America’s incarceration rate falls to lowest level since 1995

….crime rates are spiking…..I’m all for improving policing to reduce the rate of necessary incarceration and reduce use of force incidents, but it seems we’ve just decided we’re going to look the other way when crimes are committed, and the crime rate is responding accordingly as criminals are on the streets instead of in jail.

Right - prison rates falling because D.A.s and courts refusing to prosecute and sentence, or give very minimal sentences. Bert is correct.

There’s a lot more to this than meets the eye. Work at decreasing incarceration rates has been going on for at least three decades. The current level of incarcerated population is distinct from “the number of people prosecuted and convicted and jailed this year” or the previous two or three. It takes a long time to reduce prison population… and this appears to be what Pew means by “incarceration rate”—an unfortunate term for “current prison population.”

My point is that there isn’t a meaningful correlation between short term spikes in crime and the number of people in jail. I doubt there’s even a meaningful correlation between short term spikes in crime and number of people being prosecuted. It’s just more complex than that.

Five years of reading in the field has lead to some adjustments in my thinking from the simplicity of the Reagan Era “tough on crime” view. There’s an idealistic, “everybody just needs help living better and crime will end” perspective on the left end and the “just round ‘em all up and jail ‘em” lingers on the right. The truth, I’m convinced, is that an unknown percentage of people involved in crime are entirely reformable and that it’s worth the time and money to do that. But there’s also a chunk that can’t or won’t be helped.

We’re all sinners, but we’re not all crooks. So the biblical anthropology of it doesn’t really argue for the view that there’s no helping convicts live within legal boundaries.

Edit to add: The biblical anthropology/hamartiology also doesn’t answer the concern that sending young and low-level offenders to prison with older more serious offenders trains the young to increase criminal activity when they get out. So, I think there’s a lot of room for “what works?” logic within the biblical perspective of human nature.

30 years would include the Clinton/Biden bill that made the penalties for crack far harsher than for cocaine and caused incarceration rates of blacks to skyrocket. It also includes a large portion of the “get tough on crime” efforts in places like New York City that also helped put the kibosh on the crack-fueled crime rates of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Part of this includes the “three strikes” laws of the same time period. So while acknowledging that good policing and incarceration desires to overall reduce the incarceration rate, I’m still having some trouble with your timeline, Aaron. Going back 30 years includes some very real efforts to increase the incarceration rate, and a lot of these efforts bore a lot of fruit in reducing crime rates.

What I’m referring to is efforts of the past ten years, supported by both parties, that have freed a lot of people who were convicted of nonviolent crimes, often the results of plea bargains down from indictments for violent crimes. I am increasingly seeing examples of horrific crimes committed by people—e.g. the guy who murdered his Cuban-American girlfriend in Shakopee a week or so back—who arguably should not have been walking the streets—at least if there was anything to the indictments made against them. There is also the reality of increasingly looking past crimes to “concentrate on the big stuff”, and it’s having the same result that the same policies had back in the 1960s and 1970s. We’ve forgotten how big an effect it had when the NYPD started issuing tickets and fingerprinting for things like squeegee guys, and how a lot of those squeegee guys turned out to be the same guys doing burglary and the like.

Yes, at least 30 years. There’s more to it than sentencing reform.

I’m well acquainted with the history and the present debates, as well as the tradeoffs—both the widespread kind and the anecdotal kind.

Stop and frisk is an interesting study in tradeoffs. While the practice wasn’t as horrible as I’ve heard it portrayed, and did indeed net lots of prosecutions of folks involved in lots of other crimes, it wasn’t all upside. When you cast a broad net like that you also have lots more negative encounters with people who turn out to be innocent, and with general interaction training problems and other factors mixed in, you have lots of seeds of resentment and generalized anti-police attitudes.

Was it a good trade? Right now the consensus is that it was not. I’m not sure. But the overall ‘broken windows’ philosophy of policing is certainly not an obvious success.

As for the work that’s been going on to decrease prison populations in addition to sentencing reform…

• General crime reduction efforts (fewer crimes happening vs. simply fewer prosecutions)
• Reform focused on re-entry and recidivism prevention
• Overlapping with that, reform focused on education/vocational training in prison
• Reform focused on families of inmates (the multi-generational crooks problem)
• Reform focused on diversion: juvenile diversion, drug diversion, family violence diversion. (This has usually been focused on alternative courts, so… ways to pull offenders into programs via juvie court, family court, drug court rather than into the justice system)
• Reform focused on youth—both school based and community based interventions
• Reform focused on how police interact with the public in general and on stops
• Reform based on decriminalization

Lots more, I’m sure, that isn’t coming to mind at the moment.

These efforts are slow to bear measurable fruit, if they bear fruit at all. There are successes and lots of fails, which only makes sense.

As for decriminalization, there’s some crazy stuff going on here and there. There’s definitely an overcorrection going on in some places in reaction to both perceived and real excesses of the tough on crime/broken windows paradigm. Some of it’s nuts. Much of it is in the spirit of, “We’ve never really tried this; let’s see if it might work.” I’m all for that, though there will sometimes be some painful lessons learned.

But ‘decrim’ doesn’t precisely mean ‘no consequences’ and ‘no opportunity to gain intel on more serious offenses.’ Much of the decriminalizing involves shifting select infractions from the criminal category into cite and fine categories. I’m not up on all the legal distinctions, but I do know that ticket-writing isn’t the same policing process at all as being booked, charged, etc. But it still gets you into the databases and police still have a chance to look you up and see if there are outstanding warrants etc.

Usually.

Like everything else, these things get oversimplified in the media…. and usually either overpraised or overcriticized based on the oversimplified version of them.

Also valid: yes, there is some shifting of resources going on in some jurisdictions where defunding/anti-police attitudes have made it especially hard for departments to properly staff. Because these agencies work for city councils and mayors, and often also civilian review/oversight boards of one sort or another, the official communication puts a positive spin on it: “We’re going to focus resources on more serious crimes” often means “We’re understaffed, under equipped, and everybody hates us, so we’re trying to make the best of the situation.”

Forgot to mention all the work going on under the heading of ‘police response to mental health calls.’

One of the reasons for increases in incarceration levels in the past was a broad movement to de-institutionalize the mentally ill. Off the top of my head, I don’t recall the chronology, but it’s referenced all over the lit on criminal justice and policing.

Among the tradeoffs of de-institutionalizing was dramatic increases in homelessness, police involvement with mentally ill people, and incarceration of the mentally ill. I’m sure there was an upside to de-inst. also, but nobody’s been writing about that much for years now. The focus is all on the unintended negative consequences.

For as long as I’ve been working in the sector, there’s been increasing work done to help police better de-escalate mental health crisis calls, as well as justice system reforms to avoid sending these folks to jail. At least the last 7 years, but I have the impression this goes back further.

So one factor in the decline in incarceration is fewer of the bona fide mentally ill getting into the justice system and being jailed, and probably also more of them getting out of the justice system who were previously in it.

But again, these are slow changes with slow consequences. It’s not like one day there’s a change in thinking on this and the next month prison populations drop. Years… often decades.

Meant to include this link as an example in the news today. Similar initiatives are going on in cities all over the U.S. also, though this one is Canada. https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/city-hopes-team-of-social-w…