Mass Incarceration and Race

Understanding the Racial Injustice

Background

The rise in incarceration that has come to be known as mass imprisonment began in 1973 and can be attributed to three major eras of policy making, all of which had a disparate impact on people of color, especially African Americans. Until 1986, a series of policies was enacted to expand the use of imprisonment for a variety of felonies. After this point, the focus moved to greater levels of imprisonment for drug and sex offenses. There was a particularly sharp growth in state imprisonment for drug offenses between 1987 and 1991. In the final stage, beginning around 1995, the emphasis was on increasing both prison likelihood and significantly lengthening prison sentences. Harsh drug laws are clearly an important factor in the persistent racial and ethnic disparities observed in state prisons. For drug crimes disparities are especially severe, due largely to the fact that blacks are nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested for drug offenses and 2.5 times as likely to be arrested for drug possession. This is despite the evidence that whites and blacks use drugs at roughly the same rate. From 1995 to 2005, African Americans comprised approximately 13 percent of drug users but 36% of drug arrests and 46% of those convicted for drug offenses.

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Race and Ethnicity

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Since the majority of people in prison are sentenced at the state level rather than the federal level, it is important to understand the variation in racial and ethnic make-up across states, and the policies  that contribute to this variance. Incarceration creates multiple consequences that include restricted employment opportunities, housing instability, family disruption, and disenfranchisement. These consequences set individuals back by imposing new punishments after prison. These consequences are felt disproportionately by people of color, and because of concentrations of poverty and imprisonment in certain jurisdictions, it is now the case that entire communities experience these negative effects.

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The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that 35% of state prisoners are white, 38% are black, and 21% are Hispanic. In twelve states more than half of the prison population is African American. Though the reliability of data on ethnicity is not as strong as it is for race estimates, the Hispanic population in state prisons is as high as 61% in New Mexico and 42% in both Arizona and California. In an additional seven states, at least one in five inmates is Hispanic.

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What Drives Disparity?

The particular factors that drive disparity may be related to policy, offending, implicit bias, or some combination. Regardless of the causes, the simple fact of these disparities should be disturbing given the consequences for individuals, families, and communities. One has to wonder whether there would have been more of an urgency to understand and remedy the disparity directly had the ratios been reversed. While chronic racial and ethnic disparity in imprisonment has been a known feature of the prison system for many decades, there has been relatively little serious consideration of adjustments that can be made— inside or outside the justice system—toward changing this pattern. Racial disparities in incarceration can arise from a variety of circumstances. These might include a high rate of black incarceration, a low rate of white incarceration, or varying combinations. We note that the states with the highest ratio of disparity in imprisonment are generally those in the northeast or upper Midwest, while Southern states tend to have lower ratios. The low Southern ratios are generally produced as a result of high rates of incarceration for all racial groups.

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Sources:

Bureau of Justice Statistics Home page. (n.d.). Retrieved December 20, 2017, from https://bjs.gov/

Foster, H., & Hagan, J. (2009). The Mass Incarceration of Parents in America: Issues of Race/ Ethnicity, Collateral Damage to Children, and Prisoner Reentry. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 623(1), 179-194. doi:10.1177/0002716208331123

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​Rabuy, P. W. (n.d.). Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2017. Retrieved December 20, 2017, from https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2017.html

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