HN Reader

>Rapidly declining numbers of youth are committing crimes, getting arrested, and being incarcerated. This matters because young offenders are the raw material that feeds the prison system: As one generation ages out, another takes its place on the same horrid journey.

Another factor which will soon impact this, if it isn't already, is the rapidly changing nature of youth. Fertility rates have been dropping since 2009 or so. Average age of parents is increasing. Teen pregnancy on a long and rapid decline.

All of these working together means that each year the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources. Which in turn should mean fewer youth delinquency, which as the article notes is how most in prison started out.

There are many reasons why crime is in decline, but ultimately its economic.

Crime used to pay. Your expected return on a crime was pretty good for the risk involved. Nowadays though, because of technology, risk has increased while the returns have also decreased. Barriers to entry for crimes worth committing are now way higher. Robbing a gas station decades ago could yield a nice chunk of cash that could probably pay bills for a month. But now with less people using cash and cost of living increasing, there’s no point. Most registers have pitiful amount of cash. And mugging strangers on the street is likely even worse. No one carries wads of cash anymore.

The hot industry to be in is ransomware. The sums are vast and the risk is low if you do it right. But it’s very white collar, it requires skills that your typical low level criminal won’t have.

Overall, it means there’s a lot of crimes that are done not for any financial reason, just for personal satisfaction.

Incarceration isn't the same thing as crime. If the most populous state by far (California, almost 40m people in 2025) passes a law[0] that stealing things under $950 is a misdemeanor rather than a felony, then crime can continue while incarceration rates drop.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47

This is good news. The level of crime and number of offenders has decreased.

Quotes from the article:

     > As of 2016—the most recent year for which data are available—the average man in state prison had been arrested nine times, was currently incarcerated for his sixth time, and was serving a 16-year sentence.


     > But starting in the late 1960s, a multidecade crime wave swelled in America, and an unprecedented number of adolescents and young adults were criminally active. In response, the anti-crime policies of most local, state, and federal governments became more and more draconian.


     > Rapidly declining numbers of youth are committing crimes, getting arrested, and being incarcerated.

Freakonomics argued that crime correlates to whether or not abortion is available.

If it is not, crime rates are up, and by a lot.

If it is, crime rates are down.

When you flip from one to the other, takes about 15/20 years for the effect to show up.

Rationale is that forcing parents to have their kids when they're not ready for them significantly increases delinquency in young adults.

This is apparently the only possible theory at the moment. It's not proven, of course, but the other theories which were given have been found lacking. This is the only theory which has some evidence, and hasn't been found to be wrong.

In part due to simple demographics?

If most prisoners are younger, starting their incarceration incidents in their teens or twenties, then basically the fewer young people you have, the less people in prison:

https://populationeducation.org/u-s-population-pyramids-over...

Compare 1960 to 2020.

How much of this is due to smartphones? The years seem to line up.

2014 seemed like the big year where smartphone ubiquity changed US teen culture. Less boredom, dumb adventure, drinking, etc. (For better or worse but in this case better.)

One more thing to throw into the mix. The treatment of ADHD might be helping:

"ADHD medication still reduces risks, but benefits have weakened over time"

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

We may see a boom in crime as functional illiteracy rates climb, which is already correlated with criminal behavior. A generation that is weaned on having a computer do everything by voice command and gaining passive knowledge exclusively through videos will have more living on the margins who can't function well in a society that needs some base level of competence in understanding and interpreting text.

The Atlantic suggests this results from the release of those convicted during a decades long crime wave, which apprently took place when many of us grew up. Perhaps it also tracks with a progressive decline in law enforcement. Whether that is because crime waves not longer exist or whether it is some other reason is a question for the reader. A substanbtial amount of crime is now done via internet. Few are ever convicted.

While my Target puts Legos behind plexiglas. While my Safeway puts deodorant behind plexiglas.

Statistics are amazing.

Even crime stats are "down". Don't report, don't convict - done.

This is interesting. I don't know why it's happening. However, this book deserves a mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur... . It shares statistics on how violence has been decreasing throughout the history of humanity.

I'd like to see stats on how many people are getting arrested for petty crimes e.g. marijuana (which isn't even a crime in some contexts any more) back then vs now.

Does that mean we can stop keeping mouth wash and deodorant behind lock and key on store shelves and resume locking up the criminals making messes of our cities?

The best stat is that nearly 90% of prisoners had absent fathers.

In the light of that dynamic I fund it curious that Russian prisons population is rapidly declining too, but for very different reason.

An interesting and upbeat article.. But the death rate from overdose went from 9 to 32 per 100000 in the last 2 decades. Using their entrance logic, if I understand what this means afa per annum, couldn't that amount to a few hundred per 100000 who are not cycling into long prison terms because they are dead?

There's been something like 900k excess deaths since 1968 compared to if the rate was just flat since then. That's a lot of people who probably had a much higher chance of incarceration than average even if you only consider drug law and the more recently someone was born the more likely they are to have already overdosed at any given age.

Is it possible that incarceration had the intended effect? Did an entire generation grow up seeing their fathers and uncles locked up and decide that there must be a better way?

Problem isn't with people who are in prison. Problem is with people who are out of prison with prison experience - most of them are thoroughly criminalised for life. So one should count people who served serious time behind bars, and now out - ideally, age-corrected, because people age out of crime and someone who got in jail at 18 and left at 50 is probably ok and isn't a big danger. That is the metric that society should strive to minimise.

  From the end of World War II until the mid-1970s, the proportion of Americans in prison each year never exceeded 120 per 100,000

That's a funny way of saying 0.12%. Is there a reason for this? It sure doesn't make it easy to compare the numbers they're giving with other numbers given as percentages.

I guess if you're considering a sufficiently small population you could go from ~600,000 people in Vermont * 120/100,000 -> ~720 imprisoned people in Vermont trivially, but we're the second smallest state. This certainly doesn't scale to cities over a million. At least I'd start having to think harder about it.

The question not even asked by the article is ... why?

Prison is big business in the U.S., so I fully expect red alerts going off and panic attacks sweeping the country.

Crime is also way down over the last 20 years:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...

When they decide change the threshold for arrests, like the SF robberies or under some dollar amount.

this is great news. but...

i fear the new avenues of business sought by companies that operate for-profit prisons - i don't expect they'll just eat the losses of declining populations in their main moneymakers, and we're already starting to see them work on detention facilities for DHS etc.

> After peaking at just more than 1.6 million Americans in 2009

> But a prison is a portrait of what happened five, 10, and 20 years ago.

Is this just a result of the dropping crime rates since the mid 90s, but on a 20ish year lag?

Bad news for prison owners

GOOD

They fail to mention the reason the prison population soared in the 70's and 80's, because of ultra-harsh prison sentencing for drugs. In retrospect, those laws appear to have been deliberately designed to create a massive and permanent prison population, far beyond what locking people up only for non-consensual crimes could ever sustain.

Now, most of those laws have been rolled back. In the past 10-15 years the number of people locked up at the state level for drug crimes is down 30% even though drug arrests remain high. And those still getting locked up are getting shorter sentences. (though over 40% of inmates at the federal level are still there for drugs)

I'm not sure why they failed to mention such a key issues related to incarceration. They repeatedly refer to the surge in crime in the drug war era as a "crime wave". And they link to 3 other pro-drug war articles by the same author. Maybe Keith Humphreys had a bad trip in his youth and now he's making it everyone's problem.

only because the US is soft on crime - so soft that drugs that were illegal are no longer illegal

Does this include those sent to the gulag in El Salvador?

Crime has been going down since the 90s, video games and online porn probably helped this

The Black southeast is still in over the Soviet Union’s rates during the 1930s https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/LA.html. Racialized carceral warfare.

After covid they changed who will go to jail for what because they decided overcrowding with covid was killing inmates. I think it was the right thing to do at the time.

However since 2021ish crime has been skyrocketing. It's definitely time to figure out the next steps. I want to live in a peaceful, safe society. It makes sense to separate those that can't help but destroy the peace.

It has also been stated that something like 90% of crime is performed by a very small percentage of people and most of it is just the same person over and over and over. Those people must be separated from society.