

In this July 23, 2004 file photo John Gibson, right, and Capt. Jul Hull, left, walk past a prisoner sleeping on the floor of a cellblock at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta. The Massachusetts-based Prison Policy Initiative, a criminal justice reform group, said in a study released Wednesday, Georgia and New Mexico, two states with some of the nation's largest percentages of minority residents, also had the country's highest jail incarceration rates in 2013. - photo by Associated Press

W prisons — In this July 23, 2004 file photo John Gibson, right, and Capt. Jul Hull, left, walk past a prisoner sleeping on the floor of a cellblock at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta. The Massachusetts-based Prison Policy Initiative, a criminal justice reform group, said in a study released Wednesday, Georgia and New Mexico, two states with some of the nation's largest percentages of minority residents, also had the country's highest jail incarceration rates in 2013. - photo by Associated Press

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — New Mexico and Georgia — two states with some of the nation's largest percentages of minority residents in the United States — had the nation's highest rates of inmates in county jails, according to a report made public Wednesday by a non-partisan criminal justice reform group. The study by the Massachusetts-based Prison Policy Initiative that lobbies for reducing U.S. jail and prison populations showed that New Mexico had a jail incarceration rate of 340.8 per 100,000 residents in 2013 — the latest year of federal data tracking all local jail populations. Georgia had the second highest rate that year with 317.3 per 100,000 residents.

Associated Press

Associated Press