US federal prison population

It is a curious fact, and one that ought to trouble us more than it apparently does, that as Americans have been released from federal prisons at an accelerating rate over the past decade, they have compensated almost perfectly by purchasing board games at an accelerating rate. One might imagine that these two populations—the incarcerated and the leisure-game-consuming—would be entirely distinct, operating in different economies, different moral universes, different corners of human experience altogether. And yet the correlation between them is so tight (negative 0.955, for those keeping track) that if you'd plotted one against the other, you might have concluded they were the same dataset viewed in a mirror. The universe does enjoy its jokes, though they tend to be told in whispers.

The actual culprit, we suspect, is economic expansion and contraction working like a vast puppet master on both trends. Between 2015 and 2023, the US experienced a long recovery from the financial crisis, followed by pandemic collapse, then stimulus-fueled rebound—and this economic weather affected both criminal justice policy and discretionary consumer spending simultaneously. When money loosens and unemployment falls, judges sentence fewer people to federal time, and also, mysteriously, families find themselves with both the disposable income and the psychological need for a Tuesday night around the Catan board. The board game market grew from roughly $1.5 billion to over $5 billion in this period—a tripling that feels abstract until you consider it means roughly 100 million boxes moving into American homes while 30,000 fewer people occupied federal cells.

What we're witnessing, then, is not causation but a kind of economic shadow play, where two entirely unrelated human activities dance together because they're both responding to the same invisible orchestra. The prison population and the board game market are correlated for the same reason your left foot and right foot move in sync while walking—not because one causes the other, but because both are being directed by something upstream. We remain baffled but slightly less confident in our ability to spot real causation.