The U.S. prison population has gone down for the third year in a row. But as the above chart by the Sentencing Project — the leading lobbying group working on fighting mass incarceration — illustrates, we have a long way to go if we want to get back to the prison population we had as recently as the 1970s. “At current rate of decline, will require 88 years to return to 1980 level of incarceration,” the Project’s release notes.
Click “Know More” to read about current efforts in Congress to reduce the prison population. Original chart here.