WASHINGTON – Attorney General Eric Holder announced this week that the federal prison population has dropped by roughly 4,800 inmates since September 2013. This represents the first time the federal inmate population has fallen, rather than risen, over the course of a fiscal year since 1980.
Moreover, Attorney General Holder announced that current Bureau of Prisons estimates project this downward trend to continue in each of the next two fiscal years. In FY15, the inmate population is projected to drop by another 2,200 inmates. In FY16, the population is projected to drop by 10,000 inmates – or the equivalent of six federal prisons.
“This is nothing less than historic,” said Attorney General Holder. “Clearly, criminal justice reform is an idea whose time has come. And thanks to a robust and growing national consensus – a consensus driven not by political ideology, but by the promising work that’s underway – we are bringing about a paradigm shift, and witnessing a historic sea change, in the way our nation approaches these issues.”
While these statistics show progress at the federal level, there is similar progress at the state level. Overall, incarceration rates have fallen by roughly 10 percent since President Obama took office, and that has occurred simultaneously with a similarly-sized reduction in crime rates.
Holder says that the Justice Department is refining its approach and rejecting “the ineffective practice of calling for stringent sentences against those convicted of low-level, nonviolent crimes … we also need to refine the metrics we use to measure success; to evaluate the steps we’re taking; and to assess the effectiveness of new criminal justice priorities. In the Smart on Crime era, it’s no longer adequate – or appropriate – to rely on outdated models that prize only enforcement, as quantified by numbers of prosecutions, convictions, and lengthy sentences, rather than taking a holistic view.”
Holder touted the need for the Justice Department to direct funding to help move the criminal justice field toward a fuller embrace of science and data and base prosecution and punishment of crimes on those outcomes.
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