Over the first two decades of the 21st century, the U.S. has been imprisoning people at a steadily declining rate. What’s more, annual new prison admissions for black people fell more than for white people during that period. The result is a prison population that is not only significantly smaller than it was in 2000 but also much less skewed by race.
Are you surprised by this good news? It is, after all, contrary to the conventional wisdom on the political left, which still reflects the “mass incarceration” narrative established in Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book, The New Jim Crow, which argues that prison has become a modern means to subjugate blacks. The DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), in particular, has called for eventual prison abolition as a key plank in its platform.
This narrative needs to catch up with the facts. A powerful new peer-reviewed study from sociologists at the universities of Wisconsin and Iowa—and published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour—makes the case that the criminal justice system was already moving toward less incarceration, and less incarceration of black offenders, when national concern over “mass incarceration” was peaking in the mid-2010s.
What’s more, the study, titled forthrightly “Why America’s Prisons Are Shrinking and Racial Gaps Are Closing,” by Jason Robey and Michael Light, shows that one of the main drivers of lower prison admissions is not more lenient treatment of violent offenders, but a lower violent crime rate. In other words, rather than an incurably racist and broken criminal justice system, the United States may be experiencing a virtuous cycle in which crime and incarceration decline in tandem.