The new term for inmates, in most official and journalistic usage, is incarcerated person or incarcerated individual. It is person-first language: the word “person” comes before any description of legal status, so the label describes a situation rather than an identity. New York has written the phrase into state law, the Associated Press has written it into its stylebook, and federal justice-grant guidance recommends similar constructions. “Inmate” has not disappeared, but it is no longer the default in the places that set the standards.
The Terms That Have Replaced Inmate
Several alternatives are in circulation, and the right one depends on what you are describing.
- Incarcerated person / incarcerated individual. The most common replacement for “inmate.” Describes someone currently held in a correctional facility.
- Person in custody. A neutral term that works for both jail and prison settings.
- Person who committed a crime. Recommended in some federal agency guidance in place of “offender” or “criminal,” because it separates the person from the act.
- Justice-involved individual. A broader term covering anyone touched by the criminal justice system, including people on probation, parole, or awaiting trial.
- Formerly incarcerated person. Used for someone who has completed a sentence, in place of “ex-con” or “ex-offender.”
The thread running through all of them is the same construction the disability rights movement adopted decades ago: put the person first, then the circumstance. “Person with a disability” rather than a label that stands in for the whole individual. The criminal justice version follows the same grammar for the same reason.
Who Uses Which Term
New York went furthest at the state level. Governor Hochul signed S.8216, which replaced every instance of “inmate” in state law with “incarcerated individual.”1Governor Kathy Hochul. Governor Hochul Signs Legislative Package to Promote Greater Fairness and Restore Dignity for Justice-Involved Individuals The bill’s sponsor, State Senator Gustavo Rivera, said “inmate” “dehumanizes and demoralizes” the people it describes.2New York State Senate. Senate Bill S8216 Illinois has pursued similar changes, moving to replace “offender” with “justice-impacted individual” in state law.
At the federal level, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, part of the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs, issued a style guide telling staff to avoid “offender,” “ex-offender,” “criminal,” and “felon,” and to use phrases such as “person who committed a crime,” “individual who was formerly incarcerated,” and “person released from incarceration.”3Bureau of Justice Assistance. BJA Style Guide
Journalism caught up in 2024, when the Associated Press added a criminal justice chapter to its stylebook advising reporters to use person-first language. Because most American newsrooms default to AP style, that single update changes how millions of readers encounter these descriptions in daily news.
Why the Word Was Changed
The pressure for the change came from people who had been incarcerated themselves. Eddie Ellis, who spent decades at Attica and other New York prisons, founded the Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions after his release and wrote a 2007 open letter that circulated widely among reform advocates. In it, he argued that “inmate,” “convict,” and “felon” are “devoid of humanness” and identify people “as things rather than as people.” He asked organizations to stop using them. Around the same period, the California-based group All of Us or None, founded by formerly incarcerated advocates, rejected the same labels as part of its civil rights work.
There is research behind the intuition. A 2017 study by Denver, Pickett, and Bushway found that when the public reads crime-first language such as “convicted criminal,” their estimates of a person’s likelihood of reoffending rise compared with person-first phrasing. The effect was strongest for people with violent convictions, where even a single exposure to the crime-first label shifted perceived risk. One exposure moved the needle modestly; the labels appear thousands of times across news coverage, policy debates, and courtroom proceedings.
The logic is simple. A label like “inmate” or “felon” sounds like what someone is, not where they currently are, and that perception follows people into hiring decisions, housing applications, and their reception back into communities after release. Jerome R. Wright, a formerly incarcerated advocate, put it this way: if people cannot be seen as human beings, they will never be treated that way, and they cannot escape the parameters of the system.
Where the Old Word Still Shows Up
Adoption is uneven, and you will still hear “inmate” in plenty of settings. The Federal Bureau of Prisons, which actually operates the federal prison system, continues to use “inmate” as standard terminology in its official documents, even as the DOJ’s own grant-making arm has moved away from it. Within one department, the old and new vocabulary coexist.
Everyday usage lags policy almost everywhere. In states where the statute now reads “incarcerated individual,” corrections officers, judges, and prosecutors often still say “inmate” out loud. Changing a law is faster than changing the speech habits of hundreds of thousands of criminal justice workers.
Not all of the criticism is about inertia. Some law enforcement groups and victim advocates argue that softening the language downplays the seriousness of the underlying crimes. When Illinois proposed “justice-impacted individual” in place of “offender,” opponents raised that objection directly. And some formerly incarcerated people find constructions like “justice-involved individual” clinical or evasive, preferring the directness of “prisoner” or “incarcerated person” to phrases that seem designed to make outsiders more comfortable. The consensus, to the extent there is one, is less about settling on a single perfect word than about dropping labels that define a person permanently by their worst moment.