Crime Is Down, Yet U.S. Incarceration Rates Are Still Among the Highest in the World

Crime Is Down, Yet U.S. Incarceration Rates Are Still Among the Highest in the World​
The New York Times by Campbell Robertson
4/25/19

For all the talk of curbing America’s appetite for mass incarceration and bipartisan support for reducing prison sentences, the number of people incarcerated in the United States declined only slightly in 2017, according to data released on Thursday by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The United States still has the largest known incarcerated population in the world.

“If we keep working on the kinds of criminal justice reforms that we’re doing right now, it’s going to take us 75 years to reduce the population by half,” said Rachel Barkow, a sentencing expert at New York University School of Law and author of “Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration.”

Read More