This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The U.S. prison population is declining at an accelerating rate, and prison admission rates are predicted to fall an additional 50% within the next two decades, according to new research from University at Albany professor Shawn Bushway. "I study crime, so I rarely get to deliver good news," said Bushway, a professor at UAlbany's Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy.
The generation that filled our prisons is aging out, and the generation behind it is not replacing them. You cannot imprison people who never get arrested." The article was written by Bushway and co-authors Jason Robey, who until recently taught at UAlbany's School of Criminal Justice, and Keith Humphreys, a professor at Stanford University. Titled "Running Out of Inmates?
Cohort Nonreplacement and the Approaching End of Mass Incarceration," and published in the Annual Review of Criminology, the review finds that the decline is driven mainly by generational change. The cohorts who came of age during the crime boom of the 1980s and 1990s are aging out of the criminal justice system. The generations behind them entered adulthood with far lower rates of crime and arrest.
While tough sentencing laws delayed the decline by keeping older cohorts in prison long after crime fell, they could not stop it. Prison admission rates for people ages 18 to 30 have already fallen 53% since 2000. The largest declines are among Black men.
Their prison admission rate fell by nearly two-thirds between 2000 and 2023, and the authors project it will fall another 46% in the next decade. In 2000, Black men were admitted to prison at 7.9 times the rate of white men. The authors project that ratio will fall to between 2.0 and 2.3 by 2036.
The authors also reviewed prison forecasts from 19 states. Sixteen predict their prison populations will grow. None account for generational differences in crime.
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