Anyone bold enough to make predictions about the federal prison population — which is now at 151,646 according to BOP?

Regular readers know that I have been following federal prison population data quite closely during the COVID era and giving particular attention to the numbers the federal Bureau of Prisons updates weekly at this webpage.  This morning, which just happens to be the first full day of the new Biden Administration, BOP reports “Total Federal Inmates” at 151,646.  I am very curious to hear predictions as to what this number might be a year from now, or two years from now, or four years from now.

Here is some notable recent historical perspective.  Thanks to the wayback machine, we can see here that during Prez Trump’s first week in office in late January 2017, BOP was reporting 189,212 total federal inmates.  Because I cannot find parallel data going back to the Obama inaugural months, I can just link to BOP historical data showing the federal prison population was reported at 201,668 at the end of 2008 and was at 218,687 at the end of 2012.  So, roughly speaking, the federal prison population increased by 17,000 persons during Prez Obama’s first term (roughly 8%), and then it declined nearly 20,000 persons during Prez Obama’s second term (roughly 9%).  And then the federal prison population decreased by nearly 38,000 persons(!) during Prez Trump’s term (nearly 20%).

Gosh knows I would not have predicted that the federal prison population would have increased so significantly during Prez Obama’s first term, and I also would not have predicted that this prison population would have decreased so much more significantly during Prez Trump’s time in office.  Of course, the unpredictable COVID pandemic is a big part of this Trump era story, but BOP data shows that the federal prison population was declining at a pretty steady clip even in the pre-COVID years of the Trump era despite the fact Trump’s Justice Department back in 2017, as noted here, was forecasting prison population increases. 

In short, hindsight shows that the direction of the federal prison population is quite hard to predict.  So, all the more reason for me to want to hear any and all new predictions now.  I am tempted to predict the federal prison population will be relatively steady during the Biden years, at least initially.  Though I would like to see Biden’s Justice Department do a lot more to get a lot more vulnerable inmates out of federal prisons, I suspect it may be many months before we see any big DOJ policy changes and likely many more months before any big policy changes start to impact the federal prison population.  (I would love to see the Biden Administration have the gut to set a target of a federal prison population under 100,000, but I will save discussion of that idea for a future post.)

So, dear readers, any federal prison population predictions for the Biden era?