The other day on Facebook, my Jacobin colleague
Connor Kilpatrick posted an excerpt from an interview with
prison scholar Marie Gottschalk. Gottschalk has a new book out called Caught:
The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics that looks to
be very much worth reading.
In the interview, she points out how, despite large racial
disparities in incarceration rates, even whites in America are imprisoned at
far higher rates than the populations of most other rich countries.
Gottschalk is right. Which
reminded me of something that came up during the Charlie Hebdo debate. Some people at the time were
circulating articles reporting that 60% or 70% of French prisoners are Muslims. In fact, these were basically guesses since France doesn't collect data on the
religious affiliations of detainees. (Which doesn't necessarily mean they're
wrong).
The argument went that by comparing those stats with analogous U.S. figures it could be said that the "racial" bias against Muslims in the French criminal justice system is even worse than the bias against blacks in the U.S.
So I went
looking for actual stats on French prisoners, and compared them with U.S. data.
Here's what it looks like:
It turns out it's true -- the black-white incarceration ratio in
the U.S. is lower than the North African immigrant-native ratio in
France. But that's only because so few native French are in prison.
Which
raises a larger issue.
I remembered finding something surprising in the U.S. stats when I
looked at them a while ago. It turns out that the smallest racial
disparities in U.S. imprisonment rates are in the Deep South, while the largest
are in states like New Jersey and Connecticut. Not quite what you'd expect, right?
What to make of that surprising fact? I have no problem believing that
the New Jersey and Connecticut justice systems are racist. What I
find hard to believe is that those in Alabama and Mississippi are far less racist.
So after looking at the French numbers, I decided to do a little
statistical analysis. I found that the degree of racial disparity in U.S.
states' incarceration rates is almost entirely a function of how low the
white rate is. It's completely unrelated to how high the black
rate is. (R-squared is 54% for the white rate, 5% for the black rate.)
Racial disparity in overall incarceration, it seems, is a pretty
useless way to measure the bias of a criminal justice system. What seems to be
the case, rather, is that the more punitive a justice system gets, the more the
experience of incarceration starts to affect people outside the very
lowest ranks of society.
The result is a paradox: the higher a state's overall
incarceration rate, the smaller the racial disparity. Here's what
that looks like:
So suppose, tomorrow, the government were to blindly adopt an
across-the-board cut in statutory sentencing standards for every crime. The
result would surely be a massive drop in incarceration, for both blacks and
whites. But also, it seems, a big increase in the level of racial disparity.
Food for thought.
