(for the Prison Policy Initiative)

Of all the reasons people get sent to jail, forgetting an appointment has to be among the least justifiable. Around 5.6 million people are booked into local jail each year in the United States. With some people arrested more than once, total jail bookings are even higher, at over 7.9 million in 2024. Produced in collaboration with the Jail Data Initiative (JDI), this briefing provides new evidence on jail bookings for people arrested for “failing to appear” in court — a typically innocent mistake that is treated as a crime in and of itself, sometimes called “bail jumping.” According to our national, lower-bound estimates presented here for the first time, at least 1 in 8 jail bookings are connected to failure to make it to a court appearance (13%), and about half of those had only failure to appear (FTA) charges. This means 546,000 jail bookings were due to arrests where the only matter at hand was an FTA warrant, not any other criminal offense. In fact, if no one was sent to jail for missing court, there would be 52,000 fewer people in jail each day nationwide, and 19 million fewer nights spent in jail each year.

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