The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have reversed a promising trend in the racial makeup of U.S. prisoners. In recent years, Black people have comprised a smaller percentage of the incarcerated population than in decades past. But in 2020, the percentage of Black people behind bars increased slightly, despite a sharp decline in the overall prisoner population, according to a new study.
The finding, based on a large data set of U.S. prison populations and published today in Nature, suggests the pandemic may have modestly exacerbated racial disparities in the criminal justice system by disadvantaging Black prisoners. The reason may be that they have traditionally been given longer sentences for their crimes.
The work is “remarkable,” says Jessica Eaglin, an expert in sentencing law and policy at the Indiana University, Bloomington, Maurer School of Law, who was not involved with the study. What’s most important, she says, is a huge, previously obscure database of prisoner demographics that the team has uncovered. It will allow researchers to analyze the effects of different law reforms on the racial makeup of prison populations—and to potentially help ameliorate the large racial disparities, says Eaglin, who authored an accompanying perspective on the new study. “It’s a huge first step.”
In 2019, there were more than 2 million people in prison and jail throughout the United States. Currently, Black people make up 38% of all incarcerated people, despite representing only 12% of the U.S. population. White people also make up for 38% of those incarcerated, but they represent 60% of the population. Critics have argued that minority groups are more likely to be sentenced—and given longer prison terms—for their crimes. In the past decade, drug courts and criminal code revisions may have started to reverse this trend. In the nearly 10 years leading up to the pandemic, the Black population in prisons fell from roughly 42% to almost 39%.
The COVID-19 pandemic had a big impact on prisoner numbers. In an effort to curb the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, several states released prisoners early, and many trials were suspended. One year into the pandemic, the authors found, the number of incarcerated people had dropped 17%, bringing the overall prison population to levels not seen since the past century.
To see whether this had any impact on the racial disparities in prison, Brennan Klein, a Northeastern University network scientist studying how different populations changed during the pandemic, and his colleagues first needed to know how many people of different races and ethnicities were incarcerated over time. The scientists quickly realized that although prison records are public, they aren’t easy to analyze because each state reports them differently. So they filed Freedom of Information Act requests for all 50 states; Washington, D.C.; and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which has demographic data on prisoner populations at the federal level.
“It was a nightmare,” says co-author Brandon Ogbunugafor, a computational biologist at Yale University. “You have to have all the data in order to tell the story,” he says. “If there was any state missing, you can’t tell the story at all.”
The result was a public data set of more than 9000 imprisoned people across more than 20 years. The data revealed that although the total prison population declined rapidly in March 2020, the number of incarcerated Black people increased by almost 1% in the first year of the pandemic. It then returned to prepandemic levels by 2022. The researchers also found the Latino prison population increased slightly, about 0.2%, but quickly dropped back to prepandemic levels.
“What they did was very impressive,” says William Sabol, a criminologist at Georgia State University who was not involved in the study. “It is really complicated to try to summarize 50 states’ [worth of data].”
The trend didn’t hold in all states. Whereas the percentage of Black prisoners increased in Georgia and Texas, for example, it stayed flat or went down in Oregon, Maryland, and Wyoming.
The 1% increase is very small, so it may not mean much in the grand scheme of things, says Shawn Bushway, an economist and criminologist at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit policy research institute, who was not involved in the study. He thinks the authors are “essentially making a big deal over a slight blip that goes down within a year.”
Eaglin disagrees. “A 1% increase in the span of less than a year is crazy,” she says, “when it took us 10 years to decrease it by 3%.”
Klein adds that the 1% figure is significant because it equates to roughly 15,000 more Black people incarcerated. “It reflects something so deep about this massive structure in a society,” he says. Were it not for the differences in sentencing outcomes based on racism, he says, “15,000 [Black] people would not have been exposed to the virus.”
To figure out what could be causing the disparity, Klein’s team looked at the racial differences in admissions and release records in a sample of 18 states. In every state except Nebraska, the authors found, courts closed at the beginning of the pandemic, which reduced or even halted prison admissions for months. The admissions of Black people were even lower than the admissions for white people, which wouldn’t explain the blip.
Some states, such as Arkansas and Virginia, authorized the early release of some of its imprisoned population soon after the pandemic was declared in 2020. But again, Klein’s team found no significant differences in the release rates between white and Black populations at that point in time.
That left a possibility: Because Black people have traditionally been given longer prison sentences than their white counterparts, more Black people remained in prison even as the prison population plummeted. In Illinois, for example, where Black and Latino people have longer sentences than white people, the percentage of both prisoner populations increased at the beginning of the pandemic. But in Texas, where Black people have longer sentences than both white and Latino people, only the percentage of Black imprisoned people increased, suggesting sentence length is driving the racial disparity the researchers discovered.
Klein hopes the study will compel policymakers to not only continue to examine racial disparities in policing and incarceration in the United States, but also in sentencing guidelines. And the database itself could inform future studies on disparities in incarcerated people, he says, helping scientists study, for example, how health care emergencies impact this population. With the new database, he says, “We’re trying to think of holistic ways of actually making a more just criminal legal system.”
Source: Science Mag