This strikes me as a good visualization that we misframe things when we talk about STATES decarcerating. It's really certain counties. And it isn't just that it's the big ones (that's ... unavoidable), but DISPROPORTIONATELY the big ones.
And in some states, ONLY the big ones.
Tennessee is a great example of this. Tennessee, as a state, has seen its overall prison population decline since 2009.
But most counties (the blue dots) have MORE total people to prison in 2019 than 2009. The two big urban counties are doing almost ALL the work.
Texas has so many tiny counties that it helps to look at both the state as a whole and just the small counties.
Same general pattern: the big counties are doing all the work, while lots of the smaller ones are getting more punitive both relatively AND absolutely.
Texas often holds itself up as a state-wide success story, and a Red State one at that.
Given denser places tend to be more Democratic, betting when I plot county results against general Democratic vote-share, we'll see that the bluer counties have driven this Red State story.
None of this is to say that state-level reforms are irrelevant. But worth noting that in at least some of the states with the most-touted state-level reforms, it looks like local decisions are really driving the "state" story.
Meant to add: all four of the states in the first tweet were chosen bc their state-level prison pops fell from 2009-2019. They all have that in common.
Oh! This could be even more important. Here are some states that saw net INCREASES from 2009-19.
They look... almost exactly the same as decliners (except NE).
Which means: the diff between rising and falling is often whether urbans shrink fast enough to offset non-urban rises.
In other words, efforts to tell a story about why "Tennessee" saw prison pops shrink while "Washington" saw them rise miss the fact that... trends were pretty similar between them.
Just... netted out differently.
That's obviously a bit of an oversimplification, of course, but... it's getting at something real, too.
Our efforts to explain state differences should probably focus more on why urban counties in TN offset rural counties better than those in WA.
That's a MUCH diff framing.
Adding this other thread here: the politics of the counties:
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