Incarceration and Crime: A Weak Relationship

By Nazgol Ghandnoosh,  and Kristen M. Budd

  A decade after national protests catapulted the Black Lives Matter movement following the police killing of Mi chael 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.1 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.3 Following a nearly 700% buildup in imprison ment since 1972, the U.S. prison population downsized by 25% between 2009 and 2021 – falling to under 1.2 million people.4 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%.5 Interventions such as the transfer of approximately 11,000 people from fed eral prisons to home confinement demonstrated that in some cases, substantial decarceration could accompany extremely low recidivism rates.6 Nevertheless, imprisonment levels increased in 2022.

Rates of crimes reported to U.S. law enforcement reached peak levels in the 1990s, and fell roughly 50% by year end 2019.8 However, the uptick in the 2022 pris on population – following eight years of modest decline – occurred in the midst of growing concern about crime. The economic, social, and psychological turbulence of the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to a seismic shift for the most serious crime: homicide. Homicides spiked up 27% in 2020 and remained at elevated rates until declin ing substantially in 2023.9 Reported rates of violent and property crime exhibited typical fluctuations amidst the pandemic, although household surveys of violent victimization showed a more dramatic increase across the country.10 Motor vehicle thefts, which were at near-historic lows by 2019, also increased in the subsequent years, as did carjackings.11 These facts, combined with bouts of misleading media coverage have heightened public concern about crime.12 When combined with a growing sense of disorder and the persistence of the drug/opioid overdose crisis, the result has been eroded policy debates about how to create community safety. 

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2024. 18p.