Why America's prisons are shrinking and racial gaps are closing.

Why have incarceration rates and racial disparities fallen in the USA? Using data on recorded crimes, arrests and prison admissions from 2000 to 2019, we decompose declines in imprisonment by race and offence category. Whereas the rise of mass incarceration primarily reflected increased punitiveness in policing and case processing, recent declines in imprisonment for violent and property offences can be attributed almost exclusively to reductions in recorded crime rates, particularly to declines in violence among Black Americans. For drug offences, however, the pattern appears different. There is little evidence of declining drug use. Rather, drug prison admissions appear to have fallen owing to reductions in the likelihood of arrest and imprisonment. For Black individuals arrested for drug-related offences, the probability of imprisonment was cut in half since 2000. Overall, we find clear evidence that the forces that produced mass incarceration differ substantially from those associated with the contraction of America's carceral state.