In 2015, America’s mass incarceration rate declined to its lowest level in nearly two decades, according to a recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The number of people locked up in local, state, and federal prisons across the country dropped to 670 inmates for every 100,000 residents (down from 760 inmates in 2007), or an estimated 6,741,400 people.
The 1.7 percent decline in the United States’ prison population isn’t some marginal decrease; it marks the largest annual decline since 2010, and the seventh straight year of contraction since 2008. As the Washington Postnotes, this trend makes President Barack Obama the first president ”to leave the office with a smaller federal prison system than he started with” in nearly 40 years. Believe it or not, the U.S. prison-industrial complex seems to be ever-so-slightly collapsing in on itself.
[For more of this story, written by Jared Keller, go to https://psmag.com/the-u-s-mass...a30f1b51f#.d7byejdni]
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