Highlighting new research with encouraging news about incarceration trends

Writing in the Washington Post, Charles Lane has this great new opinion piece headlined “New data show a dire forecast about incarceration rates didn’t come true.” I recommend the whole piece, and here are a few highlights:

Few data points have more dramatically illustrated the disparate racial impact of incarceration in the United States than this statistic, first calculated in a 2003 Justice Department-sponsored study: If imprisonment rates remained the same as they were in 2001, then 1 out of every 3 Black men born that year could expect to be put behind bars during his lifetime. The figure for White men, by contrast, was 1 of every 17.  Hammered home in political speeches, media coverage and activist websites, that projection did much to galvanize public opinion in favor of criminal justice reform.

And yet it did not actually materialize.  The overall U.S. incarceration rate peaked in the three-year period of 2006 to 2008, according to Pew Research, and it has been declining since then.  What’s more, the rate for Black men fell faster during the past two decades than that for White men (and other groups), contrary to expectations in 2003 — and to much conventional wisdom today.

Therefore, since the 2003 Justice Department study appeared, chances that Black men would not go to prison improved so much that the actual lifetime “incarceration risk” for those born in 2001 turned out to be fewer than 1 in 5 — about 40 percent lower than the oft-cited 1 in 3 figure.  This outcome connotes a modest, but real, reduction in racial inequality generally.  Amid a national criminal justice debate that often understandably focuses on the problems and injustices that still need to be solved, encouraging data deserve attention, too.

The hopeful findings about racially disparate incarceration rates emerge from a study to be published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Demography.  It includes such remarkable data as the fact that, whereas 5,159 out of every 100,000 Black men were imprisoned in 1999, the rate had fallen to 2,881 per 100,000 by 2019 — a 44 percent decrease. In that period, almost every state saw a decline in its incarceration rate for Black men….

The news gets better.  Partly as a result of these positive trends, Black men are now more likely to have earned a bachelor’s degree by age 25 than to have been in prison: The respective population shares, as of 2019, are 17.7 percent and 12 percent.  As recently as 2009, the opposite was the case, with 17.4 percent of 25-year-old Black men having gone to prison but only 12.8 percent having finished college. …

Optimistically, but plausibly, the study argues that the generation of Black men — and, indeed, of all U.S. residents — born after 2001 “is facing a distinctly reduced risk of imprisonment.”  This is because rates of criminal behavior and arrest fell over the past two decades, relative to the 1980s and 1990s; the effects of this trend “will likely compound into even lower rates of incarceration as they age.”

The study acknowledges that U.S. crime and incarceration rates are still well above those of peer nations.  Although the Black-White ratio in male incarceration rates fell from 9.3 to 1 in 1999 to 6.1 to 1 in 2019, that unacceptable disparity “remains quite large,” the study notes.  “There is plenty more progress to be made,” the study’s lead author, sociologist Jason P. Robey of the University at Albany’s School of Criminal Justice, told me.

It might help to achieve that progress if the new Demography study, co-authored by sociologists Michael Massoglia and Michael T. Light, both of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, had provided an account of exactly why incarceration generally, and Black male incarceration in particular, has declined, but such explanations lie beyond the scope of their research.  Less punitive enforcement policies on nonviolent drug offenses, as well as other recent reforms intended to limit racially disparate incarceration, are undoubtedly part of the story.  And of course continued downward trends in imprisonment depend on preventing crime itself from spiraling upward.  The Demography study warns, appropriately, that positive trends are “reversible.”…

Alarming data on what the study labels the “incarceration boom” supplied one necessary ingredient to the criminal justice reform movement: urgency.  Statistical evidence of progress can provide another: hope.

The research article referenced in this opinion piece is authored by Jason P. Robey, Michael Massoglia & Michael T. Light and is titled “A Generational Shift: Race and the Declining Lifetime Risk of Imprisonment.”