Where did everyone go? “Baby Bust” affects both prison population and college enrollment

Someone once told me if you build a prison, it will fill up. Conversely, if a prison is full, criminals will be let out.

From this it is easy to conclude that a person who normally would be free might get locked up, and a person who normally would be jailed might go free.

Both are frightening thoughts. Neither says much about justice.

More frightening is the widely known but often ignored fact that the United States puts more people behind bars than any other nation. That figure is about 2 million.

The U.S. population has increased by about one-third since 1980, but the federal prison population has grown by about 800 percent.

Yet we still call ourselves the land of the free.

So it goes. I wish I understood why. I wish there was someone who could explain these problems and come up with a method to reverse them.

Well, sometimes things reverse themselves.

A recent story that was basically overlooked said that the federal prison population has declined by 4,800 inmates. This is the first decline in a decade. And it turns out that the populations in state and county lockups have been dropping for the past five years.

“Our new projections anticipate that the number of federal inmates will fall by just over 2,000 in the next 12 months — and by almost 10,000 in the year after,” said Attorney General Eric Holder “This is nothing less than historic.”

Fine, but no one explained why.

It is doubtful our government has the ability to stop crime. Government can take credit for it, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. After crime dropped years ago, improvements in law enforcement were credited. Later, under the category of Freakanomics, it was determined that the drop in crime occurred about 18 years after the legalization of abortion. This means that there was was less crime because fewer criminals were born.

It was that simple.

Abortion may not be behind these new figures, but fewer criminals being born may be.
A running demographic trend called the “baby bust” has now caused a decline in the number of young adults, the same people who commit most crimes. A bad economy, it seems, affects childbirth, and the economy hasn’t been good for quite some time. It is said that the recession of 2008 alone resulted in a half million fewer births.

I’m familiar with the baby bust because I’ve seen its impact on higher education. With fewer students of college age, enrollments are declining at colleges and universities across the nation.

“They can’t go to college if they haven’t been born,” one educator explained.

In 1900, Mark Twain looked for some linkage between crime and education and said, “Every time you close a school, you have to build a jail.” While the reserve could be true, new colleges aren’t needed right now because of the enrollment decline. But because of the savings from the decline in prison population – the feds spend $80 billion a year on incarceration — money could be available to help students with tuition.

What a great nation ours would be if, like some others, we made it easy and cheap for young people to get an education. But we still would have the empty prisons and we’ll need to figure out what to do with them.

Maybe we can just let them rot. They can become sad displays of a culture that with a blind eye created and nourished the darker side of humanity. But a demographic bump doesn’t permanently correct a problem. So a better idea might be to turn the prisons into factories, which will improve the economy, which will increase the birth rate, which will create more crime, which will require more prisons. At that point, we can close the factories, open the prisons, and wait for economy to go bad and the birth rate to drop again.

That sounds so right it has got to be wrong. But I’m not hearing much better from the experts. Do you think we can put a little pressure on them? Or should we just wait until everything fixes itself? Actually, this seems much more likely.

By Lanny Morgnanesi

Tags: baby bust, birth rates, college enrollment, declining prison population, freakanomics, prison, prison population