The funnel of unequal justice shows over 294,000 Black Americans would not be incarcerated if they were white.
In my last post, I show Black Americans were over twice as likely to be arrested than White Americans. But racial disparities persist beyond arrest to incarceration.
Combining data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program with the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Prisoners Statistics program, I find arrested Black Americans are nearly three times as likely to be incarcerated than white Americans. And as a percent of population, Black Americans have an incarceration rate more than five times higher than that of White Americans.
While reasonable people can disagree about the causes and remedies to these disparities, the data is unequivocal that there is a funnel of unequal justice where Black Americans are more likely to be arrested and more likely to be incarcerated than White Americans. Seven key findings below illustrate the extent of racial disparities in incarceration likelihood, rates, and effects.
1. In 2018, the last year of publicly available data, nearly a half million (465,200) Black Americans were incarcerated. Black Americans make up 33% of the prison population even though they are only 13% of the national population.
2. Black Americans who are arrested are nearly time mores (2.7x) more likely to end up in federal or state prison than White Americans. Using FBI arrests data as the opportunity for incarceration measure, Black Americans have a 22% likelihood of being imprisoned while white Americans have a 8% likelihood of being incarcerated upon arrest. In other words, more than 1 in 5 African Americans who are arrested are likely to end up in prison, compared to 1 in 12 white Americans.
3. If arrested Black Americans were incarcerated at the same rate as white Americans, there would be over 294,000 fewer Black Americans in prisons. That is more than the number of fans that fit in the fifteen largest NBA arenas.
4. Conversely, if White Americans were incarcerated at the same rate as Black Americans, there would be nearly an additional three quarters of a million incarcerated Whites (739,362). This is equivalent to the number of fans that would fit in the ten largest NFL stadiums.
5. Accounting for population, the incarceration rate of Black Americans is over five times (5.2x) higher than that of White Americans. The biggest discrepancy is among men. Black men are nearly six times more likely to be incarcerated (5.8x) than white men. The biggest racial discrepancy is among young men — 18 to 19 year old Black Americans are over twelve times (12.7x) to be incarcerated while 20 to 24 year old Black Americans are eight times more likely to be incarcerated.
6. The economic costs of incarceration is over six times (6.2x) greater on Black communities than White communities. The total cost of loss potential income from incarcerated Black Americans is over $19 billion, which is more than 1% of total black income. While the total costs of loss income from White Americans is over $30 billion, it is “just” equivalent to .2% of total white income.
7. The discrepancy in racial likelihood to be incarcerated cannot be explained by severity or type of crime at initial arrest alone. 7% of Black Americans arrests and 4% of White American arrests are for violent crime, a relative odds ratio of 1.6. 61% of Black Americans and 48% of White Americans in prison are sentenced for violent crimes, a relative odds ratio of 1.3. This is evidence against the hypothesis that Black Americans are more likely to be incarcerated because they commit more violent crimes since the relative odds ratios of arrests and incarceration are similar. Indeed, focusing on just male prisoners, research by the United States Sentencing Commission find that Black offenders receive longer prison sentences even after accounting for type of arrest and previous record of violence.