Race, economy and punishment: inequity and racial disparity in imprisonment, 1972–2002

Abstract

Guided by the Rusche and Kirchheimer thesis, this study examines variation in incarceration rates across states. Time-series regression analysis is applied to 30 years of state-level data to examine how economic factors interact with aggregate measures of race/ethnicity in predicting rates of incarceration. The analysis indicates that income inequality, not unemployment, is the most salient predictor of incarceration rates. That is, state-level measures of income inequality exert a strong, positive effect on state-level incarceration rates, and this effect is particularly salient in the presence of higher percentages of African-Americans.

Pro Life until Birth: Race as a Primary Driver of State Abortion and Concurrent Natalist Policy

“…According to The Sentence Project (2017), black men are six times as likely to be arrested as white men and 60% of prisoners today are black men. Research on imprisonment from 1972-2002 shows that the rate of all African-Americans ending up in prison was seven times higher than whites (Jackson, 2014).…”