We are still a year away from a very big anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but criminal justice fans can finb a lot to celebrate today on July 4, 2025. As I have been highlighting in many prior posts (eg, here and here), the first half of 2025 has continued, and has perhaps even accelerated, dramatic declines in homicides across the United States. Additional crime data suggest that all sorts of other crime rates are also trending in a terrific direction: this recent Substack post by Jeff Asher captures the story in its headline, “It’s Not Just Murder That’s Likely At Historic Lows; The US is on track to record the lowest violent crime rate since 1968 and lowest property crime rate ever.” Declining crime surely helps to advance, directly and indirectly, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for all Americans.
In addition, as detailed in this recent post, at least one thoughtfut anaylst has predicted that America’s prison population “is on track to fall to about 600,000 — a total decline of roughly 60 percent.” I am not at all certain that we are going to see such a dramatic decline in imprisonment in the US in the coming years, but I am certain that the nearly 25% decline in prison incarceration rates from 2009 to 2024 itself represents a remarkable development that suggests the era of mass incarcerations is in serious decline, if not quite entirely over. And declining imprisonment levels likely helps to advance, directly and indirectly, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for many Americans.
Linking these stories, if the US in 2025 and beyond can sustain historically low crime rates along with relatively low incarceration rates, there would be a basis to hope that the United States could trend toward low rates of incarceration in the second half of the 21st Century to rival those in the first three quarters of the 20th Century. Again, I am neither predicting nor expecting such developments, but I am eager to imagine celebrating in the years ahead even more and more Americans enjoying fully on this day their “unalienable Rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”