COVID-19 amplified racial disparities in the U.S. criminal legal system

  1. Brennan Klein
  2. C. Brandon Ogbunugafor
  3. Benjamin J. Schafer
  4. Zarana Bhadricha
  5. Preeti Kori
  6. Jim Sheldon
  7. Nitish Kaza
  8. Arush Sharma
  9. Emily A. Wang
  10. Tina Eliassi-Rad
  11. Samuel V. Scarpino
  12. Elizabeth Hinton

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Abstract

The criminal legal system in the United States drives an incarceration rate that is the highest on the planet, with disparities by class and race among its signature features [1–3]. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of incarcerated people in the U.S. decreased by at least 17%—the largest, fastest reduction in prison population in American history [4]. In this study, we ask how this reduction influenced the racial com-position of U.S. prisons, and consider possible mechanisms for these dynamics. Using an original dataset curated from public sources on prison demographics across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, we show that incarcerated white people benefited disproportionately from the decrease in the U.S. prison population, and that the fraction of incarcerated Black and Latino people sharply increased. This pattern of increased racial disparity exists across prison systems in nearly every state and reverses a decades-long trend before 2020 and the onset of COVID-19, when the proportion of incarcerated white people was increasing amid declining numbers of incarcerated Black people [5]. Although a variety of factors underlie these trends, we find that racial inequities in average sentence length are a major contributor. Ultimately, this study reveals how disruptions caused by COVID-19 exacer-bated racial inequalities in the criminal legal system, and highlights key forces that sustain mass incarceration.

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  1. Version published to 10.1101/2021.12.14.21267199v3 on medRxiv
  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.12.14.21267199v2 on medRxiv
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    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.12.14.21267199: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

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    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

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    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

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    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

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  4. Version published to 10.1101/2021.12.14.21267199v1 on medRxiv