Abstract
Do large racial and ethnic disparities in prison populations reflect systematic racial and policy discrimination in the criminal justice system, or do they reflect disproportionate involvement of blacks and Hispanics in “serious” or street crime? Our investigation of this question keys off the approach initiated by Alfred Blumstein is his pioneering studies on the topic. While yielding important findings, there are, however, substantial gaps in the empirical literature on the racial disproportionality issue. We attempt to fill those gaps by (1) using both data on prison admission as well as in-stock prison populations, (2) presenting more recent racially and ethnically disaggregated arrest and incarceration data from Pennsylvania for 2003–2007, and (3) including Hispanic offenders in our racial and ethnic disproportionality comparisons. Our results indicate, first, that the representation of blacks, whites, and Hispanics among offenders admitted to state prison and in the prison population corresponds closely to their representation in arrest statistics. Second, using arrests as a marker of violent offending, the overrepresentation of blacks among offenders admitted to state prisons occurs because they commit a disproportionate number of frequently imprisoned (i.e., violent) crimes. Third, for those offenses where there is a within-race difference between arrest and incarceration representation, Hispanics experience the greatest disadvantage. Fourth, failing to account for Hispanics in white and black estimates tends to inflate white proportions and deflate black proportions of arrests, admissions, and prison population estimates, masking the “true” black and white racial disproportionality. We conclude that while there is a need for continued concern with possible racial discrimination in justice system processing, this concern should not distract attention from what arguably is the more important matter—ameliorating the social environmental conditions that foster disproportionate minority (especially black) involvement in violent crime.
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Notes
The Pennsylvania arrest data include total counts for each of the index offenses by (1) racial group (white, black, Asian/Pacific Islander, Native American) and (2) ethnicity (Hispanic, non-Hispanic). This separate, twofold enumeration allows us to calculate race/ethnic-disaggregated arrest counts (mutually exclusive white, black, and Hispanic) using a simple two-stage procedure. First, we calculate the number of Hispanic arrests, which are white-Hispanics and black-Hispanics. For this, we multiply the total Hispanic arrests (HAij) provided in the PA data by the year-specific proportions of the state Hispanic population that are white- and black-Hispanic, respectively (PHjr). Roughly 87% of Hispanics in Pennsylvania are classified as white-Hispanics, 11% as black-Hispanics, and the remaining 2% as other-Hispanics. Second, we subtract the white-Hispanic and black-Hispanic arrest counts from the original (“confounded”) white and black arrest counts (U ijr) to yield “true” white, black, and Hispanic arrest counts (A ijr), which are mutually exclusive of one another. This is summarized in the following formula:
\( A_{\text{ijr}} = U_{\text{ijr}} - ({\text{HA}}_{\text{ij}} \times {\text{PH}}_{\text{jr}} ), \) where i is the offense, j is the year, and r is the race-group (white or black).
Our admissions estimates include race/ethnic counts of admissions into state prisons with a sentence of at least 2 years. We also replicated the analysis using 1 year as the cutoff (see Blumstein 1982; Langan 1985), with the results closely paralleling those reported using the 2-year cutoff. In Pennsylvania, a sentence of two or more years is viewed as a “state prison” sentence, whereas as sentence of less than 2 years is a “county jail” sentence.
Blumstein’s (1982) arrest counts/rates combine whites and white-Hispanics, and it is unclear whether his incarceration data also confound Hispanics with white and black counts.
One possible alternative to using absolute deviations in racial proportions (RP’s) is to calculate the percentage change. If a group’s arrest and incarceration RP’s are small, the same absolute within-race deviation would represent a greater proportional difference than if that group’s RP’s were large. However, estimates of the percentage change in RP’s are substantively difficult to interpret since they are essentially proportions of proportions (i.e., the proportion change in the racial proportion of arrest rates). Thus, we rely upon the absolute value of within-race deviations, though supplementary analysis using the percentage change in arrest and incarceration RP’s with a cutoff value of 10% (available from authors) do not change our substantive results.
Our argument here is that findings from prior research comparing the white-black gap in arrests to the white-black gap in incarcerations (either admissions or in-stock) may be misleading because Hispanics are combined with whites and blacks (mostly whites). Given that Hispanic offending and incarceration rates are somewhere between whites and blacks, this has the effect of significantly inflating the white arrest and incarceration rates while simultaneously lowering the black arrest and incarceration rates (though the decline is small). As a result, the white-black gap in both arrests and incarceration will appear narrower than if Hispanics are excluded from white and black estimates (see the supplementary analysis).
It is interesting to note that there is no meaningful change for homicide between arrest and incarceration RPs for any race-group. Given the seriousness of homicide, it is reasonable to assume that the criminal justice system has little room for the use of discretion resulting in little or no disproportionality.
As already discussed, our arrest data are adjusted using a two-stage procedure in order to produce white and black counts/rates, which are not confounded by Hispanics. On the other hand, our admissions and in-stock data are disaggregated by (1) offense and (2) race/ethnicity. As such, they are already purged of the confounding effect of Hispanics. In order to calculate “confounded” estimates for admissions and in-stock populations to compare to “confounded” arrest estimates, we reversed the procedure used to produce “true” arrest estimates. This entailed (1) calculating the Hispanic admissions/prisoners that were white-Hispanic and black-Hispanic and (2) adding them to the non-Hispanic white and non-Hispanic black counts, respectively (detailed description available from authors).
Some have speculated that the issue of intra- versus inter-racial offending and “victim discounting” may affect disproportionality by masking post-arrest bias when the victim is of the same race as the offender. We are unaware of any data that would allow us (or anyone else) to directly examine this as it relates to race-specific discrepancies from arrest to incarceration.
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Harris, C.T., Steffensmeier, D., Ulmer, J.T. et al. Are Blacks and Hispanics Disproportionately Incarcerated Relative to Their Arrests? Racial and Ethnic Disproportionality Between Arrest and Incarceration. Race Soc Probl 1, 187–199 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-009-9019-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-009-9019-x