Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

New Hampshire’s Imprisonment Rate Peaked at 219 per 100,000 in 2014. By 2023 It Was 151, Sixth-Lowest Among the States.

Federal prisoner counts going back to 1990 show New Hampshire locking up people at well under half the rate of the states as a group. They also show the state’s rate climbing faster than the states’ combined rate until 2020, then falling faster.

At the end of 2023, 2,115 people were serving sentences of more than a year under the authority of New Hampshire’s state prison system, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. That works out to 151 for every 100,000 state residents. Only five states had lower rates: Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Jersey. Nine years earlier, at the end of 2014, New Hampshire held 2,915 sentenced prisoners and its rate stood at 219, the highest in any year from 2010 through 2023.

The figures come from the National Prisoner Statistics program, a yearly count that the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the research arm of the U.S. Justice Department, collects from every state corrections department and the federal Bureau of Prisons. The bureau publishes the results in a report series called Prisoners. Granite State Report read the New Hampshire rows in 14 editions of that series, covering 1990 through 2023.

What the rate counts

The bureau’s imprisonment rate is the number of prisoners sentenced to more than one year who are under a state’s jurisdiction on Dec. 31, divided by the state’s resident population of all ages, per 100,000. Jurisdiction means legal authority. A New Hampshire prisoner held in another state’s prison still counts for New Hampshire; a federal prisoner held in New Hampshire does not.

The rate leaves out most people held in county jails. Six states, among them Rhode Island and Vermont, run prisons and jails as one integrated system, and the bureau’s tables flag that their figures include jail populations. New Hampshire is not one of them. Its figure covers only people sentenced to the state Department of Corrections. That matters when New Hampshire is set beside its neighbors: two of the five states with lower rates in 2023 count jail inmates that New Hampshire’s figure does not.

Two decades of growth, a plateau, then a slide

In the bureau’s advance count for 1990, New Hampshire had 1,342 sentenced prisoners and a rate of 117 per 100,000. The advance count for 2000 put the rate at 185, and the bureau ranked New Hampshire fourth-lowest among the states, behind Minnesota, Maine and North Dakota. In 2005 the rate was 192, again fourth-lowest, behind Maine, Minnesota and Rhode Island.

From 2010 through 2023, the chart below uses the latest figure the bureau printed for each year in the reports Granite State Report read. From 2010 through 2018 the rate held between 198 and 219, with the high point in 2014. It slipped to 197 in 2019, then fell to 172 in 2020, the year the pandemic hit. New Hampshire admitted 884 sentenced prisoners in 2020, down 31.6 percent from 1,292 in 2019; admissions nationwide fell 40 percent. The rate kept falling, to 153 in 2021 and 149 in 2022, before ticking up to 151 in 2023.

Set beside the other states

In every year in this record, New Hampshire’s rate was far below the rate for the states as a group. What changed is the ratio. From 1990 to 2020 New Hampshire’s rate rose 47 percent, from 117 to 172, while the combined rate for all states rose 16 percent, from 272 to 315. In 1990 New Hampshire’s rate was 43 percent of the combined rate for all states. By 2012 it was more than half, and it stayed above half through 2020, peaking at 54.6 percent that year. Then it dropped back: 49.8 percent in 2021 and 47.5 percent in 2023.

Put another way, from 2014 to 2023 New Hampshire’s rate fell 31 percent, from 219 to 151. The combined rate for all states fell 23 percent over the same years, from 411 to 318.

At the end of 2023, 22 states had rates above the combined state rate of 318, the bureau reported. Mississippi was highest at 652. Massachusetts was lowest at 96, a figure that includes people serving sentences of more than one year but less than two and a half years in local jails, the term the bureau describes as the legal line between prison and jail in Massachusetts.

Who was inside, and how they came and went

The bureau’s offense breakdown in Prisoners in 2023 is for the end of 2022, when 1,976 sentenced prisoners were in New Hampshire’s custody. For 59.7 percent, the most serious offense was violent. Drug offenses accounted for 14.3 percent, property offenses for 13.4 percent and public-order offenses for 9.1 percent. The rest were other or unknown offenses.

In 2023 the state admitted 819 sentenced prisoners, down from 870 in 2022. Of those 819, 427 were new court commitments and 392 were people returned for violating the conditions of parole or other supervision. In 2022 the split ran the other way, with 477 violators and 393 new commitments. The state released 794 sentenced prisoners in 2023, 636 of them through conditional releases such as parole. Women made up 144 of the 2,115 prisoners at the end of 2023, down from 154 a year earlier.

By its rated and operational measures, the state also reported more prison capacity than prisoners. On Dec. 31, 2023, New Hampshire’s prisons held 1,950 people in custody against a rated and operational capacity of 2,760, or 70.7 percent. Against the lower design capacity of 1,810, the same population was 107.7 percent.

What the state constitution says about punishment

New Hampshire’s Bill of Rights speaks to punishment directly. Part I, Article 18 reads, as the New Hampshire Supreme Court quoted it in full in a 1984 opinion, State v. Elbert: “All penalties ought to be proportioned to the nature of the offense. No wise legislature will affix the same punishment to the crimes of theft, forgery, and the like, which they do to those of murder and treason. Where the same undistinguishing severity is exerted against all offenses, the people are led to forget the real distinction in the crimes themselves, and to commit the most flagrant with as little compunction as they do the lightest offenses. For the same reason a multitude of sanguinary laws is both impolitic and unjust. The true design of all punishments being to reform, not to exterminate mankind.”

In that 1984 opinion, the court noted that it had never decided whether the article’s language sets mandatory standards or only advises. The federal counts do not measure whether New Hampshire meets the article’s aim. They show how many people the state holds, and how that number has moved.

The limits of these numbers

The rate is a one-day snapshot taken each Dec. 31. It does not count people held in county jails on shorter sentences or awaiting trial, or New Hampshire residents held in federal prisons. The bureau revises earlier years as states send corrected counts, so a figure printed in one edition can differ by a few points in the next; the 1990 and 2000 figures are advance counts. The 2020 figures reflect a year when courts, jails and prisons changed how they operated because of the pandemic. New Hampshire did not file the 2020 federal survey; the bureau estimated the state’s 2020 counts from Department of Corrections population reports, and the department approved them. The rate also divides by every resident, including children, so it is not the share of adults in prison; for adults 18 and older, New Hampshire’s 2023 rate was 183 per 100,000.

Granite State Report earlier described the state prison system’s facilities, staffing and budget in “New Hampshire Prisons in 2025: Challenges and Innovations Ahead” and examined the Eighth Amendment’s reach in the state in “Cruel and Constant: The Eighth Amendment in New Hampshire”. The federal counts add the long view: a rate that climbed for two decades, leveled off, then fell by nearly a third from its 2014 high.

— Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Imprisonment rates, prisoner counts, admissions, releases, offense shares and capacity figures are drawn from the Bureau of Justice Statistics Prisoners series, editions covering 1990 through 2023, and the bureau’s National Prisoner Statistics and National Corrections Reporting Program data published in them. The text of Part I, Article 18 is quoted from the New Hampshire Supreme Court’s opinion in State v. Elbert (1984). Percentages and shares not printed by the bureau are Granite State Report arithmetic from the bureau’s figures. Nothing in this article is legal advice.

Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.