Incarceration & Crime: A Weak Relationship

A decade after national protests catapulted the Black Lives Matter movement following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and four years after a national racial reckoning triggered by Minneapolis police officers killing George Floyd, lawmakers are wavering on their commitment to making the criminal legal system more just and effective. Many are reverting to the failed playbook of the 1990s which, as this brief will show, dramatically increased incarceration, particularly among Black Americans, with limited benefits to community safety. The recent move away from evidence-based policymaking includes New York’s reversal of its bail reform law, Louisiana’s expansion of its already draconian prison sentences, and Oregon’s repeal of Measure 110, which had decriminalized the possession of controlled substances in favor of a public health response.

This shift threatens the modest progress made in recent years in reducing U.S. incarceration levels. The United States now ranks sixth globally in its incarceration rate – as much as eight times the rate of industrialized peer countries. Following a nearly 700% buildup in imprisonment since 1972, the U.S. prison population downsized by 25% between 2009 and 2021 – falling to under 1.2 million people. A significant portion of this decline occurred in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, when reduced prison admissions and expedited releases downsized the prison population by 14%. Interventions such as the transfer of approximately 11,000 people from federal prisons to home confinement demonstrated that in some cases, substantial decarceration could accompany extremely low recidivism rates. Nevertheless, imprisonment levels increased in 2022.