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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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over 9% of males can expect to be imprisoned in their lifetime

Wow, I would not have guessed. See source here, including racial breakdown: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/Llgsfp.pdf

But, do note that the above is 1997 report using 1991 data. I believe rates are up since then, though, so I don't mean to disagree with your point.

Your data doesn't appear to include local jails, as ireally suggests below. However, rates are not up since 1991, which is at the top or end, depending on the particular stat, of the big crime peak - rates of homicide, property crime, etc have significantly decreased since then, even including the post 2020 spike

In what is my new favorite excuse, ChatGPT told me wrongly, my apologies. Checking Wikipedia (ironically, given how often we were told not to do that at first), per capita peaked in ~2008 (including local jails).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate#Growth_and_Subsequent_Decline


year  total         per-100k

1940	0,264,834	201

1950	0,264,620	176

1960	0,346,015	193

1970	0,503,586	161

1980	0,503,586	220

1985	0,744,208	311

1990	1,148,702	457

1995	1,585,586	592

2000	1,937,482	683

2002	2,033,022	703

2004	2,135,335	725

2006	2,258,792	752

2008	2,307,504	755

2010	2,270,142	731

2012	2,228,424	707

2014	2,217,947	693

2016	2,157,800	666

2018	2,102,400	642

2020	1,675,400	505

Wikipedia is almost always a better source - in the sense of usefulness and accuracy of the information - than something like (not implying these are the same) nyt/cnn/nypost/local news, or even worse a popular random website, even if that random website is from "harvard" or something. It's a worse source than a paper / dataset / article in a trade publication / review article in the field, but those are hard to interpret if you're not familiar with them.