Abstract
The proportion of U.S. prison inmates who were black increased dramatically between 1940 and 2000. While about two-thirds of the increase occurred between 1940 and 1970, most recent research analyzes the period after 1970, focusing on explanations such as the war on drugs, law-and-order politics, discrimination, inequality, and racial threat. We analyze the growth in the racial difference in incarceration between 1940 and 1980, focusing on the role of demographic processes, particularly population growth, migration, and urbanization. We implement three analyses to assess the role of these demographic processes: (1) a simple accounting model that decomposes the national trend into population growth, changes in arrests, and changes in sentencing; (2) a model of state variation in incarceration that decomposes the racial difference in incarceration into population change, migration between states with different incarceration rates, and other processes; and (3) race-specific models of within-state variation in incarceration rates using state characteristics coupled with a decomposition of the role of changes in state characteristics.
Highlights
The U.S criminal justice system is said to be in a period of “mass imprisonment” that began in the mid-1970s and incarcerates more than one in 100 American adults [1,2,3,4]. important and frequently commented on is the fact that the current U.S prison population is overwhelmingly, disproportionately black
Using data from the 1970s to the 1990s, Jacobs and his colleagues have argued that the rise of law-and-order politics by the Republican party has contributed to increased incarceration of minorities, showing that Republican strength is related to state variation in black incarceration rates and local variation in racial differences in sentencing [2,41,46,63,64,65]
Glancing ahead to Models 5 and 6, we see that these results are robust to further controls for political context and segregation. These results suggest that processes of black population growth, urbanization, and migration played important roles in the trend in the racial difference in incarceration between 1940 and 1980
Summary
The U.S criminal justice system is said to be in a period of “mass imprisonment” that began in the mid-1970s and incarcerates more than one in 100 American adults [1,2,3,4]. In 1926, only 21% of the individuals sentenced to state or federal prison were black, but by the 1990s the comparable figure was over 50% [7] This dramatic increase in the incarceration of African Americans occurred during a period that witnessed considerable improvements in their social and economic status, including gains in income, occupational position, and education [8,9,10]. In order to further understand racial changes in incarceration, we model black and white incarceration rates over time using state fixed effects and time-varying state characteristics by race, including demographic and economic composition, population growth, migration, urbanization, political context, and segregation. We motivate our analysis by arguing that the United States experienced considerable population growth, migration, and urbanization during the 1940–1980 period, all of which varied by race, these factors have not been previously considered as explanations for changes in incarceration rates. We conclude by summarizing the results and discussing their implications
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