A California Highway Patrol officer holds an evidence bag after taking a suspect into custody during a stop in Oakland, Calif. Many factors can influence a police agency’s clearance rate, including how quickly evidence is processed by crime labs. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Police departments’ “clearance rates” — the percentage of cases they declare closed — are one of the most widely cited benchmarks for how effectively they combat crime. Lawmakers reference clearance rates in hearings, mayors cite them during police budget debates, and community members often use them to judge how well their local department is functioning.

But the figures can be confusing — and in some cases misleading.

State lawmakers are pushing to better understand and improve clearance rates, as crime remains top of mind for many Americans and a defining issue in statehouses nationwide.

Efforts to help solve more crimes and support victims have become a rare area of bipartisan agreement. This year, lawmakers in Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Texas have considered or enacted measures that would boost police investigative capacity or improve crime data and clearance rate reporting.

A new law in Illinois will require all law enforcement agencies to publish routine clearance data on nonfatal shootings and homicides starting in July 2026.

Missouri enacted a similar law, which will go into effect in 2026, that directs the state’s Department of Public Safety to publish clearance rates statewide and create a new grant program to help police departments solve violent crimes. And Texas lawmakers established a pilot program to set up rapid DNA testing facilities in two counties.

Lawmakers and police officials in some of these states say raising clearance rates is both a public safety priority and a matter of providing closure for victims and families. Research suggests that the likelihood of being caught is one of the strongest deterrents to committing a crime — making clearance rates a closely watched indicator of how well the justice system is working.

Clearing crimes is critical for public safety because it takes repeat offenders off the streets, helps resolve cases that never made it into official reports, delivers justice for victims, and strengthens the community trust that helps police solve future cases, said Thaddeus Johnson, an assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at Georgia State University. Johnson, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan think tank Council on Criminal Justice, also served as a police officer in Memphis, Tennessee, for a decade.

“Clearance rate reflects police actions, but also the vibe and how the community feels –– the confidence and faith they have in the police,” Johnson said.

Across the country, clearance rates for violent crimes — including homicide, rape and aggravated assault — have declined for decades. The national homicide clearance rate, for example, has fallen from 72% in 1980 to 61% in 2024, the most recent year with FBI data available.

The decline is similar across other major crime categories. In 1980, police cleared 49% of rapes and 59% of aggravated assaults. By 2024, those figures had fallen to 27% and 49%, respectively. Robbery clearance rates also shifted over time, rising from 24% in 1980 to 30% in 2024.

But those figures reflect national averages. At the local level, clearance rates vary widely, with some departments solving a large share of cases while others struggle with consistently low numbers.

Police departments in Vermont, Delaware and Idaho had the highest violent crime clearance rates in 2024, while New Mexico, Georgia and Mississippi had the lowest, according to a 50-state crime data analysis by the nonpartisan, nonprofit Council of State Governments Justice Center.

Some experts say there are several reasons clearance rates can swing in either direction. Chronic staffing shortages, overwhelmed detective units, rising caseloads and strained community relationships can push rates down. Strong victim and witness cooperation, better investigative technology and clearance of older backlogged cases can push them up.

At the same time, clearance rates — like most crime statistics — have limitations and can be difficult to understand.

Clearance rates, explained

A clearance rate is meant to show how often police solve reported crimes in a given year. The formula is simple — cleared cases divided by reported cases — but the definition of “cleared” is broad.

Under federal rules, cases can be cleared either by arrest or by “exceptional means.” Arrest clearances are straightforward: Police make an arrest, file charges and hand the case to prosecutors.

Exceptional clearances apply when police say they have enough evidence to arrest someone but cannot do so for reasons outside their control — for example, when a suspect has died, fled the country, is being held in another jurisdiction that won’t extradite, or when prosecutors decline to bring charges or victims choose not to move forward.

Since agencies have wide discretion in using exceptional clearances, similar cases may be counted as “solved” in one community and remain open in another. High exceptional clearance rates can give the impression that more arrests have been made than actually have.

Timing also complicates the statistics. Clearances are counted in the year a case is closed, not the year the crime occurred. For crimes that routinely take months or years to investigate, such as homicides or sexual assaults, this is common.

As a result, departments that focus on long-term investigations or suddenly receive new evidence may clear a batch of older cases, making their current-year rate look higher even though more recent cases remain unresolved.

Most agencies do not publicly break down how many of their annual clearances involve older cases, but that doesn’t mean they are intentionally manipulating their statistics.

National reporting isn’t airtight either. The FBI’s crime reporting program is voluntary, and some police departments may submit crime data but skip clearance data altogether.

Other measures of effectiveness

A clearance does not guarantee that prosecutors filed charges or that a case resulted in a conviction — outcomes that often matter most to victims and their families. It also doesn’t capture whether the right person was apprehended.

“It’s an imperfect metric for the performance of our criminal justice system,” said Marc Krupanski, the criminal justice policy director at Arnold Ventures, a philanthropic research organization.

Clearance rates also say little about investigative quality, how consistently police update families, how quickly officers respond or whether residents feel comfortable coming forward with information in the first place.

For these reasons, experts recommend looking at other measures, including prosecutorial outcomes, police response times, victim satisfaction and levels of community trust.

Some experts say clearance rates are most meaningful when analyzed over time — ideally 10 to 20 years — and adjusted per capita or per 100,000 residents. Breaking out clearances by arrest and exceptional means also adds important context, as does examining how many arrests lead to charges or convictions.

These outcomes, experts say, reflect both police work and community cooperation — from gathering witnesses to processing crime scenes and maintaining evidence — offering a clearer picture of investigative effectiveness.

Michigan’s proposal

Just last month, Michigan lawmakers introduced bipartisan legislation aimed at boosting the state’s clearance rates. Last year, Michigan police solved 48% of violent crimes, according to the Council of State Governments Justice Center’s analysis.

The House and Senate versions of the Violent Crime Clearance Act are sponsored by Republican state Rep. Sarah Lightner and Democratic state Sen. Stephanie Chang. The legislation would create a statewide grant program for police departments, allowing them to use the funds to hire and train investigators or crime lab personnel, upgrade evidence-collection equipment or record-management systems and support witnesses in violent crime investigations. It would also establish strict clearance rate reporting requirements.

“Regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, I think there’s just a general belief that we want crimes to be solved,” Chang told Stateline.

Rural police departments, which often have fewer staff and limited investigative resources, sometimes face challenges in solving certain types of cases. To help address this, the bill would require that grants be distributed across the state, and that no single agency receive more than 20% of the total program funding in a given year.

Supporters, including Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard, say the legislation would provide much-needed help for overburdened departments.

“These aren’t just statistics. These are people. … They were dragged into the criminal justice system as a victim, and so for us, each case — and trying to find and bring closure, whether it’s an armed robbery, a rape or a murder — is critically important,” Bouchard said.

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at ahernandez@stateline.org.

Telephones inside the Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Vandalia, Mo., where incarcerated people pay per-minute rates to call loved ones. (Photo by Amanda Watford/Stateline)

The Federal Communications Commission voted to roll back limits on how much companies can charge incarcerated people and their families for phone and video calls.

The 2-1 vote in late October reverses rate caps the FCC adopted last year under a 2023 law that allows the agency to set limits on prison phone and video call rates. Critics say the rates are kept high by limited competition among major providers such as Securus Technologies and ViaPath.

Under the new interim rules, phone calls will cost up to $0.11 per minute in large prisons and $0.18 per minute in the smallest jails. Video calls will cost up to $0.23 per minute in large facilities and as much as $0.41 in small ones.

Only three states — Florida, Kentucky and Oklahoma — currently have rates above the new rates, meaning most prison systems across the country are already below the previously adopted 2024 rate caps.

The new 2025 rates will take effect 120 days after being published in the Federal Register.

In June, the FCC had abruptly announced a two-year delay in implementing the 2024 rate caps after receiving complaints from local sheriffs and prison telecom companies. Republican attorneys general from 14 states also filed a lawsuit last year challenging the commission’s authority to limit how much prisons and jails can charge for phone calls, arguing that the rules deprived correctional facilities of needed funding.

Republican Commissioners Brendan Carr and Olivia Trusty, both appointed by President Donald Trump, supported the rollback. Carr argued the previous caps limited facilities’ ability to recover safety and security costs, such as monitoring calls, leading some to scale back or eliminate calling services altogether. Trusty said the 2024 rules “did not always strike the right balance,” and cited “unintended consequences” like service disruptions in some facilities.

At least one small jail — in Baxter County, Arkansas — ended phone services earlier this year in protest of the lower rate caps.

Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez, appointed by President Joe Biden, voted against the order and called it “indefensible.” She said the decision gives monopoly telecom providers “the authority to increase the costs for families to maintain critical connections with their loved ones in prison.”

Advocates for incarcerated people condemned the vote.

“These changes are a betrayal of the families who entrusted the FCC to protect them from the notoriously predatory correctional telecom industry,” Bianca Tylek, the executive director of Worth Rises, said in a news release. Worth Rises is a nonprofit advocacy organization dedicated to dismantling the prison industry.

Some research suggests that incarcerated people who maintain consistent contact with loved ones are significantly more likely to succeed upon release and are less likely to reoffend.

The FCC’s latest decision comes months after New York joined California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Minnesota in offering free phone calls in state prisons. Colorado’s policy won’t take full effect until 2026.

At least two states — Maryland and Missouri — considered legislation this year to make prison and jail calls more affordable. Maryland’s proposal to make calls free in state prisons did not pass, but Missouri enacted a law in August capping phone call rates at no more than 12 cents per minute in correctional centers.

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at ahernandez@stateline.org.

Women gather outside a Goodwill store inside the Elmwood Correctional Facility in 2024 in Milpitas, Calif. A Council on Criminal Justice report warns that criminal justice policies are failing to address the unique needs of women, from arrest to incarceration. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

A new report from the nonpartisan think tank Council on Criminal Justice warns that policies and practices across the nation’s criminal justice systems are failing to address the distinct factors that drive women into the system — and in doing so, are harming families and undermining public safety.

The report, which was released early this month, calls on states and local communities to reconsider how they respond to women at the earliest stages of criminal justice involvement — from arrest and pretrial detention to charging and sentencing — and to focus more on prevention, treatment and family stability.

“Women are no less responsible for their actions than men, and should be held accountable,” said Stephanie Akhter, the director of the council’s Women’s Justice Commission.

“If we really want to stop crime and put people on a path to success, then we need to take an individualized approach and craft responses that are fair and in service of those goals,” Akhter told Stateline.

The report outlined four major policy recommendations: prioritizing alternatives to arrest, basing pretrial detention decisions on public safety and flight risk, considering women’s unique circumstances during charging and sentencing, and prohibiting sexual contact between law enforcement officers and people in custody.

The authors also urged state and local leaders to invest in research and data collection to better understand women’s experiences in the justice system and the factors that may contribute to criminal behavior, including domestic violence, economic instability, substance use and mental illness.

“We need to know more about what’s bringing them into the system,” Akhter said. 

The report comes as new federal data shows the female prison population is growing faster than the male population. The female state prison population increased about 5% nationwide between 2022 and 2023, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. Most states saw gains of fewer than 100 women, with Texas being the only state where the number of incarcerated women rose by more than 500. 

Roughly 58% of women incarcerated in state prisons were parents of minor children in 2016, compared with 46% of men, according to a 2021 Bureau of Justice Statistics research brief.

The latest national FBI data shows a similar trend in arrests: Women accounted for 27% of all adult arrests in 2024, nearly double their 14% share in 1980, according to the council’s report. The share of violent offense arrests among women also has steadily risen, from 11% in 1986 to 21% in 2024. 

A separate report from the council’s Women’s Justice Commission examined how communities respond to women in crisis. The authors found that some crisis intervention systems are not designed to meet women’s specific needs, and that more research is needed to understand women’s experiences and long-term outcomes.

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at ahernandez@stateline.org.

Men exercise in the maximum security yard of the Lansing Correctional Facility in Lansing, Kan. The prison population in Kansas rose nearly 5% between 2022 and 2023. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

The nation’s prison population grew for the second consecutive year in 2023, reversing more than a decade of steady decline.

A new prison population report from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, released before the federal shutdown, shows that 1,254,224 people were incarcerated in state and federal prisons on the last day of 2023 — an increase of 24,081 people from the year before, or about 2%. 

It follows a rise in 2022, which marked the first uptick since 2010, when prison populations began a gradual decline after peaking in the mid 2000s.

Even with recent increases, the prison population in 2023 was still about 20% below the 2013 level.

The latest figures show that women remain a small share of the prison population, but their numbers are growing faster than men’s. 

Between 2022 and 2023, the female prison population rose nearly 4%, from 87,800 to 91,100. The male population increased by nearly 2% during the same period. Thirty-eight states saw growth in their male prison populations, while 41 states reported increases among women.

New Mexico, Maine and South Dakota recorded the highest growth rates in their prison populations. 

Seven more populous states — Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, New York, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin — added more than 1,000 people to their prison rolls during the same period. New Jersey, Alaska and Hawaii had the largest decreases in rates.

The growth comes as prisons are grappling with another demographic shift: a rapidly aging population. In 2023, nearly 1 in 4 prisoners were 50 or older. That trend is expected to continue, some experts say, with projections that by 2030 as much as one-third of the U.S. prison population will be over 50.

Correctional systems, many of which already face staffing shortages and overcrowding, are under growing pressure as prison populations rise. In recent years, some prisoner advocates and state legislators have pushed for measures such as “second look” laws or expanded parole eligibility that would release people deemed low risk for reoffending. Those could include older adults, people with serious medical needs and those convicted of nonviolent offenses.

The idea has gained traction as a way to lower prison operation costs and ease strain on correctional staff, but it remains controversial. Supporters say targeted decarceration can improve safety inside prisons and save taxpayer dollars, while opponents argue it could jeopardize public safety and that such releases may not significantly lower taxpayer costs. 

Stateline reporter Amanda Hernández can be reached at ahernandez@stateline.org.