If you’re asking which state has the most private prisons by reliance, the answer is Montana, which held 48.7% of its prisoners in privately operated facilities in 2023. If you’re asking by raw headcount, it’s Florida, with about 11,637 people in private facilities. The two measures point to very different states, and which one matters depends on what you’re trying to understand.
Montana Leads by Rate
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2,427 of Montana’s prisoners were held in privately run facilities in 2023, or 48.7% of the state’s total prison population.1Bureau of Justice Statistics. Prisoners in 2023 – Statistical Tables No other state is close. New Mexico comes next at 29.2%, nearly 20 percentage points behind.
Montana’s total prison population is under 5,000, so a single large private facility shifts the percentage a lot. Even allowing for that, the policy choice to split the system roughly in half between public and private operators is unusual. Most states that use private prisons at all keep fewer than 15% of their inmates in them.
Florida Leads by Count
Percentage shows how dependent a state is on private operators. Raw numbers show where the most people actually sit inside private facilities. The two lists look quite different. In 2023, the states holding the most people in private prisons were:
- Florida: 11,637 inmates (13.3% of its prison population)
- Arizona: 9,842 inmates (28.5%)
- Texas: 9,821 inmates (6.6%)
- Georgia: 7,658 inmates (15.2%)
- Tennessee: 6,640 inmates (27.2%)
- Ohio: 6,466 inmates (13.9%)
Texas shows why both measures matter. It has the third-highest count in the country, but because its total system is so large, that works out to just 6.6%. Florida is similar: the biggest raw number anywhere, but only 13.3% of its population. Arizona is one of the few states that ranks high on both lists.
How the 28 States Compare
Twenty-eight states housed at least some inmates in privately operated prisons in 2023. Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia used none. Across the country, roughly 75,260 state prisoners and 13,358 federal prisoners were held in private facilities, totaling about 88,618 people, or 7.1% of the combined state and federal prison population.1Bureau of Justice Statistics. Prisoners in 2023 – Statistical Tables
States cluster into rough tiers. Montana sits alone at the top at 48.7%. A second tier runs between 20% and 30%: New Mexico (29.2%), Arizona (28.5%), Tennessee (27.2%), Wyoming (24.8%), and Hawaii (22.2%). A middle tier of roughly 12% to 16% includes Colorado, Indiana, Georgia, North Dakota, Ohio, and Florida. The remaining user-states generally keep fewer than 10% of inmates in private facilities.1Bureau of Justice Statistics. Prisoners in 2023 – Statistical Tables
The 22 states with zero private prison inmates include some of the largest systems in the country. California, New York, and Illinois all house every state prisoner in publicly operated facilities.
Why Reliance Varies So Much Between States
Overcrowding drove most of the early contracts. During the incarceration boom of the 1980s and 1990s, prison populations grew faster than states could build new public facilities. Private companies offered to build and operate prisons in exchange for a daily rate per inmate, and for states under court orders to reduce overcrowding, contracting was faster than public construction.
Cost claims kept the model going. Supporters have long argued that for-profit operators run facilities more cheaply than governments. The evidence is weak. The Government Accountability Office has concluded multiple times that available data doesn’t definitively show either model is more cost-effective, and a meta-analysis of cost studies found that private and public prisons were similarly expensive to operate. Where private facilities do show lower costs, the savings come mostly from paying officers less and staffing more thinly. Private prison guards earned roughly $7,000 less per year than their public counterparts, and private facilities averaged one officer per 6.9 inmates compared to one per 4.9 in public prisons.
State politics do the rest. Some states have embraced privatization as a governing philosophy and are receptive to contracts. Others have moved the other way: California, New York, and several other states have effectively prohibited new private prison contracts.
Occupancy Guarantees in the Contracts
One contract feature catches most readers off guard. About 65% of private prison contracts reviewed by researchers included clauses requiring the government to keep a certain share of beds filled, typically between 80% and 100%, with 90% the most common threshold. If the state doesn’t deliver enough inmates, it pays for the empty beds anyway. Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Virginia have been locked into contracts requiring 95% to 100% occupancy.2Office of Justice Programs. Criminal – How Lockup Quotas and Low-Crime Taxes Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations Critics call these provisions “low-crime taxes,” because the government pays either way when crime declines.
What the Federal and Immigration Numbers Don’t Show
The BJS figures above cover state prisoners and federal criminal prisoners. They do not cover immigration detention, and the distinction matters when you’re trying to figure out where private prison companies actually hold people.
On the federal criminal side, President Biden’s Executive Order 14006, signed in January 2021, directed the Department of Justice to stop renewing contracts with privately operated criminal detention facilities. The Federal Bureau of Prisons stopped placing inmates in private prisons, and by the end of 2022 the BOP reported holding zero people in privately operated facilities.3Bureau of Justice Statistics. Federal Prisoner Statistics Collected Under the First Step Act, 2025 On January 20, 2025, President Trump rescinded that order.4The White House. Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions The BOP had not yet resumed placing inmates in private facilities as of early 2026.
The 13,358 “federal” prisoners counted in private facilities in 2023 largely reflect other federal agencies, including the U.S. Marshals Service, which continued using private detention throughout the Biden administration. The executive order applied specifically to the BOP, not to every federal agency that detains people.
Immigration detention is a separate system entirely and sits outside the state prison counts. Nearly 90% of people in ICE custody are held in facilities run by for-profit companies. The two dominant operators, CoreCivic and GEO Group, derive substantial revenue from immigration contracts; GEO Group alone reported $2.63 billion in total revenue for 2025.5The GEO Group. The GEO Group Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Results Anyone looking only at the state prison numbers will undercount how many people private prison companies actually hold at any given time.