The Unheralded End of Mass Incarceration

In the past half century, thousands of books and articles have been written about mass incarceration. Some have characterized the imprisonment of millions of Americans as a tragic necessity in a high-crime society, others have celebrated it as just deserts for criminals, and still others have denounced it as a reinvention of Jim Crow policies that oppress Black Americans. But one fact remains remarkably neglected: Mass incarceration is ending. 

In a new research article, we document how the nation’s carceral system has already shrunk and how it will shrink further, with prison admissions projected to drop by 50 percent over the next decade. Although sentencing reforms have had some impact, the prison population is declining primarily because crime has fallen dramatically over the past 30 years, whether measured by police reports, arrests, or victim reports.  This matters because mass incarceration was produced in the 1970s and 1980s and then sustained by the toxic combination of high crime and increasingly punitive criminal justice policies that were implemented in response.  

Those policies—for example, lengthening sentences and expanding collateral penalties (e.g., for having a gun in one’s belt while shoplifting)—have a long shadow, but the prison boom they created is finally colliding with a simple demographic reality: For decades, young people have been committing far fewer crimes than did the generations that came of age in the 1970s and 1980s. Prison admission rates for people under 30 have already been cut in half, and juvenile arrests and detention have decreased even further. That’s why the number of Americans in prison has fallen by a quarter since its 2009 peak, and why the imprisonment rate of male senior citizens is now double that of 18- and 19-year-old men. 

The horrific 2020 homicide spike threatened a return to the cycle of rising crime and rising incarceration that defined the late 20th century. But the surge proved temporary. The Council on Criminal Justice recently reported that homicide rates in American cities have fallen to levels not seen in over a century. Burglaries, carjackings, and motor vehicle thefts are also in steep decline. Incarceration levels remain well below 2019 levels. 

Black Americans are the largest beneficiaries of the new normal, in terms of both reduced incarceration and victimization. The incarceration rate for Black Americans is already less than half of what it was at the start of the 21st century and is going to fall further. Today, and even more so in the years ahead, more Black Americans, particularly men, will live freely and safely in their communities and pursue work and family formation at levels their parents might not have dared hope for. The most famous prediction of the mass-incarceration era, that a Black man born in 2000 would be more likely to go to prison than graduate from college by age 30, is now on track to be decisively wrong. 

Given the seismic nature of what has happened, and what is likely to happen in the years ahead, why isn’t the decline of mass incarceration front-page news? Facts that don’t fit neatly into dominant political narratives are, alas, orphans in public policy discussions. Loud voices who preach that Americans with darker skin are inherently criminal cannot cope with a massive fall in crime as the nation moves towards minority-majority status.  Meanwhile, those who characterize America’s carceral system as an implacably oppressive lever of an inherently racist country cannot explain a nearly two-decade fall in imprisonment. Yet falling crime and imprisonment are real and should command our attention even if it requires radically new narratives and thinking.  

As the number of people who commit crimes that lead to incarceration falls, policymakers have two choices: Right-size correctional systems or find new ways to fill empty beds. Already, some juvenile facilities house so few youths that staffing levels can equal or exceed the number of those confined. Empty beds encourage greater use of pretrial detention, increased revocations from community supervision, and other forms of net widening (more colloquially, the system generating business for itself) that research suggests increase harm without reducing crime.  

Americans have been blessed to live in the post-crime-boom era for nearly 30 years. Yet political, bureaucratic, and financial incentives continue to preserve correctional systems built for a different time and far larger than public safety requires, imposing needless costs on individuals, families, and communities while diverting billions of public dollars from other priorities. Our correctional systems should reflect the new reality that America can be both safer and freer. 

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