Here's an incarceration chart from my buddy Rick Nevin:
It looks like incarceration rates went down in both 2020 and 2021, and indeed they did. Between 2019 and 2021 the prison incarceration rate for ages 18-19 declined from 1.07% to 0.84% to 0.55%. For the entire age cohort of 18-24 year-olds, prison incarceration rates went down from 4.0% to 3.2% to 2.7%.
The incarceration rate for ages 18-24, including both jail and prisons, also went down between 2020 and 2021—from 6.5% to 6.2%.¹
Rick has more data here. Note that he and I are showing different things. He focuses mostly on male crime and shows it over the long term. My stats are for everyone and focus just on 2020 and 2021, since those are the years when crime supposedly exploded among the young.
But it didn't. The murder rate exploded among the young, and that's obviously a problem. But when it comes to overall violent and property crime, the incarceration data is yet another data point indicating that it continued to go down.
POSTSCRIPT: Stats for the prison population are available at the BJS site for 2019, 2020, and 2021. Stats for the jail population in 2020 and 2021 are available here. Check my arithmetic!
¹I don't have a figure for 2019-2020 because jail rates by age are inexplicably not available before 2020.
Was there a corresponding drop in blood lead levels the right number of years ago?
I would expect incarceration to lag crime rates as the wheels of justice grind slowly, or so they say...
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Is there a trend of more lenient sentencing that affects this?
As well as increasingly restricted social lives, where everyone is able to simply avoid those they may have otherwise to make a kind of an accommodation for, and therefore less argument, less aggravation, and less letting it all out on some random mail box.
Is this an artifact of the Pandemic? with the courts shut down and then horribly backlogged incarceration also had to be reserved for the very worst criminals. Jails were bursting full and a lo of lesser offenders were released.
There is a long lag between the commission of a violent crime and the beginning of a prison sentence -often a year or more. A crime wave in 2020 & 2021 wont swell prisons until 2023, or longer if it takes time to catch those involved.
For example, the Rittenhouse trial ended 15 months after the shootings.
I don’t care what Mr. drum says… some black teens are a menace in some parts of my local area. They are armed. They are stealing cars. And they shoot at each other every few days. I don’t read the Wall Street journal. I watch my local news where they faithfully report every incident. Maybe this has happened more in the past. I have no idea. My local police leadership seem to think otherwise.
I guess it’s good they don’t end up in jail for long so they can go back out and do it again. There is no excuse except stupid.
I don’t care really… let them shoot each other. I don’t go where terrorize each other.
And right on cue… well this happens every other day so maybe not fair. We all know what happened even without the details… At risk youths. Oh well. Why bother?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/23/us/des-moines-shooting.html
Two students were killed and an adult staff member was injured in a shooting on Monday at an educational mentorship program for at-risk youths in Des Moines in what the authorities described as a “targeted” attack.
This is really great news. I am a bit skeptical of the 2020-2021 numbers and wonder if Covid made them lower and we’ll see them bounce back in 2022. But for now I’m just happy that things seem on the right track.
Also, I’m actually proud that no one fed the troll.