By Bri Brands
For Jason Robey, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology, the story of incarceration is more complicated than the common narrative of a dramatic rise in imprisonment rates across the United States.
In a recent study of imprisonment rates from 2000–2019, Jason Robey’s team examined how incarceration rates have declined substantially, especially among Black Americans. Robey’s research seeks to understand why those changes happened, how they can inform policy, and what they could mean for the future.
Tracking a changing criminal justice system
“One of the things that I find so fascinating is that this relationship between inequality and our criminal justice system has changed a lot in the last 50 years,” he said. “What I study now might be different than what I study in five years, because the system could have changed pretty drastically in that time,” Robey said.
Incarceration rates in the United States began increasing substantially in the 1970s, with particularly pronounced effects on Black Americans. Robey’s research examines how those patterns have changed.
“Incarceration rates for Black men are about half today what they were at the beginning of the 21st century,” Robey said. “In the last 25 years, the incarceration rate for Black men has gone down about 54 percent.”
Those declines do not mean racial disparities have disappeared. Robey said differences in arrest and imprisonment rates between Black and white Americans remain, but the gap is shrinking significantly.
For violent and property offenses, declining prison admissions corresponded primarily with reductions in recorded crime. From 2000 to 2019, the national violent crime rate fell 32 percent, while the prison admission rate for violent offenses among Black Americans fell 43 percent. The analyses in their study attributed that change entirely to a 47 percent reduction in measured violent crime among Black Americans, rather than a less punitive criminal justice system.
Drug offenses followed a different pattern. National survey data provided little evidence that falling drug use explained the decline in prison admissions. Instead, among Black Americans, both the likelihood of arrest for a drug offense and the likelihood of being sent to prison after an arrest declined. The latter fell by about half.
Together, those changes corresponded with a 75 percent decline in drug-related prison admissions for Black Americans from 2000 to 2019. The Black-white difference in drug-related prison admissions also narrowed from more than 12-to-1 to about 3-to-1.
“If we want to continue to reduce our incarceration rates in the United States, we have to understand why we got here,” Robey said. “Continuing the progress we’ve made starts with recognizing that we’ve made progress, and then evaluating how we made that progress.”
From law school to sociology at Iowa
Robey’s path to studying incarceration began while he was deciding between law school and research. After graduating from the University of Minnesota, he spent two years researching probation and parole at the university’s law school. The experience helped convince him to pursue a PhD in sociology.
Robey was drawn to the University of Iowa by the opportunity to study crime and incarceration within the combined Department of Sociology and Criminology.
“The department has a long history of excellence in sociology, but also in the study of crime,” he said. “That, along with excellent faculty, staff, and students, were big draws for me.”
Robey is now working on a book exploring the causes and consequences of declining imprisonment and policies cities, states, and the nation could adopt to continue reducing imprisonment.
“The evidence points us towards the things we’ve done to reduce crime in the United States,” he said. “If we can continue that progress in reducing crime, we can continue our progress in reducing imprisonment as well.”