Decarceration

Interesting stuff that I had never really thought about:

From the end of World War II until the mid-1970s, the proportion of Americans in prison each year never exceeded 120 per 100,000. But starting in the late 1960s, a multidecade crime wave swelled in America, and an unprecedented number of adolescents and young adults were criminally active. In response, the anti-crime policies of most local, state, and federal governments became more and more draconian. The combined result was that the prison population exploded. By 1985, the imprisonment rate had doubled from its historical norm, such that more than 200 in 100,000 Americans were in a state or federal prison. The number of people in prison increased an average of 8 percent a year for the next decade, breaching the 1 million mark in 1994 and continuing to grow until 2009. This had ramifications that were felt for years: Because most people who are released from prison return, the system has been stocked and restocked with the legacy of that American crime-and-punishment wave for a quarter century. That’s why the 2009 peak of U.S. imprisonment came 18 years after the 1991 peak in the violent-crime rate. The prison system is like a badly overloaded tractor trailer—it takes a long time to stop even after the brakes are hit.

That tractor trailer is finally slowing down, decades after the “great crime decline” began in the 1990s. Until 2009, the lengthier sentences handed down during the preceding crime wave and the tendency of released prisoners to be re-incarcerated kept imprisonment rising even as crime declined. But the falling crime that the U.S. experienced in the 1990s and 2000s is now finally translating into a shrinking prison population… Rapidly declining numbers of youth are committing crimes, getting arrested, and being incarcerated. This matters because young offenders are the raw material that feeds the prison system: As one generation ages out, another takes its place on the same horrid journey. The U.S. had an extremely high-crime generation followed by a lower-crime generation, meaning that the older population is not being replaced at an equal rate. The impact of this shift on the prison population began more than a decade ago but has been little noticed because it takes so long for the huge prison population of longer provenance to clear.

But such a transformation is now well under way. One statistic vividly illustrates the change: In 2007, the imprisonment rate for 18- and 19-year-old men was more than five times that of men over the age of 64. But today, men in those normally crime-prone late-adolescent years are imprisoned at half the rate that senior citizens are today.

The crazy thing is that while the late 20th century explosion in crime had significant and observable effects on our politics, the long decline in criminal activity really hasn’t, or at least not yet. The Right narrative on prisons is that criminal activity has never been higher than it is today, therefore requiring more draconian penalties and higher rates of incarceration. The Left narrative is a good deal more sane, but tends to try to explain high American incarceration rates by reference to long-standing ideological structures in American politics (“America incarcerates so many people because racism”) which isn’t at all wrong but also doesn’t explain the variation across time.

I suppose a sane politics is too much to ask for…