a public defender

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Via SL & P, the Justice Policy Institute has released this new report, which finally gets close what I’ve been looking for for quite a while now. A study that examines incarceration rates to see whether there is a racial bias in who gets sent to jail and who doesn’t.

The study found that counties with higher poverty rates, larger African-American populations and larger police or judicial budgets imprison people for drug offenses at higher rates than counties without these characteristics. These relationships were found to be independent of whether the county actually had a higher rate of crime. (The findings for the 198 counties.)

Among some of the findings:

• In 2002, there were 19.5 million illicit drug users, 1.5 million drug arrests, and 175,000 people admitted to prison for a drug offense. While African Americans and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates, African Americans are ten times more likely than whites to be imprisoned for drug offenses.
• Of the 175,000 admitted to prison nationwide in 2002, over half were African American, despite the fact that African Americans make up less than 13 percent of the U.S. population.

There is an interactive map by county here and the full report can be accessed here.