At the end of 2023, 1,254,200 people were in US prisons, 22 percent fewer than in the peak year of 2009.
Among young adults ages 18 to 30, the rate at which people are sent to prison has fallen 53 percent since 2000.
In 2000, Black men were sent to prison 7.9 times as often as white men, and by 2036 the gap is expected to be about twofold.
The number of prisoners in the US peaked in 2009. That year, 1,617,970 people were held in state and federal prisons. At the end of 2023, the number was 1,254,200, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. That is a drop of 22 percent, or more than 360,000 people.
Per capita, the decline is larger. Between 2013 and 2023, the number of prisoners fell 20 percent, while the imprisonment rate dropped 25 percent, from 479 to 360 sentenced prisoners per 100,000 residents.
A new review in the journal Annual Review of Criminology explains why prisons are shrinking. It was written by Shawn Bushway at the University at Albany, Jason Robey at the University of Iowa and Keith Humphreys at Stanford University. The main explanation is that crime has fallen for 30 years. It shows up in every measure: crimes reported to police, arrests and surveys of crime victims.
New generations commit fewer crimes
The prisons were filled by people who came of age during the crime wave of the 1980s and 1990s. Now they are getting older and leaving the justice system. The generations after them have entered adulthood with far fewer crimes and arrests. The researchers describe this as cohort nonreplacement. The old cohorts are not being replaced by new ones.
Among young adults ages 18 to 30, the rate at which people are sent to prison has fallen 53 percent since 2000. Shawn Bushway points out that someone who is never arrested cannot end up in prison.
Arrests and confinement of juveniles have fallen even more. In 2022, 75 percent fewer youth were held in juvenile residential facilities for offenses than in 2000, according to the federal agency OJJDP.
Long sentences meant that the decline in prison populations came later than the decline in crime. The sentences kept the older cohorts in prison long after crime had fallen. Today, men of retirement age are imprisoned at twice the rate of men who are 18 or 19, according to the researchers.
Fewer crimes mean fewer prisoners
A study in Nature Human Behaviour points in the same direction. Jason Robey and Michael Light examined data from 2000 to 2019. The decline in the number of people imprisoned for violent and property offenses is almost entirely linked to a drop in recorded crime. This is especially true for violence among Black Americans.
Crime has kept falling. The Angry Optimist has previously reported that violent crime in the US fell 9.3 percent in 2025, according to preliminary FBI figures. Murders fell 18.1 percent. The Council on Criminal Justice estimates that the US homicide rate in 2025 was likely the lowest since at least 1900. In the first half of 2026, homicides in 30 large cities were 18 percent lower than in the same period the year before. In New York, summer 2026 had fewer shootings and murders than any summer since record-keeping began.
Prison admissions expected to halve within 20 years
The researchers used data from the National Corrections Reporting Program to make a projection. They expect the rate at which people are sent to prison to halve again within 20 years. The level would then approach that of the 1970s.
Black men have benefited the most
The largest declines are among Black men. The rate at which Black men were sent to prison fell by nearly two-thirds between 2000 and 2023. In 2000, Black men were sent to prison 7.9 times as often as white men. The researchers expect the rate to fall by another 46 percent over the next decade. By 2036, the gap with white men is expected to shrink to between 2.0 and 2.3 times.
According to the researchers, the imprisonment rate for Black Americans is already less than half of what it was at the turn of the millennium. Figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics show the same trend. Between 2013 and 2023, the imprisonment rate for Black adults fell 33 percent. Among white adults, the decline was 22 percent.
During the years of mass incarceration, a well-known prediction was that a Black man born in 2000 was more likely to go to prison than to graduate from college before age 30. According to the researchers, that prediction is on its way to being proven wrong.
A study in the journal Demography compared different birth cohorts. Among Black men born in 1981, 33.7 percent had been imprisoned by age 38. For Black men born in 2001, the share was projected to be 18.3 percent. In 2009, more 25-year-old Black men had been imprisoned than had earned a bachelor's degree, 17.4 percent versus 12.8 percent. In 2019, it was the reverse. That year, 17.7 percent had a bachelor's degree and 12.0 percent had been imprisoned.
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