Tracking the Causes and Consequences of Racial Disparities in Imprisonment

The project has two goals. First, it seeks to explain both the overall trend of rising imprisonment and rising racial disparities in imprisonment, and geographic and temporal differences in these trends. Official data sets on arrests, imprisonment, and social, economic, and demographic factors are merged to create a new longitudinal data set that permits the researchers to control for current and previous reported crimes and race-specific arrest rates as well as social factors in predicting imprisonment rates. Cross-sectionally, the most serious crime is found to account for very little of the racial disparity in prison admissions: differential arrest rates and differential prison/arrest ratios in drug offenses and property crimes account for the majority of imprisonment disparity. The research seeks to determine the factors that lead to high enforcement levels against African Americans for drug offenses and lower-level offenses, testing hypotheses that this enforcement arises as a reaction to prior elevated levels of serious violent crimes, to increasing in-migration or integration of minorities with whites, to exogenous macroeconomic or political factors that affect crime or policing, or to "shocks" such as drug panics. Secondly, it seeks to identify the consequences of high rates of imprisonment of African Americans, testing the hypotheses that, net of controls, black imprisonment rates adversely affects black economic well-being and family stability in a manner that indirectly contribute to increasing crime rates. These hypotheses are tested with a longitudinal analysis of a new county-level data set created by merging existing public data sets. The research is guided by an integrated theoretical schema of the relation among crime, law enforcement, political processes, racial segregation and racial discrimination, and social and economic well-being. It recognizes that law enforcement is never a simple mechanical response to crime, but is always politically influenced. This research suggests ways in which political processes may respond to social, economic, and demographic factors as well as to crime and the internal logic of politics in influencing crime enforcement. It emphasizes that "crime" must not be viewed as a single entity, but as a set of types of crimes which have different kinds of relationships to social and economic factors, to political factors, and to law enforcement, and specifically problematizes the relationship between criminal justice responses to lower-level offenses and rates of serious crimes. It addresses the paradox that the size of the black population positively affects the level of police resources and white fear of …