The plummeting U.S. prison admission rate, in one stunning chart

last updated 8 January 2015

By taking the annual intake of prisoners and dividing by population, Keith Humphreys has made an incredible chart:

What's the story? Crime has been falling fast for over 20 years, for one. Second is the sheer size of the prison population, which is still so mind-bogglingly huge that growth was becoming very hard to sustain (and to be clear, America still has the highest incarceration rate in the world). A third reason, and one which isn't as appreciated, is a movement among conservatives to reform our prisons, in large part because of their sheer expense.

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Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.