New research shows steep and continuing decline in prison population in the US

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. “This is good news. 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.

Bushway said the prison findings connect directly to another new paper on how employers use criminal records.

“Risk is not a permanent trait,” Bushway said. “It falls as people age. It falls every year they stay out of trouble. And it has fallen with every generation since the crime boom. Our prisons and our hiring rules have not caught up. States are budgeting for prisoners who will never arrive, and employers are turning away workers whose risk faded years ago.”

The second paper co-written by Bushway, “Safe to Hire: Predicting Recidivism Risk for Job Candidates with Criminal Records,” was published in August in Statistics and Public Policy. RAND researcher Elizabeth Chase is the lead author, and the co-authors are Bushway and RAND’s Bethany Saunders-Medina and Lane Burgette.

The team used the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System, the most comprehensive criminal history data in the United States, to follow more than 9 million people convicted of crimes in seven states. Unlike much earlier research, they measured new convictions rather than arrests. They also excluded time people spent in prison, when they could not reoffend.

The results contradict a common employer assumption. In five of the states studied, almost 80% of people were not convicted of a new crime within 10 years. In the two states with higher rates, about two-thirds were not. Risk also falls quickly. Within a few years of a conviction, many people with a record are about as likely to be convicted in the next year as people with no record at all.

“A 30-year-old with a felony and a misdemeanor at age 22 is about as likely to be convicted next year as a 20-year-old with a clean record,” Bushway said. “Most hiring rules treat those two people very differently. The data say they shouldn’t.”

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