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Dec 7, 2023 · The United States experienced a 25% decline in its prison population between 2009, its peak year, and 2021. 3 While all major racial and ethnic groups experienced decarceration, the Black prison population has downsized the most. 4 But with the prison population in 2021 nearly six times as large as 50 years ago and Black Americans still ...
- Overview
- Black People Were Overrepresented in Most Jails with Relevant Data
- Admissions and Length of Stay Disparities
- Similar Disparities Persist Across Additional Measures in The 3-County Analysis
- Conclusion
- Endnotes
The large growth of the United States’ criminal legal system in the late 20th century brought a widening racial gap in incarceration.1 By the year 2000, Black people made up almost half of the state prison population but only about 13% of the U.S.2 population. And although a wave of changes to sentencing and corrections policies over the past two d...
In 2022, Black people made up 12% of the local populations but 26% of the jail populations on average across the 595 jails from the JDI sample for which race data was available for the entire year. Of these jails, in almost 71% (421), the share of the jail population that was Black was at least twice that of the locality as a whole. (See Figure 1.)...
Admissions
For the 595 jails with racial data in the JDI sample, this analysis found highly disproportionate jail admissions by race. Black people were admitted at four times the rate of White people on average in 2022. (See Figure 3.) This finding is in line with the most recent national BJS data, which shows that Black people were incarcerated in jails at a rate 3.4 times that of White individuals as of June 2021.15 The three-county analysis using the DCJ data found similar admissions disparities. In...
Length of stay
Among White and Black individuals released from the 498 facilities with relevant data, the same share (54%) spent a week or less in jail in 2022. However, a greater share of Black people had spent more than three months in jail, and this gap widened from 2021 to 2022. (See Figure 4.) As a result, Black people spent about two weeks more in jail than White people on average in both years.17 Again, the data from the three counties was consistent with these national-level findings. As of 2019, Bl...
The greater detail available in the DCJ study, compared with the JDI data set, demonstrated racial and ethnic disparities in admissions and length of stay when examining other demographic and criminal legal variables, such as charge severity, sex, and age.
Overrepresentation of Black people in jails is a reflection of disproportionally higher admission rates and longer average lengths of stay for Black individuals than for their White or Hispanic counterparts. And these disparities persist across charge severity, age group, and sex, as well as other metrics. Additional data is needed to identify the ...
B. Drake, “Incarceration Gap Widens Between Whites and Blacks,” Pew Research Center (2013), https://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2013/09/06/incarceration-gap-between-whites-and-blacks-widens/.P. Guerio, P.M. Harrison, and W.J. Sabol, “Prisoners in 2010,” Bureau of Justice Statistics (2012), https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/p10.pdf; J. McKinnon, “Census 2000 Brief: The Black Populatio...A. Nellis, “The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons,” The Sentencing Project (2021), https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/The-Color-of-Justice-Racial-and...Z. Zeng, “Jail Inmates in 2021: Statistical Tables,” Bureau of Justice Statistics (2022), https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh336/files/media/document/ji21st.pdf.Oct 13, 2021 · According to the report, Black Americans are incarcerated at a state average of 1,240 per 100,000 residents, whereas Latino Americans are imprisoned at a rate of 349 per 100,000 residents. White ...
Oct 11, 2023 · The experience of imprisonment is concentrated among people with lower levels of education, wealth, and income but racial disparities in imprisonment exist across all socioeconomic groups. 23 In 2021, Black Americans were imprisoned at 5.0 times the rate of whites, while American Indians and Latinx people were imprisoned at 4.2 times and 2.4 ...
Feb 23, 2021 · The US is a leader in incarceration in the world. The next highest incarceration rate, in 2012 was Rwanda. The US incarceration rate in 2012 was 707 per 100,000. Rwanda is 492 per 100,000. Now I checked more recent statistics and I think El Salvador is now in the 590s and the US has dropped into the 690s. Still, that is a massive margin.
Oct 13, 2021 · The latest available data regarding people sentenced to state prison reveal that Black Americans are imprisoned at a rate that is roughly five times the rate of white Americans. During the present era of criminal justice reform, not enough emphasis has been focused on ending racial and ethnic disparities systemwide.
Apr 30, 2019 · Another way of considering racial and ethnic differences in the nation’s prison population is by looking at the imprisonment rate, which tallies the number of prisoners per 100,000 people. In 2017, there were 1,549 black prisoners for every 100,000 black adults – nearly six times the imprisonment rate for whites (272 per 100,000) and nearly ...
