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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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

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

Statistics are amazing.

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

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.

  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

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.

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

> 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?

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.

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.

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.