Criminal Justice

Is Our Age of Mass Incarceration Collapsing?

Researchers say low crime rates by Gen Zers and millennials could keep driving down the prison population for the next two decades.

C.J. Ciaramella | 10.7.2026 2:45 PM

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Researchers argue that a profound generational shift by millennials and Gen Zers away from criminal behavior is ending mass incarceration and will ultimately reduce the prison population by 50 percent over the next two decades, with or without accompanying policy reforms.

In a Washington Monthly story last week, Keith Humphreys, Shawn D. Bushway, and Jason Robey declared, "Mass incarceration is ending," citing their new research article published in the Annual Review of Criminology.

Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University and former senior policy adviser in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy; Bushway, a professor of public administration and policy at the University at Albany's Rockefeller College; and Robey, an assistant professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Iowa, argue that the historic drop in crime over the past 30 years, and a related decline in prison admissions, is due in large part to millennials and Gen Zers entering adulthood with "extraordinarily low rates of........

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