Westmoreland County Prison’s population has been on the rise.
The jail has a capacity of 720. Last week, there were 708 inmates.
It isn’t an anomalous spike. The March population averaged 695 inmates. That was up 11% from 2024. More inmates are being admitted than released.
This isn’t a universal experience.
In Allegheny County, the 3,000-capacity jail has been averaging a daily population of about 1,820 in 2025. In recent years, staying under 2,000 inmates has been its norm. Officials credit that to efforts specifically targeted to decrease the number of people behind bars. That includes the Safety + Justice Challenge. The county received a $1.17 million grant in 2023 from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to continue efforts to reduce incarceration.
Fayette County Jail’s population is running just under two-thirds of its 336 person capacity. It is low enough that commissioners recently approved an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to house federal prisoners and still have room left over.
The Prison Policy Initiative and Vera Institute of Justice both report that county jails nationwide have seen inmate populations decreasing since 2019. Overall, numbers have fallen 10% since that watermark, ignoring the artificial decline during the pandemic.
And that’s without even noting other, larger declines. Pennsylvania Department of Corrections is looking at closing the Quehanna Boot Camp in Clearfield County and SCI Rockview in Centre County. The numbers reflect an overall drop in the number of state inmates.
Across the 24 prisons in the state system, average capacity is 80%. Population fell by 26% between 2013 and 2022.
Yet that’s not what’s happening in Westmoreland County.
“I don’t think we’re in danger of reaching capacity, but it’s something we have to watch,” Warden Steve Pelesky said Monday.
He pointed to a pattern of population increases over the winter and declines in the summer.
“I’m hoping we’re still on that trend,” Pelesky said.
The better question is why the county’s trends are different from other counties’ in the region, and that of the nation.
This doesn’t necessarily reflect a problem. Much like school standardized test scores, the inmate population can be specific to the people involved and make it hard to generalize.
But it does open a conversation about what works elsewhere and how it might be applied in this instance.
