S3 E1 | Stanford Professor Keith Humphreys on the Decline in Mass Incarceration in the U.S. and Will It Continue? Or Is It Going Back Up?

(upbeat music) Greetings and welcome to the Justice Speaks podcast from Just Leadership USA. My name is Ronald Simpson Bay. I am the executive vice president of Strategic Partnerships for J.O. USA. And my name is Zach Ruppel, Policy Analyst for J.O. USA. J.O. USA is one of the nation's only criminal justice reform organizations that is both founded by and led by formally incarcerated people. Or as I like to call it, the baddest criminal justice reform organization in the country. Today, we are joined for this conversation by a very special guest, Professor Keith Humphreys. He is currently the Esther Ting Memorial Professor at Stanford University, a senior research career scientist in the Veterans Health Administration, and an honorary professor at the Institute of Psychiatry at Keynes College in London. Professor Humphreys also founded and currently co-directs the Stanford Network on Addiction Policy. He is advised multiple international administrations on addiction policy and won awards for his educational public policy and health books regarding addiction. He is the deputy editor in chief for the journal entitled Addiction. And he's also the author of the book, Addiction of Very Short Introduction from Oxford University Press. - Well, very glad to be here. Thank you so much. - Yes, yes, yes. At the end of June 2025, the Atlantic magazine published at Professor Humphreys ground-baking analysis entitled, America's incarceration rate is about the fall off a cliff, where he detailed the state of decline in mass incarceration over the past two decades. We're here to discuss that research and to get his current thoughts on what is happening right now in terms of mass incarceration in the United States under the current administration. Welcome Professor Humphreys to the Justice Speak podcast. Could you tell us a bit about yourself? - As you highlighted in a very kind introduction, I've always been interested in addiction and toll things, alcohol drugs and so on. And that naturally means that I've interacted with the criminal justice system, you know, because so many people have, that is some factor in their lives. We also, of course, punish some drugs per se, also quite a few people, particularly with alcohol, do things. They would not otherwise do when they've been drinking and so you meet a lot of people with drinking problems. They were incarcerated. And I was also a prison inspector at one point in my career in California. And so I've long been interested in why so many Americans are incarcerated. I'm not an abolitionist. I know there are, that they're sometimes we do, unfortunately, have to carcerate people, but why, you know, why not have a million? And how do we get out of this sort of trap where people are discipling over and over again in the system sort of has built up an appetite and so it just continues to want to eat people, eat lives. And the first hope I've had is in that article in the Atlanta that I see something finally changing that is extremely positive and has not been noticed. - So for those who haven't read the article, yeah, published by the Atlantic, could you give our listeners just an overview of your analysis and what you sure? - Some of those trends. - So let's start by just, you know, probably not sure, your listeners know we're just in case you know, jails and prisons are really different kinds of places. Jails are local. And if you walk into a jail, you can get a sense of what happened last night or last week. I mean, you know, they're sort of a pretty current thermometer about, there was football game, a lot of people, you know, were rowdy or, you know, there was a big drug bust in town and these are some of the people who were arrested. Prison's not like that. And prisons, when you go in, you're really looking at the past, you know, you're meeting people who, you know, they're criminal career if that's the right term, you know, might have started 10, 20, 30 years ago. The average person in prison has been incarcerated multiple times. They're on a long sentence. So if you want to understand why prisons are the way they are, you have to go backwards in time, which is sort of hard to do, you know, mentally it's hard to do. I think that's probably why people have missed this, what is happening, which is prisons peak around 2007. And since that time, we're down about about a third of millions who were people in prison. And if you want to, why did that happen then when crime had been down for a very long time? And you know, crime starts dropping in the early 90s. Drops really, really drops. But it takes prisons like 15 years to catch up because all the people who were sentenced with increasingly long sentences in a very punitive criminal justice environment in the 70s and 80s, they're still serving their time. So it doesn't affect them that, yeah, crimes down, but I got sentenced in 1990, so I'm still here. That group of people is leaving prison and they're getting old, so they're either going to finish their sentence, some of them unfortunately will die in prison. But in the rest, we'll probably desist. There are a few people persist in crime when they get to be my age and older. And so that huge group of people, and demographers often talk about the baby boom, they'll say it's like a snake that ate a pig. You can just see this sort of mass moving through on all these different things, like income, housing, stuff. That's kind of what happened is the snake that is the crime justice has made a pig, and that is all moving through. Now that wouldn't matter if just as many people were coming in, but that's the other part of the story. That old group are desisting, finishing their time in prison. Young people are just not committing crime. They haven't been committing crime for a good 25-year, it's really one of the great stories of our time. Arrests for juveniles have just fallen off the cliff, it starts in the 90s. And by that, I mean, 85% drop. It's just a very different generation of kids. They do a lot less risky behavior of all sorts, and their less involved criminal justice system. We've also had some reforms in how we handle crime, which I think has helped some people not get stuck in the system. So when that happens, you get this wild situation that in our prisons, there are more men in their 60s, 70s, and 80s than our men who are 18, 19, 21 years old, which is the opposite of what you were just seeing back then. So a lot of people are leaving and very few people are coming in. And I'm projecting, starting with 2025, as we sort of finished with the COVID sort of turmoil. Over the next 10 years, this has got to really accelerate. So we will be under a million people for the first time in half a century. We could get a, you know, I honestly don't know the exact number. It's hard to pick over a decade, but my bet is that in 2035, we'll be at a half century low in prison rate. And that's going to be a really different country. Well, that, that, that is amazing. That, that's music to our ears for sure. In your article, you stated that when just leadership, you had say in a few other criminal justice reform organizations, the space set out like 10 years ago to cut the prison population in half by the year 2030. It was laughed at by the naysayers. But according to your research, the next decade could see this goal met and exceeded it. Tell us a bit about it a little bit more. Yeah, that's right. I mean, people thought that was ludicrous, cut 50. Now, you got to be a fantasy camp, you know, 50, 50% and crime 50% in prison. But that's where we are headed. I mean, we, you know, the crime part we already have, there was a big surge in crime in the first year of COVID. That was tough, you know, but that's kind of past now. And we're back on this much less crime, you know, and much less incarceration. So I think everybody who predicted that or wanted that, you know, deserves a prize, they should, they should get a party. They, they saw the future and made it happen, some very optimistic and way I haven't been, you know, for, you know, first, you know, 20, 20, 30 years when I was going to prison, I was feeling quite depressed about everything, you know, I salute the optimists. And I would say also that's something this movement needs. People who work in the criminal justice space are often pretty downbeat, you know, so they have, they have a heart like, in fact, even what I'm saying just seems unbelievable. They just can't believe it because it's just such hard work and you get very, very discouraged. It's understandable to be discouraged, but if you get, we can't let them become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like we believe nothing can change, so we stop trying. And then in fact, nothing changes. And so see, I told you in a sort of ballad age, our cynicism, you have to have the hope to even get out of bed and do the hard work. Yeah, that's a powerful reminder. I appreciate that professor. So one of the kind of the, the sibling advocacy efforts that we're seeing a lot of conversation with it right now, of course, is immigration. We know that ICE is arrested and detaining, slash and incarcerating more than 65,000 people, which is highest level since, again, the '80s, as we've already talked about when everything kind of came to a climax at that point. So do you see there being an effect, certainly a trend impact on the prison rates based on the movement that we're seeing with this rapid detention? Yeah. And I would add to you, I don't think we fully know exactly how extensive this is. It's very hard to get good information about what precisely is going on and with whom. In the short term, yeah, there's no question. I mean, we're detaining those people, so that is causing this surge at the federal level. Although, as you all know, the federal level is really not where most the action is in prison in the United States, it's at the state level. So there's been a number of years while the whole system was declining, where the federal system grew, but it's just not that big relative to California and Texas system, not quite as big as the federal system, but almost that big. But we'll have that, yeah, you'll have that increase now. Now will that persist really depend and does policy change? What happens to the next election? Also are those folks going to be kept in detention? Will they eventually be released? Will they be deported? Will they be in prison? You know, they could have other challenges coming with their sent to, but you're right. So a short term, but I'll tell you about interesting thing. The federal bureau prison shrank this year. You know, that again, I was just looking up to the other day, you know, there's something like 5,000 senior citizens in the federal bureau prisons and that is more than there are people who are under the age of like 23, 24, it's just that that inextrable force is affecting the federal system too. Hmm. Wow. Interesting. So more than 10 years, just leadership, USA has been amplifying the power of directly impacted people by educating, elevating and empowering their voices, so they have the tools and resources to self organize and advocate for themselves, their families and their communities. Our experience is our expertise to date over 1,800 leaders in 45 states, including Washington DC, are hard at work, transforming people and communities who are harmed by mass incarceration, partnered with us to bend the arc of criminal legal reform by donating to our leadership programs and policy work today. Our network of leaders is stronger and growing together with building local power for national impact. Every donation supporting jail USA and our leaders has a ripple effect across families, communities, and generations. To learn more, go to jail USA dot org, backslash gear, that's J L USA dot O R G, backslash gear. In the conversation, fresh, you mentioned, we haven't seen numbers go below a million, like almost 50 years, and we know that the so-called war on drugs play a huge part in the rise and numbers of mass incarceration in the United States. As an expert in the field of addiction, can you talk a little bit about the role of addiction and how you see the current drug policy continuing to contribute to mass incarceration today? Yeah, sure. So there's more than one way that addiction affects incarceration. And the thing, a lot of people don't get, or a lot of people are surprised to know, the number one substance that people who are incarcerated have a problem with this alcohol, which is legal. And that shows you it's not just the war on drugs, it's also when we use substances, we sometimes do things we would not otherwise do, including physical aggression and things like that. It's a very common in physical assaults that wonder both people are drunk, for example. So that's one way you get to sort of pharmacological way. The second way is just from punishing people for very long periods for drug crimes. So the example, I'm sure you will know, and I suspect most listeners will know, is people with very small amounts of crack cocaine in the '80s when I started my career, who normally would have probably had a local sentence maybe of a year were swept into the federal system during the George HW Bush administration with very long sentences in federal facilities. And that's actually why the federal facility blew up, was people with crack, some of whom were really extremely minor players, they may have not even been dealers, it's just so little there. And so that definitely accelerated the growth of incarceration and then some states copied that, added their own statutes around crack cocaine. Well, it has happened since then, though. You don't hear the war on drugs spoken of much at all anymore, I mean, it's very rare that politicians say I want to fight the war on drugs again. It seems that the country has changed in how we want to approach this problem and a lot of states have, in the federal government as well, have rolled back those kinds of really long penalties. And so that will, you know, help us constrain, you know, the growth that that produced. So thinking in kind of that realm of advisement, if you will, Professor, you have been an adviser to many chief among them, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Gavin Newsom, even the Queen of England, congratulations by your way on your honor, officer of the British Empire. But consistently throughout each of those roles, and you've shared a few of those nuggets here already, what is your advice and position been in terms of drug policy as it intersects with incarceration? Yeah. So you want to do the opposite of what we did in the 80s. So you want to have incarceration be the last worst idea, you know, that, you know, yes, it's going to happen sometimes, but you should look on that as something you're trying to minimize, not something that's good in itself or a condying punishment that will teach people a lesson and that sort of thing. But, you know, something like a, you know, a million to land people engage in some sort of drug deal each year, which Americans are going to throw at those people on prison. I mean, you know, the other point is, you know, for addiction, we do have treatments for addiction, you know, and they, they help a lot of people. They are more humane, less expensive and do more for families and communities than prison does. So, you know, if you, and there are a lot of demonstrations effects, so I've been working with states on Medicaid, you know, and turning Medicaid on before somebody leaves incarceration. And just getting them that their health insurance, they can get mental health and, and addiction care, as they're sort of going to that very challenging transition. This is very hard to explain to people who have never been incarcerated that you would think everything's easy once you get out, but of course that's, it's actually an extremely hard time. The death rate for people leaving incarceration is extremely high, suicide overdose. So building that in, you know, taking care of people is much better for them, less like it overdose, less likely to commit suicide, but also it's very good from a crime viewpoint. I mean, you know, if, when people have are treated adequately for their addiction, mental health problems, they're less likely to commit crimes. They're less likely to wind up than the criminal justice system. So everybody wins. So that, so it should try to do that first. Yes, you have people who, you know, particularly people who do violent things, you know, there will be some accountability for that. But most people are not violent. Most people can be treated and rehabilitated, and even for those who are and are incarcerated, you can do a lot in the system. I mean, you know, it's one of the real tragedies of American incarceration is the society is already sort of paying for a place for people and paying for meals a day and all that. And then you have people sitting around all day and not getting any kind of rehabilitation. You know, if you're going to, if you're going to endure the expense to build a prison, why do you not use that time to help people and, you know, whatever it is, help them become literate, help them learn how to computer code, help them, you know, treat their depression, treat their, their, their opioid addiction, whatever it is, the, the benefit of that is huge is just sort of left on the table in most states. And then people come out and very commonly, you know, they, they things go badly for them and for, for others and then they're back in the system again. So that's the other part. When you do have to incarcerate people, you should not give up on them and you should not, you could still try to help them, particularly with addiction, which, you know, drugs, a huge amount of crime and so everybody wins when we adequately treat somebody for addiction. Absolutely. Absolutely. Are you, the formerly incarcerated or justice impacted leader or work for an advocacy organization that serves the justice impacted community, the just us coordinating council is a national collective of systems impacted individuals, allied organizations and partners across all 50 states, including DC that informs decision making at the federal, state and local policy levels. The JCC is the connective tissue that demands change through creating a united purpose for a united voice to establish a unite in power and we want you to join us. You'll get access to resources such as the new tools of the game, volume one and two in reentry mythbusters as well as regular webinars and our federal speaker series and access to the JCC member space on our engage platform. You'll also have the opportunity to join our federal policy listserv for action alerts and opportunities to share your experience and expertise. Learn more about how we are elevating issues impacting the 70 plus million Americans with lived experience at the federal level through the just us coordinating council. And sign up for a free membership today at just us cc.org that's j-u-s-t-u-s-c-c dot o-r-g. What would your top priorities be for the current administration to pursue if you were actually sharing your subject matter expertise? The reentry, Medicaid reentry is the biggest thing and I'm pleased to say the administration seems favorably disposed to it. So this is a bill when they design Medicaid, which is now like 60 years ago. The federal government didn't want it. They thought on the stage of this awful at all the prison health care on us. So we just turn Medicaid off when you enter a jail or prison and that in bed medicates the most common insurance people have when they go. So you basically have none and then you don't get health care. So your problems get worse when they are addiction, physical health care, mental health care. So the idea of legal action centers, what if we change the rules so that Medicaid would at least turn back on before somebody left? So you could at least get them started on health care and just as importantly prisons could start building partnerships with health care partners in the community. So I'll give you an example. I went to a prison in Rhode Island when Gina Ramondo was the governor. She later became the commerce secretary for a president Biden. I salute her for this because it was a political risk. She put general funds into health care for people who were incarcerated and she could have gotten blowback and she did it and I think that was great. And here's what it is. So you know, we went when it is clinics and these for people who were addicted to opioids and they would get the medication, put an orphan and get counseling from a community provider. And then the great thing about that is when you leave instead of it being, Keith, here's a brochure. You might want to go try to find a clinic to treat your heroin addiction and fentanyl addiction. It was, you know, Keith, you remember Carol, she's your counselor and the president, she's still your counselor. It's the same group, same team, same medication, same doctor, you know, and they're right there and you have that relationship. So doing that, dropped the death rate for people leaving prison in Rhode Island by 60% 60% and that was so much of Rhode Island's overdose problem that that year when New England was just going, you know, really to hell, I mean, every place with overdoses going up, Rhode Island actually dropped because the prison population was so much of their overdose. That's really impressive. So to just try that, so the idea was change Medicaid so all everyone could do that, all 50 states. It came really close to passing, two different cycles in Korea, so it was agonizing. We had people in both parties for it, we had people in the house in the Senate for it. It's one of those things like, you know, at the end of the session, it could have just creeped across maybe it had to do the bill, it just didn't quite work. So what happened then is the Biden administration decided to do 11, 15 waivers in Medicaid. So what that means is it's like it says states you can experiment, give it, you know, give it a try. And oftentimes they would do one or two states, but they really said like come on, come on. So there's something I think like 25s or so states have applied so far, very different places. And they're all, they're all trying this, making that work is really important. It's really, you know, because prisons don't really know how to do healthcare, they obviously don't have a bill Medicaid, they've never had that capacity before. They need help, you know, and there are some good groups like Harp, for example, is trying to help them learn how to do that. That is the thing I think we can do now, because even though Medicaid as a whole has just been cut pretty substantially, this seems safe, seems like the administration supports this. So that's a great place to, you just, it's just to me, it's just win, win, win, win. You know, if you, if you look at, if you look at one of your, the health of people are incarcerated, their health is going to be better. If you are as some Americans are just so angry, you don't, they should mad, even think of, you know, spending money on people or incarcerated, say, look, you're mad about crime, a healthy people commit less crime, you know, to take care of. So you'll, you'll get what you want in the end. And so who can, who could be against this? It's just, why should they get at work? It's challenging. These are big system, big rocker sees, prison system and the Medicaid system, getting them to work together. That's, that's going to be, that's the labor I've been spending time on. Well, I think the good news that we have professor is that when I re-entered in 2018, I was under a 1115 SUD waiver, similar to that. But incredible linkage to care, some of that continuity of care that's reflected in the re-entry act. And, you know, we're, we're hopeful like you are that we can get it across the finish line. But we know those SUD waivers have been so essential. And we're hoping that, that more than 19 or 20 re-entry waivers end up submitted. But share your optimism, certainly one of the other pieces that we're certainly monitoring in. And I would venture to guess that you are as well as artificial intelligence. And we're already seeing from parole recommendations to surveillance of the incarcerated with technology, it's everywhere. It's rapidly expanding. We know it's coming. It's here. It's not going anywhere. Do you have a sense of ways in which you see AI detracting or benefiting this kind of intersection of addiction, policy and incarceration? Yeah, you know, so in my, in my training, there were still few people doing worstshacking blocks, you know, we just show people this block. What do you see? I have a feeling AI is like a worstshacking block. I mean, I think like we don't quite know what's going to happen. So we just default. And if we're optimistic people, we say it's going to be great. And if we're pressing this people to say it's going to be awful, I think it's incredibly hard to know. You know, because we almost can't think about it. You don't have the framework to think about it. But I think it was like an education, we don't know, like what do you do now? Like the students that it can do everything a student can do. If we can probably soon do most things a professor does, what does that mean? So it started with industrial revolution is happening and you know, except it's happening over 12 months. It's just very disorienting. I think the thing I do know is true is it's wrong to assume that AI will be objective, neutral and fair. All it can do is look at what humans have done. And then do it again, right? So if you have a parole board that has some bias or another and you, you know, you have an LLM look through 50 years of its decision, say, well, now the computer's doing it. So we're taking the human bias up. No, you're not. Because the bias is in all those decisions. So that's the thing that I think would be the worst is if people start deferring to the computer and thinking, well, you know, it's like, like it's on the start track, like the computer gives us the objective answer. All it can do is learn from us, like that's who's been making the decisions before. That's the bad part. The good part, you know, would be, it doesn't have any bad days. It doesn't get angry. It doesn't rush through the hearing because it wants to go to lunch. A lot of the frailties we have is as people, it would not have as a machine. And you know, that part, you know, could make the system, could, so to say, could not well, but could make the system fairer and more efficient. And to the extent of efficiency, you know, just as delayed, just as denied, you know, that efficiency can be very good in terms of making systems fair. Great. That's very helpful. I appreciate that. And yeah, we share some of that, you know, cautious optimism, if you will, that there are definitely processes that can be made more efficient. And certainly, certainly, we see opportunity, potentially, even with some of the continuity of care issues that we're already seeing with the juvenile waivers from the chip changes already that went into effect, seeing AI benefit, some of those great. So yeah, we will, we will stay tuned like you, I'm sure. Professor, in closing out, are there any other thoughts that you would like to share with us or our leaders and the audience around the work that you do or the, the insight you have and, you know, the things you see coming on the horizon. We're turning to this pace for rational optimism. I'll tell you sooner or so, I emailed a friend of mine about some state and I said, hey, did you know, like probation is down 10% and you know, parole is down 20% and he's a long term reformer. And he will back up. He says, who cares? You know, probation is the bigger system, but you know, that parole thing and I said, I'm sorry. I had the numbers wrong. It is 20% probation, 10% parole and he said, that doesn't matter. You know, parole is the big thing because that means people have been in prison. And that kind of almost like aggressive despair can become true. I mean, you just start to heal hopeless and so I just noticed that and I've worked in a lot of your policies, but this one has the most of that. And part of what I was trying to write was not just for the public, but for people in reform to say, hey, this is the person who's we've had a long time. It is in fact smaller. There's a third of a million fewer people in prison while the country has grown dramatically. You know, that that changes lives, the changes community, the work you do matters reform matters, all the work you're trying to get state legislators to change the law, trying to change how police, you know, police communities work done to help people who are re-entering and trying to help them get back into, you know, connect to their families, connect to their communities, all that kind of stuff. It is making a difference. So don't despair. I'm not saying be happy, clapy, there's a lot of work in front of us. But, you know, to be rationally optimistic, the prison system is shrinking. It is, it is, I haven't been able to say that most of my life, it is shrinking a lot. And that's a credit to everybody, but keep your head up. That's important. Professor, I can't think of a better way to draw our conversation today to a close than some hope and not only the season we're in, but also the times that we're living in. I think that is more important than ever to close our conversation with hope. So, thank you so much for taking time to join us today to share more about your expertise, certainly for your contributions over the decades to the work. We look forward to continuing to partner with you when we're able and supporting the good work together. We want to thank our listeners for tuning in to this episode of Just Us Speaks. And we look forward to sharing space with each of you again very soon, wishing you all a great day. Thank you. And great to meet you guys.