In 2023, correctional authorities in the United States had jurisdiction over 1.2 million individuals in state or federal prisons, an increase of 2% from 2022. This report provides counts of incarcerated individuals under the jurisdiction of state and federal correctional authorities in 2023, including findings on admissions, releases, and imprisonment rates. Key findings include that the number of females in state or federal prison increased almost 4% from 2022 (87,800) to 2023 (91,100), prison populations in seven states increased by more than 1,000 persons from 2022 to 2023, the incarceration rate in 2023 (360 individuals per 100,000 U.S. residents of all ages) was down 25% from 2013 (479 individuals per 100,000) but up 2% from 2022 (355 individuals per 100,000), and incarceration rates for individuals age 18 or older increased for black and white adults between 2022-23. In addition, eight states had at least 500 more admissions to prison in 2023 compared to 2022, and in 2022 and 2023, about 70% of all prison releases were conditional on community supervision or other requirements.

This report presents estimates of non-fatal criminal victimizations reported and not reported to police from the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). This report includes statistics on non-fatal violent crimes (rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault) and property crimes (burglary or trespassing, motor vehicle theft, and other types of household theft). This report found that in 2024, 1.45% of persons age 12 or older experienced at least one violent victimization. Specifically, veterans experienced 455,240 violent victimizations in 2024. In the same year, there were 23.3 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older in the United States. In addition, the rate of violent victimizations reported to police was 11.2 per 1,000 persons age 12 or older in 2024. There were 13.1 million property victimizations in 2024. However, property crime rates in rural areas decreased from 2023 (56.5 per 1,000 households) to 2024 (48.3 per 1,000).

Recent studies show that transportation insecurity among students and the effects of these barriers on everything from whether students enroll in college and succeed in earning a degree, to whether students are able to maintain their mental health. Structural barriers, such as limited transit options and unreliable service, can determine whether students attend the college of their choice, make it to class on time, consistently attend classes, or take on a job to support themselves. These challenges also affect their ability to access healthcare or manage caregiving responsibilities. When getting from home to campus is too costly, too slow, or too unpredictable, fulfilling school, work, or caregiving responsibilities may simply be impossible. Students’ transportation needs and the barriers they face vary due to differences in geography, infrastructure, and the availability of alternatives to driving. The researchers partnered with Florida Atlantic University to understand how transportation barriers affect students’ daily lives. RThey found that 84% of surveyed students had regular access to a car, but the financial burden was substantial. Approximately 76% of surveyed students covered part or all of the vehicle maintenance costs. In addition, 54% of surveyed students never used public transportation, underscoring the challenges of relying on a system that many students see as inconvenient or unreliable. Focus group discussions revealed that some students find that transportation insecurity consumes too much mental energy due to external factors, such as planning around traffic, construction, parking, or delays.

About one in seven young people aged 18 to 24 report not being engaged in school, training, or work. This group of nearly 4.2 million disconnected youth is unlikely to be on a path toward economic prosperity. Experiencing disconnection has enormous costs for the individual and for broader society; disconnected young people forego more than $12,000 per year in earnings in the short term and are expected to earn less throughout their working lives than those who have not experienced disconnection. The total costs to society from a young person’s disconnection throughout their youth can be as high as $1 million (in 2025 dollars), including lost earnings, lost tax revenues, and other costs. Key takeaways from this report include that about one in seven young people (aged 18–24) are disconnected—that is, not engaging in school, training, or work. The definition of disconnected youth includes groups with very different experiences but excludes a large group of individuals who are only marginally connected to education or employment. This suggests a need for revising the definition to include young people with marginal attachments and examining subgroups separately. Young men have higher rates of disconnection than young women, but family status, race/ethnicity, and disability status generally are more important than sex in explaining disconnection rates. Most young people experiencing disconnection have at least a high school diploma. This suggests that efforts to promote high school graduation alone will not solve the problem of disconnected youth. Community factors matter. Youth disconnection rates are higher in communities in which fewer adult men are employed. Young veterans have high rates of disconnection. Especially among female veterans, family status appears to drive disconnection. This suggests that even when the research team examined disconnection by subgroup, the findings may still mask differences in level of disconnection within the subgroup.

Despite a large earnings premium for bachelor’s degree completion in general, graduates from low-income families earn substantially less than graduates from high-income families. While prior research has documented the role of college quality and major choice in explaining these gaps, the authors examine undermatching on a different margin: the first (post-college) job transition. The transition from college to the labor market can be challenging to navigate, and students with financial, informational, or other disadvantages during the job search may be more likely to “undermatch” to their first job. Using administrative data from a large, urban, public college system, the authors document large gaps in earnings five years after graduation by socioeconomic status (proxied by financial aid receipt) that remain unexplained even after controlling for grade point average, college, field of study, and other pre-graduation characteristics. They then examine how features of the initial job transition relate to longer-term earnings, and to what extent differences in the first job transition can explain later socioeconomic status earnings gaps. Their results show that first job transitions are rocky for many graduates, strongly predict earnings at Year 5, and are a substantial mediator of socioeconomic gaps in earnings five years after college graduation—reducing the unexplained gap by almost two-thirds.

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) has driven a surge in computational demand, creating unprecedented pressures on U.S. data centers and the electric power grid. The authors of this report identified the key constraints limiting the grid's ability to expand capacity and support future AI growth. They also reviewed research on barriers to increasing electricity supply, assessed which could be addressed by 2030, and suggested courses of action to tackle those barriers. The report provides their recommendations for federal and state regulators, grid planners, and system operators, along with estimates of the additional capacity that could be achieved if these barriers are resolved. Key findings include that (1) Permitting delays can be caused by poor coordination between agencies for permitting processes and time needed for permitting processes. Potential risks of addressing these barriers include community opposition, insufficient developer interest, and negative impacts on the environment; (2) Interconnection processes can be lengthy, complex, and costly and result in interconnection rights that are under-used because of inconsistent implementation, lack of standardization, and insufficient market incentives. Potential risks of addressing these barriers include diversion of resources from interconnection reform, grid reliability risks, and unequal access to fast-track processes; (3) Transmission can be underutilized for a variety of reasons, including suboptimal transmission line configuration and usage, substantial costs for network upgrades, minimal incentives to adopt grid-enhancing technologies, and limited operator capabilities to manage and analyze large volumes of data. Potential risks to addressing these barriers include costs of implementing congestion pricing and cyberattacks on a better-connected grid; and (4) Many data centers rely not just on diesel generators but also on the limited or inconsistent resources for supplemental generation. Potential risks to addressing these barriers include difficulties in developing a commitment mechanism to use supplemental generators, supply chain disruptions, and the reliability of on-site generation.

Small businesses play a critical role in the U.S. economy. Yet many small business owners struggle to access the capital they need to sustain and grow their businesses. To explore how to bridge this credit gap for small business owners, the research team reviewed the Get Ready loan program, a credit-building product and financial coaching program for small business owners offered by Ascendus, a community development financial institution. The program provides borrowers a $500 line of credit, with the ability to graduate to a $5,000 line of credit after three months of on-time repayment. The program has provided important access to capital for small business owners who might otherwise struggle to access traditional loans. After two years, the program has shown promise toward improving access to capital and financial health, developing new borrowers, and providing a replicable model. Several borrowers noted that the program took a chance on them when no other lender would. Incoming borrowers had an average credit score of 571, lower than the typical threshold traditional lenders use. The program reaches borrowers largely unable to access capital via other lenders. Despite coming into the program with credit challenges, 41% of participants graduated from the $500 line of credit to the $5,000 line of credit. Several participants were also able to access additional loans outside the program. Borrower impressions of the program were largely positive, particularly regarding financial coaching. Many noted increased financial literacy and felt the program gave them tools to help them manage their credit. There is demand for the program. Ascendus has a pipeline of 150 potential borrowers in the application process. Yet the program requires grant support to expand its reach and impact into new markets. Additional research is needed to understand the program’s full impact. In particular, more analysis is needed to understand the program’s long-term outcomes on borrowers, including improvements to their finances and credit standing. Some borrowers had suggestions for improvements. Some suggested the addition of a user-friendly mobile app to manage accounts. Others noted challenges with the line of credit’s low dollar amount.

The plurality voting rule used in most U.S. elections has been the subject of debate, with some noting that it may misrepresent voters' preferences and allow for candidates who lack broad support to be elected. To better understand how alternative voting rules may perform in real-world elections, researchers built an agent-based model grounded in real-world survey data from the American National Election Studies. The researchers simulated more than half a million Senate elections to quantify and compare the performance of eight voting rules on the extent to which they resisted spoiler effects and elected winners who were centrist, representative, and majority preferred. A Condorcet winner is a candidate who beats all other candidates in a pairwise (one-on-one) comparisons. A Condorcet-compliant rule is a voting rule that elects the Condorcet winner whenever one exists. The authors found a stark, consistent performance gap between Condorcet- and non-Condorcet voting rules but minimal differences within the class of Condorcet voting rules. The most widely debated voting rules in electoral reform discourse-plurality and instant run-off voting-showed lower performance on all measures analyzed. The authors also noted that Copeland Rule (if there is no Condorcet winner, elect the candidate who wins the greatest net number of pairwise comparisons) was the only voting rule not vulnerable to spoiler effects. A spoiler effect is when a candidate who does not win the election but, by entering, draws enough support from other candidates to alter the outcome in favor of a less-preferred alternative. The results suggest that alternatives to the status quo (plurality) that go beyond familiar options like instant run-off voting may warrant consideration.

The annual National Survey on Drug Use and Health provides nationally representative data on the use of tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drugs; substance use disorders; mental health conditions; suicidal thoughts and behavior; and receipt of substance use and mental health treatment among the civilian, noninstitutionalized population aged 12 or older in the United States, with nearly 70,000 respondents in 2024. Key findings include that among adults aged 18 years or older, the percentage who had any mental illness or serious mental illness in the past year showed no change from 2021 to 2024; among people aged 12 years or older in 2024, 58.3% used tobacco products, vaped nicotine, used alcohol, or used an illicit drug in the past month; and among adolescents aged 12 to 17 in 2024 with a co-occurring major depressive episode and a substance use disorder in the past year, 72.1% received either substance use treatment or mental health treatment in the past year, and 27.9% received neither type of treatment. In 2024, 31.7 million adults aged 18 or older (or 12.2%) perceived that they had ever had a problem with their use of alcohol or drugs. Among these adults, 74.3% (or 23.5 million people) considered themselves to be in recovery or to have recovered. Similarly, 67.8 million adults aged 18 or older (or 26.1%) perceived that they ever had a mental health issue. Among these adults, 66.9% (or 45.0 million people) considered themselves to be in recovery or to have recovered.

The National Substance Use and Mental Health Services Survey is sponsored by the Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality of the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The survey is a comprehensive national source of data on treatment services provided by substance use and mental health treatment facilities in the United States, its territories, and the District of Columbia. Key findings include that private organizations operated 90.3% (n = 14,421) of substance use treatment facilities, 86.0% (n = 12,114) of mental health treatment facilities, and 87.5% (n = 7,733) of combined treatment facilities. In 2021, among mental health treatment facilities, the top two licensing, certification, and accreditation sources were state mental health authorities (68.8%, n = 6,226) and U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (50.9%, n = 4,608). In 2024, the top two licensing, certification, and accreditation sources were state mental health authorities (60.1%, n = 8,468) and state departments of health (49.1%, n = 6,917). Among substance use treatment facilities, 63.5% (n = 10,131) provided suicide prevention services. Of the top 10 geographic distributions, more than 76.5% of substance use treatment facilities provided suicide prevention services with Wyoming (88.9%, n = 48) providing the highest percentage.

Millions of Americans aged 65 and older have limited financial resources and may struggle to afford essential necessities such as medical care and groceries. Medicare Savings Programs (MSPs), which help pay Medicare premiums and, in some cases, other expenses such as deductibles and copayments, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are critical government programs that can provide substantial financial assistance to older adults with low incomes to meet these needs. However, t eligible older adults have historically had low rates of participation in both programs. Using both national and state-level eligibility estimates, this analysis seeks to determine the extent of the eligibility overlap in SNAP and MSPs— that is, the number of older adults eligible for both programs—and examines characteristics of older adults who are eligible for both programs. Key findings include that about 5.5 million (or nearly 1 in 10) adults ages 65 and older were eligible for both the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and a Medicare Savings Program in Fiscal Year 2022-23 and older adults eligible for SNAP were similar to those eligible for MSPs in terms of demographics, employment, and income. These characteristics include that 56% of older adults were aged 65 to 74, 95% of older adults were retired, and 91% of older adults had no countable SNAP income.