Monday Research Seminar Series 

March 3, Al Blumstein

Noon, Hamburg Hall, Room 1502

On the Racial Disproportionality of US Prison Populations

One of the most troubling aspects of incarceration in the United States is the large racial disproportionality of prison populations. Today, the ratio of black-to-white incarceration rates is about 8:1. In many quarters, that ratio has been seen as a manifestation of gross racial discrimination in the criminal justice system.

In earlier work, I have shown that one can account for 80% of that disproportionality through race differences in the involvement in the kinds of crimes that lead to incarceration. That estimate was developed initially before the initiation of the massive incarceration associated with the “war on drugs”, which reduced that accountability to 76%.

In current work, I am examining this pattern by individual states and crime types to develop insights into differences across the states in their punishment patterns.