Despite earlier predictions, overall incarceration rates across the nation are down, with Black men seeing the largest percentage decline.
In 2003, a Justice Department-sponsored study calculated that for children born in 2001, one out of every three for Black males and one of every 17 for White males were expected to be incarcerated in their lifetimes.
That prediction never came true, but it did much to spur public opinion toward criminal justice reform, The Washington Post reported July 12, 2023.
Pew Research says the overall U.S. incarceration rate peaked between 2006 and 2008, but has since declined. The rate for Black men dropped by about 40 percent, more than any other group. The lifetime incarceration risk for Black men born in 2001 dropped from the predicted one in three to less than one in five. This indicated a real, but modest, reduction in racial inequality, according to the Post.
The peer-reviewed journal Demography reported a study on racially disparate incarceration. Data from its July 2023 publication found that 5,159 out of 100,000 Black men were incarcerated in 1999. By 2019, the rate had fallen to 2,881 per 100,000. There was a 44% decrease in nearly every state.
The drop from a one-in-three to a one-in-five chance of imprisonment for Black men born in 2001 converts to 31,000 fewer ending up incarcerated, according to Demography. That number, the study notes, is about equal to the entire 2019 population of Black men incarcerated in California prisons.
The study’s authors observed that the one-in-five lifetime incarceration risk could easily be an overestimation as it was based on 2019 rates, which have continued to slide downward. They find that the generation of Black men, as well as all U.S. residents born in 2001, “is facing a distinctly reduced risk of imprisonment.”
The Demography study found other positive trends. Black men are now more likely to have earned a bachelor’s degree by age 25 than to have been incarcerated. In 2019, 12% of 25-year-old Black men had been to prison, while 17.7% had finished college. A decade earlier it was the opposite: 17.4% had been incarcerated and 12.4% had finished college.
With the Black-White ratio in male incarceration rates dropping from 9.3 to one in 1999, to 6.1 to one in 2019, the study commented that the unacceptable disparity “remains quite large.”
The lead author, sociologist Jason P. Robey of the University of Albany’s School of Criminal Justice, said, “There is still more progress to be made.”
The report did not offer an explanation as to exactly why the conditions have improved. The Washington Post lists less punitive enforcement policies on non-violent drug offences, as well as other reforms intended to limit disparate incarceration as possible reasons.
The national criminal justice debate often focuses on problems and injustices that still need solving. However, encouraging data also deserves attention. While the Demography study labeled the “incarceration boom” data as alarming, it highlighted the urgency of the criminal justice reform movement. “Statistical evidence of progress can provide another: hope,” cited the Post.