This is great news!..Or is really? On Thursday, June 26. 2025, The Atlantic published an article headlined, “America’s Incarceration Rate Is About to Fall Off a Cliff.”
For more than 40 years, the United States—a nation that putatively cherishes freedom—has had one of the largest prison systems in the world. Mass incarceration has been so persistent and pervasive that reform groups dedicated to reducing the prison population by half have often been derided as made up of fantasists. But the next decade could see this goal met and exceeded: After peaking at just more than 1.6 million Americans in 2009, the prison population was just more than 1.2 million at the end of 2023 (the most recent year for which data are available), and is on track to fall to about 600,000—a total decline of roughly 60 percent.
Discerning the coming prison-population cliff requires understanding the relationship between crime and incarceration over generations. A city jail presents a snapshot of what happened last night (for example, the crowd’s football-victory celebration turned ugly). But a prison is a portrait of what happened five, 10, and 20 years ago. Middle-aged people who have been law-abiding their whole life until “something snapped” and they committed a terrible crime are a staple of crime novels and movies, but in real life, virtually everyone who ends up in prison starts their criminal career in their teens or young adulthood. 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.
Because of that fundamental dynamic, the explanation for why roughly 1.6 million people—more than 500 for every 100,000 Americans—were in a state or federal prison in 2009 has very little to do with what was happening on the streets or with law-enforcement policies that year. Rather, the causes lay in the final decades of the 20th century.
“This is great to hear, unless you understand the true reason why.” said Thomas Robb, National Director of the Knights Party of the Ku Klux Klan, based centrally in Harrison, Arkansas. “For many years now we have heard about how overcrowded the prison systems are in America. We heard how our prison systems were stacked against the black race, even though it should be because 14% of our country is black, and that small number commits 56% of our crime. In reality, that number of 14% should be lower because not every black person in America is a criminal. Regardless, if one race commits over half of America’s crimes, then wouldn’t it be logical to think that over half our prison population would be black? I mean it makes sense to me. America has a strange way of making blacks equal. Take education for example, blacks didn’t just start getting smarter, White students were dumbed down to make blacks feel equal. In my opinion, and we all should see this, blacks didn’t just quit committing crimes, they just stopped arresting them for them, using systemic racism as an excuse for it. President Trump is ridding America of all the Third World criminals in America, so in turn, the prison population should drop even more. You sometimes have to read between the fancy words and made up statistics to see what really is happening. As far as the black population dropping in our prison systems, I look for White deaths to increase in America. But there will be an excuse for that too, as so not to put black criminals in the spotlight.”
