New York is "leading the nation with the lowest imprisonment rate of any large state”
More remarkably, as the crime and murder rates declined, so did the jail population. Currently, there are less than 6,000 people incarcerated—a reduction of 16,000 or 73% in the jail population. Clearly, NYC has shown that crime and jail populations can be drastically reduced at the same time. Both the current NYC murder rate (4.5 per 100,000) and the jail incarceration rate (66 per 100,000) are well below the national rates (6.5 murder and 192 jail rates). NYC also has one of the lowest incarceration rates for Black people in the nation. If the rest of the country could match New York City’s rates of Black Incarceration, the national jail population would decline by about 400,000 and there would be about 5,000 fewer murders per year.