By Keith Humphreys

Keith Humphreys is a psychiatry professor at Stanford University.

The U.S. imprisonment rate has been shrinking for six years, but the change has been uneven across generations. Despite criminal behavior typically peaking in young adulthood, the young rather than the old are driving the nation’s ongoing de-incarceration.

Over the most recent decade of state prison data analyzed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the inmate population aged even faster than the graying U.S. general population. The imprisonment rate for people ages 55 and older bucked the broader de-incarceration trend by jumping a startling 71 percent.

Adults younger than 30 in contrast were far less likely to be imprisoned in 2013 than was the case a decade ago. If the entire population had experienced the same change, states would be shuttering empty prisons coast to coast. This good news about young American adults is paralleled in other studies showing that they are far less likely to get arrested than were young adults of prior generations.

Multiple factors account for the rising proportion of older Americans in prison. First, ever the trendsetters, baby boomers are somewhat more criminally active in late life than were previous generations. Second, the many state-level reforms designed to reduce incarceration were implemented long after the “tough on crime” era in which many older inmates were given protracted sentences. Third, older convicted criminals by definition have had more time than younger ones to accrue long criminal records, which often leads judges to mete out longer sentences for a particular offense.

Because prisons are legally responsible for providing health care to inmates, the aging of the prison population could strain their budgets despite the decline in the imprisonment rate. On the other hand, elderly, severely ill inmates pose minimal risk to public safety and thus …read more

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By Christopher Ingraham

A little more than one-third of Americans told Gallup in 2006 that they “usually” celebrate Halloween by carving a pumpkin. And, if Google search data is to be believed, some of us have a more natural knack for making faces out of orange gourds than others.

Consider the map below. It plots the relative volume of searches for the phrase “how to carve a pumpkin” between 2004 and 2016.

That phrase is a pretty useful proxy for pumpkin-carving ineptitude: search it yourself, and you can see the top results include how-to’s from the likes of Martha Stewart (“Tip: Prevent exposed areas of the pumpkin’s flesh from turning brown by applying a film of Vaseline”), extremepumpkins.com (“I personally use power tools and extreme techniques, but many of the methods that I use to carve pumpkins apply to anyone”), and the New York Times (“An annual tradition like carving a jack-o’-lantern can become a mindful moment by cultivating what is known as beginner’s mind”).

In other words, people Googling “how to carve a pumpkin” need help with the basic mechanics of the task, like stabbing, cutting and the scooping-out of guts.

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According to Google, the states most lacking in this fundamental knowledge are clustered mostly in the South — Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi all lead the nation in how-to pumpkin carving searches. North Dakota and Hawaii also stand out as places with a relatively high interest in pumpkin tutorials.

On the flip …read more

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