Federal prison population, thanks in part to the FIRST STEP Act, hits lowest level in over 15 years

Every Thursday morning, one can see at this webpage an official refreshed count of the total number of federal inmates as calculated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. That page also has a chart and data on the total number of federal inmates for each fiscal year going back to 1980. A quick look at these data reveal that in FY 2013, the federal prison population hit a modern high of 219,298.

But this morning, we were down to "only" 177,619 inmates.  I put "only" in quotes because back in 1980, we had truly only 24,640 federal prisoners. But the last time there were fewer prisoners than this morning in federal facilities was way back in FY 2003. So I think it is quite notable and exciting to see such a decline over the last six years after such enormous growth the previous 33.

I have been following these numbers closely for a number of years, and I have been especially focused on week-to-week changes during the years of the Trump Administration because I feared that an uptick in federal prosecutions and various new sentencing directive begun under then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions might reverse the trend of prison population reduction that started during the second part of the Obama Administration.  But it seems that a lot of forces worked in various ways to kept the federal prison population at just over 180,000 inmates for much of the last three years.  And now, thanks to the FIRST STEP Act's "good time fix" finally kicking in, we are this week significantly below that 180,000 inmate threshold.

I would love to be able to predict that the FIRST STEP Act will ensure that the federal prison population keeps going down, but I am not sure that would be a sound prediction.  It is possible that the continued robust implementation of various components of the FIRST STEP Act will keep the downward trends moving.  But continued increases in the number of cases prosecutors by the Justice Department could get us back to an era of federal prison population growth (though that growth would likely be relatively modest).