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Jails are the local facilities generally funded by counties where people are incarcerated awaiting trials on felonies and misdemeanors and where people tend to be sent after be convicted of misdemeanors and given jail sentences. Prisons are run by either the state or federal government and they are where people go after being sentenced for felonies.

a distinction without a difference; typical twisting involved in making the statistics fit the predefined agenda.

What is your source for those definitions? My working copy of Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (1980, pg 613) notes "prison" as a synonym for "jail"."Jail" and "Prison" both come up as synonyms for each other using the Microsoft Word thesaurus.Roget's Thesaurus (1972, pg. 167 notes "jail" as a synonym for "prison" at entry #752.

if you're incarcerated, it makes little difference in the big view whether it's in a "jail", or in a "prison". You're still "in the big house".

I don't really recall what my source was for that tidbit of information. I've just been practicing law for a lot of years and that's the way it appears to work everywhere. Jails tend to be places funded by cities and counties. Prisons are funded by the states or the federal government. People tend to go to jails for misdemeanors and prisons for felonies. Misdemeanors are generally going to have maximum sentences of a year or less, and felonies go all the way up to life sentences or death sentences. There is some overlap with the way prisons and jails are used. Certainly people charged with felonies will often be sitting in county jails awaiting trial. A lot who have been convicted are sitting in county jails waiting for prison beds to come open, and there are some felons housed in county jails on contract with the states to to make room in the prisons.

It kind of sounds like you are implying that I am trying to pull a fast one on people with statistics. That sort of ticks me off. The only reason I had to bring up the distinction between jails and prisons is because some of the available statistics only include those in prisons and some include those both in jails and prisons and I didn't want anyone to get confused. I realize that people do often use the terms jail and prison interchangeably, and that the distinction may not be made in all dictionaries, especially those written for lay persons. If you were to look at legal dictionaries you would find more precise definitions. I don't have my Blacks Law Dictionary handy but I looked on Findlaw and their definitions from Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law for jails, penitentiaries, and prisons are as follows:

"jail
: a place of confinement for persons held in lawful custody

specif
: such a place under the jurisdiction of a local government (as a county) for the confinement of persons awaiting trial or those convicted of minor crimes"

http://dictionary.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/results.pl?co=dictionary.lp.findlaw.com&topic=e3/e38c8d696da6cd423db8ea98eb8161a0

"penitentiary
['pe-ne-'ten-che-re]

pl: -ries
: a state or federal prison for the punishment and reformation of convicted felons"

http://dictionary.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/results.pl?co=dictionary.lp.findlaw.com&topic=c2/c23246913683fd9686139782993ebe8a

"prison
: an institution usu. under state control for confinement of persons serving sentences for serious crimes"

http://dictionary.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/results.pl?co=dictionary.lp.findlaw.com&topic=1b/1b35196eba016af4e0f27bb95413d00a

Their definitions for prisons and penitentiaries are a little different. I've always used those two words interchangeably. Maybe I'm wrong. I'm sure as hell not trying to pull a fast one on anybody though. I did not and would not twist any statistics and I resent your accusations.

I wanted to give you one more quick note on the reason why some statistics only include people in prisons and others include people in both prisons and jails. Every county I think is going to have a county jail these days. In huge cities these can be huge facilities. More often then not though these are just little rinky-dink places with a few beds. Ours only has a few dozen beds. A lot have less than that. These places are run by the sheriff's departments in the respective counties. Cities will sometimes also have jails which usually just consist of one or more holding cells where people are usually kept for no more than a few hours awaiting trials or hearings in city or municipal court, or after being sentenced and before being transported to the county jails. There may be some city jails that people actually serve sentences in, I don't know. Anyway, these facilities have not always been great about keeping statistics. Now that we are in the computer age, things are a lot better than they used to be, but before computers a lot of these places were not keeping any statistical information or were at least not reporting it. Large prison systems have been keeping this data for a long time, but not little local facilities. When we look at historical incarceration rates, the only reliable data available from say thirty years back and before is for state and federal prisons. There just isn't data available before that on the numbers of people incarcerated in all the small jails run by cities and counties throughout the nation. That's the biggest reason why a lot of these statistics you will find only cover prisons but not jails.