I’ve been following this page since the aughts. Sadly, the BJS and the CIA factbook don’t chart it out so conveniently, and I’m looking as a layfolk researcher. Would love to have Langley’s data, though.

Re: Suicide rates and guns, in the 2010s guns counted for about half of the successful suicides. Now the non-gun successful suicide rate is higher. The pre-Trump CDC got better at tracking failed suicides and estimates them higher than they used to (suicides, successful or not, much like sexual assault and harassment, go unreported at a conspicuously high rate, so we have to guess how many there really are based on how many we find. This happens a lot, such as officer-involved homicide. As one of the 13 million (per year) that seriously considers suicide, I keep track of this, and it started rising fast after 2016. Conspicuously so did hate crimes.

Re: the for-profit industrial prison complex. Again, even after Trump’s first term, most penitentiaries were state-controlled (the big for-profit market was in immigrant detention centers in Trump’s first term). There was still an industrial complex in the eighties, which profited from prisons getting built which was the stronger promoter of tough on crime (tough on poor people) legislation. But in 2025 the choice is to bring down the industrial complexes that fuel conservative fascist autocratic politics, or expect yourself and everyone you know to end up in a work camp, at least until it becomes a death camp (once the network of concentration camps becomes too expensive to maintain).

Re: Serial killers

I bring them up only because this one of the common argument that comes from the right when discussing police reduction or abolition. The questions are like this:

• Q: What about [non-white] feral teens A: They don’t exist. A lot of violent dysfunctional teens can be retrained to be functional and non-violent if retrained with routine, tradition and remedial education programs, which work way better than Juvies or just shooting them. Juvenile Penitentiaries often have higher rates of abuse and violence (coming from the staff) than prisons for adult inmates. Also there are lots of crimes for which kids can go to prison that are not crimes (or lesser infractions) for adults. Teen violent mental health patients that can only be contained are extremely rare.
• Q: What about [non-white] street gangs A: The small ones develop as neighborhood watches – often against over-policing by county and state law enforcement from outside the community, which commonly respond slowly to major crime, yet harass citizens and raid homes. Gangs form to protect the community from law enforcement, to preserve order and to protect from rival gangs. Gang activity lowers when city responders are, well, responsive to calls in the neighborhood, especially when services are offered that are not law enforcement officers eager to shoot things. Several counties (Oakland, CA comes to mind) have expanded their list of responders to include mental health teams and wellness check teams to direct transients and homeless to services. This is the defund the police movement in action, though it’s developing slowly, since police departments with army-sized budgets don’t like having their funding reduced.
• Q: What about serial killers A: These exist, but they’re very rare, and are only of public interest due to the true-crime media that emerges from their actions. They number in the dozens where US inmates number in the millions, and < checking > and the US has a an incarceration rate exceeded only by (in order, top to bottom) El Salvador (home of CECOT), Cuba, Rwanda and Turkmenistan. And these figures do not include detention of immigrants sans due process as is happening in the US.