Surprising Stat: Montana Had the Highest Percentage of Private Prison Inmates in the U.S.

Every once in a while there is a statistic about Montana that surprises me. There are a lot of things that Montana leads the pack in. For example, we recently ranked as the best state if you want to be a doctor, according to WalletHub.com.

There was one ranking recently that surprised me, back in 2022 Montana had the highest percentage of prisoners in privately run prisons than any other state, according to USAFacts.org.

According to their report, in 2022 the Federal Bureau of Prisons ended the use of private prisons for federal prisoners. In 2025 there are zero prisoners in privately run prisons in the country.

But that was for federal prisoners. States can contract with private prisons. There were twenty-eight states that contracted with private prisons in 2022, Montana was included among them.

The surprising statistic, to me, was that nearly half Montana's prisoners in 2022 were in private prisons. A bigger percentage of prisoners than any other state.

According to The Sentencing Project, Montana also saw an increase from 2000 to 2021 in private prison populations. Montana went from 986 prisoners in 2000 to 2,319 in 2021. That is a 135% increase.

A privately run prison, as defined by USAFacts.org, is a prison or jail that houses prisoners under a government agreement with a third party to run the facility for profit. They also report that there is little federal data on how many private prisons are in each state.

Some states don't use private prisons, but that doesn't mean they are banned. But there are some states that do have a formal ban on the use of privately run prisons, both Minnesota and Missouri have banned private prisons.