Visualizing the racial disparities in mass incarceration

Racial inequality is evident in every stage of the criminal justice system - here are the key statistics compiled into a series of charts.

by Wendy Sawyer, July 27, 2020

Recent protests calling for radical changes to American policing have brought much-needed attention to the systemic racism within our criminal justice system. This extends beyond policing, of course: Systemic racism is evident at every stage of the system, from policing to prosecutorial decisions, pretrial release processes, sentencing, correctional discipline, and even reentry. The racism inherent in mass incarceration affects children as well as adults, and is often especially punishing for people of color who are also marginalized along other lines, such as gender and class.

Because racial disparity data is often frustratingly hard to locate, we’ve compiled the key data available into a series of charts, arranged into five slideshows focused on policing, juvenile justice, jails and pretrial detention, prisons and sentencing, and reentry. These charts provide a fuller picture of racial inequality in the criminal justice system, and make clear that a broad transformation will be needed to uproot the racial injustice of mass incarceration.

Following the slideshows, we also address five frequently asked questions about criminal justice race/ethnicity data.

There are racial disparities in policing and arrests:

There are racial disparities in the arrest and confinement of youth:

There are racial disparities in local jails and pretrial detention:

There are racial disparities in prisons, extreme sentences, and solitary confinement:

There are racial disparities in homelessness, unemployment, and poverty after release:

Frequently asked questions about race and ethnicity in criminal justice data

Q: Why are terms used inconsistently, such as “Hispanic” and “Latino/a”?

A: Sharp-eyed readers will notice some inconsistency in the terms used in the charts above, and across the literature more generally. For example, the Census Bureau and most national criminal justice data uses the category “American Indian or Alaska Native” to describe indigenous people in the U.S., but the juvenile justice system data uses the term “American Indian.” Likewise, “Hispanic” is used most frequently in various national data sets to refer to those with Spanish-speaking ancestry, but some sources use Latino/a (or Latinx), which specifically refers to those with Latin American ancestry. In these charts (and in most of our publications), we use the terminology of the original data sources.

Q: Why are some racial/ethnic categories not represented in the data?

A: The question of how accurately race and ethnicity data reflect justice-involved populations goes beyond inconsistent labels. Most obviously, not all racial or ethnic groups are consistently represented in the data; less populous Census-identified groups, such as Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, Asian, and American Indian or Alaska Native – as well as the sizable but less specific “Two or more races” and “Some other race” – are very often excluded in publications, even when they are collected. Moreover, all of these categories are so broad that they lump together groups with very different experiences with the U.S. justice system. They disregard tribal differences, sweep people of East Asian and South Asian origins into one category, and somehow ignore Arab Americans entirely. As a result, our observations of racial and ethnic discrimination are limited to these broad categories and lack any real nuance.

Q: Where can I find data about racial disparities in my state’s criminal justice system?

A: Unfortunately, the more specific you want to get with race/ethnicity data, the harder it is to find an answer, especially one that’s up-to-date. State-level race and ethnicity data can be hard to find if you are looking to federal government sources like the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). BJS does publish state-level race and ethnicity data in its annual Prisoners series (Appendix Table 2 in 2018), but only every 6-7 years in its Jail Inmates series (most recently the 2013 Census of Jails report, Table 7). The Vera Institute of Justice has attempted to fill this gap with its Incarceration Trends project, by gathering additional data from individual states. Individual state Departments of Correction sometimes collect and/or publish more up-to-date and specific data; it’s worth checking with your own state’s agencies.

Q: Where can I find criminal justice race/ethnicity data disaggregated by sex?

A: Disaggregating racial/ethnic data by sex is unfortunately not the norm in reports produced by the federal government (i.e. BJS). For people able to access and analyze the raw data, such analyses are often possible, but most people rely on the reports published by government agencies like BJS. As you can see in the chart showing prison incarceration rates by sex and race/ethnicity, BJS does sometimes offer this level of detail. But again, the same level of detail is not available for jails, and an analysis of both race/ethnicity and sex by state is all but unheard-of – even though it is precisely this level of detail that is most useful for advocates trying to help specific populations in their state.

Q: How are the data collected, and how accurate are the data?

A: Finally, the validity of any data depends on how the data are collected in the first place. And in the case of criminal justice data, race and ethnicity are not always self-reported (which would be ideal). Police officers may report an individual’s race based on their own perception – or not report it at all – and the surveys that report the number of incarcerated people on a given day rely on administrative data, which may not reflect how individuals identify their own race or ethnicity. This is why surveys of incarcerated people themselves are so important, such as the Survey of Inmates in Local Jails and the Survey of Prison Inmates, but those surveys are conducted much less frequently. In fact, it’s been 18 years since the last Survey of Inmates in Local Jails, which we use to analyze pretrial jail populations, and 16 years since the last published data from the Survey of Inmates were collected.

How to link to specific images

Because some readers might want to link to specific images in this briefing out of the context of these slideshows, we’ve created these special URLs so you can link directly to a specific image:

Black people are disproportionately stopped on the street by police, while white people are much more likely to call the police for help

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow1/1

Among individuals who have any contact with police, people of color disproportionately experience the use of force

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow1/2

Black people are disproportionately likely to be arrested, and to be arrested repeatedly in the same year

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow1/3

Black youth are arrested far out of proportion to their share of all youth in the U.S.

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow2/1

The juvenile justice system confines Black youth at over 4 times the rate of white youth

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow2/2

For the lowest level offenses, Black and American Indian youth are confined at rates over 3 times the rate of white youth

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow2/3

Racial disparities in local jail incarceration rates

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow3/1

Pretrial populations, disproportionately Black and Hispanic, have more than doubled over 15 years

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow3/2

People detained pretrial because they can’t pay bail are much poorer than their peers – and the income gaps are widest for Black people

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow3/3

Racial disparities in prison incarceration rates, by sex, 2018

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow4/1

Most people in prison are poor,
 and the poorest are women and people of color

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow4/2

Black people are disproportionately serving sentences of life, life without parole, or “virtual life”

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow4/3

Black people are overrepresented on death row, while white people are underrepresented

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow4/4

Black men and women are overrepresented in solitary confinement, when compared to total prison populations

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow4/5

The “prison penalty” in unemployment disproportionately punishes formerly incarcerated Black men and women

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow5/1

Formerly incarcerated people have very high rates of homelessness, especially women and people of color

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow5/2

Incarceration and wealth accumulation, by race and ethnicity

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/#slideshows/slideshow5/3

Not just “a few bad apples”: U.S. police kill civilians at much higher rates than other countries

Police violence is a systemic problem in the U.S., not simply incidental, and it happens on a scale far greater than other wealthy nations.

by Alexi Jones and Wendy Sawyer, June 5, 2020

There is no question that the number of police killings of civilians in the U.S. – who are disproportionately Black and other people of color – are the result of policies and practices that enable and even encourage police violence. Compared to police in other wealthy democracies, American police kill civilians at incredibly high rates:

The chart above compares the annual rates of police killings in each country, accounting for differences in population size. This is the most apples-to-apples comparison we can make with this data.¹ But the total number of deaths at the hands of police is also worth seeing in comparison with other countries:

The sources for these charts are listed in the table below. For more statistics on police, arrests, and incarceration in the United States, see these other pages:

• Ten key facts about policing
• Policing Women: Race and gender disparities in police stops, searches, and use of force
• Arrest, Release, Repeat: How police and jails are misused to respond to social problems
• Visualizing the racial disparities in mass incarceration
• Mass incarceration state profiles

Ten key facts about policing: Highlights from our work

Police disproportionately target Black and other marginalized people in stops, arrests, and use of force; and are increasingly called upon to respond to problems, such as homelessness, that are unrelated to public safety.

by Wendy Sawyer, June 5, 2020

Many of the worst features of mass incarceration — such as racial disparities in prisons — can be traced back to policing. Our research on the policies that impact justice-involved and incarcerated people therefore often intersects with policing issues. Now, at a time when police practices, budgets, and roles in society are at the center of the national conversation about criminal justice, we have compiled our key work related to policing (and our discussions of other researchers’ work) in one briefing.

1. Nearly 1 million people in the U.S. experience the threat or use of force by police annually, and they are disproportionately Black and Latinx.

The scale of police use of force is an important fact in and of itself, made more troubling by the racial disparities evident in police stops and use of force. In a national survey, Black respondents were more likely to be stopped by police than white or Latinx respondents, and both Black and Latinx respondents were more likely to be stopped multiple times over the course of a year than white respondents. The survey also showed that when they initiated a stop, police were twice as likely to threaten or use force against Black and Latinx respondents than whites. These disparate experiences have predictable effects on public trust in police: white respondents were more likely to view police use of force as legitimate and more likely to seek help from police than were people of color.

2. Over 4.9 million people are arrested each year.

In all, there are over 10 million arrests in the U.S. each year, but many people are arrested multiple times per year. From responses to a national survey, we estimate that at least 4.9 million unique individuals are arrested and jailed each year, and at least one in four of those individuals are arrested more than once in the same year. The massive scale of these police responses means that there are millions of opportunities each year for police-civilian encounters to turn violent or fatal, and an estimated 77 million people are now saddled with a criminal record.

3. Most policing has little to do with real threats to public safety: the vast majority of arrests are for low-level offenses. Only 5% of all arrests are for serious violent offenses.

The “massive misdemeanor system” in the U.S. is an important but overlooked contributor to overcriminalization and mass incarceration. For behaviors as benign as jaywalking, sitting on a sidewalk, or petty theft, an estimated 13 million misdemeanor charges sweep droves of Americans into the criminal justice system each year (and that’s excluding civil violations and speeding). And while misdemeanor charges may sound like small potatoes, they carry serious financial, personal, and social costs, especially for defendants but also for broader society, which finances the enforcement of these minor violations, the processing of these court cases, and all of the unnecessary incarceration that comes with them.

4. Policing criminal law violations costs taxpayers over $63 billion each year.

Policing costs the public $126.4 billion per year, nationwide. In our report about the fiscal costs of mass incarceration to the government and families of justice-involved people, we used only half of that figure – $63.2 billion – because only about half of police work is devoted to criminal law enforcement. The other half is spent on things unrelated to criminal law violations, such as traffic control, responding to civil disputes, and administration. Even at half the total cost of policing, $63.2 billion represents a huge public investment in criminalization. As many Americans are questioning the role of police in society, they should know just how much money is available to redirect to more humane community-based responses to social problems.

5. People who are Black and/or poor are more likely to be arrested, and to be arrested repeatedly.

People who are arrested and jailed are often among the most socially and economically marginalized in society. The overrepresentation of Black men and women among people who are arrested is largely reflective of persistent residential segregation and racial profiling, which subject Black individuals and communities to greater surveillance and increased likelihood of police stops and searches. Poverty, unemployment, and educational exclusion are also factors strongly correlated with likelihood of arrest.

6. People with mental illnesses or substance use disorders are also more likely to be arrested, and to be arrested repeatedly.

People who are arrested often have serious health needs that cannot and should not be addressed through policing or incarceration. Even a few days in jail can be devastating for people with serious mental health and medical needs, as they are cut off from their medications, support systems, and regular healthcare providers. Even worse, many people are arrested in the midst of a health crisis, such as mental distress or substance use withdrawal. History has shown that jails are unable to provide effective mental health and medical care to incarcerated people, and too often, jailing people with serious health problems has lethal consequences.

7. Women make up a growing share of arrests and report much more use of force than they did 20 years ago, with Black women most likely to be targeted.

The experiences of women and girls – especially Black women and other women of color – are often lost in the national conversation about policing. But of course women, too, are subject to racial profiling, use of excessive force, and any number of violations of their rights and dignity by police. Our analysis of national data shows that women now make up over a quarter of all arrests, with an estimated 2.8 million arrests in 2018. At the same time, the use of force has become much more common among women: the number of women who experienced police use of force (about 250,000) was 3.5 times greater in 2015 compared to 1999.

A closer examination of the data also reveals racial disparities in police stops, arrests, and use of force involving women. Black women are more likely than white or Latina women to be stopped while driving, and Black women are arrested 3 times as often as white women and twice as often as Latinas during police stops. Black women also report experiencing police use of force at higher rates than white or Latina women. With an estimated 12 million women per year experiencing police-initiated encounters – many of which involve searches, use of force, and other traumatizing experiences – the harms of policing to women demand more attention.

8. Disabled people represent a disproportionate number of those stopped, arrested, and killed by police.

As the ACLU of Southern California and the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law report, many criminalized behaviors targeted by law enforcement are related to disability: substance use (often used as self-medication for pain and other symptoms), homelessness (an estimated 78% of people in shelters have a disability), and atypical reactions to social cues, which may be interpreted as vaguely defined crimes such as “disorderly conduct.” The Ruderman Foundation reports that in police use-of-force incidents, the media and police often blame disabled people for their own victimization, especially by characterizing disabled people of color as “threatening” and “refusing to comply.”

The frequent use of police as first responders to individuals in crisis only compounds these problems. Too often, officers who are called to help individuals get medical treatment end up shooting them instead. Public funds should be redirected to community health providers to handle mental and physical health crises, rather than trying to meet this critical need with militarized police forces, who sometimes receive little training on crisis response or de-escalation.

9. Police treat Black Americans with less respect.

A Stanford University analysis of police bodycam footage from nearly 1,000 vehicle stops substantiates what Black Americans already know: police officers treat Black people differently than they do whites. This study, discussed in our briefing, finds that “police officers speak significantly less respectfully to black than to white community members in everyday traffic stops,” and that this happens irrespective of officer race, severity of the infraction, and outcome of the stop. These findings lend important context to the racial disparities observed in police encounters.

10. State and federal law enforcement practices target poor Black and Latinx residents.

Separate reports focusing on policing in Chicago highlighted two law enforcement strategies justified as ways to protect communities – drug stings and asset forfeiture – that facilitate widespread targeting of low-income communities of color. Federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) arranged drug stings that set up fake drug stash houses and lured people into committing new crimes. But they didn’t single out just anyone: At least 91% of the time, agents targeted Black and Latinx people. Columbia professor Jeffrey Fagan’s analysis found no statistical explanation for this except disparate racial treatment. A District Court judge described these cases as “ensnaring chronically unemployed individuals from poverty-ridden areas.”

Meanwhile, Cook County police conducted 23,000 seizures of assets connected to civil and criminal cases, a practice that is supposed to disrupt major illegal drug trades. But an analysis by Reason and the Lucy Parsons Lab showed that police officers were often taking petty property and the lowest-value seizures (valued under $100) were clustered in predominantly poor and Black communities on Chicago’s South and West Sides. These examples illustrate that at every level, the “war on drugs” functions as a war on communities of color.

For more information, the reports and briefings summarized here – and more – can be found on our Policing Issue page.

Acknowledgements: This briefing was compiled by Wendy Sawyer based on previously published writing by current staffers Wanda Bertram, Alexi Jones, Wendy Sawyer, and by Policy Initiative alumns Joshua Aiken, Alex Clark, Lucius Couloute, and Elliot Oberholtzer.

Five ways the criminal justice system could slow the pandemic

We offer five areas where quick action could slow the spread of the viral pandemic in prisons and jails and in society as a whole.

by Peter Wagner and Emily Widra, March 27, 2020

The United States incarcerates a greater share of its population than any other nation in the world, so it is urgent that policymakers take the public health case for criminal justice reform seriously and make necessary changes to protect people in prisons, in jails, on probation, and on parole.

Below, we offer five far-reaching interventions that policymakers can use to slow the spread of the virus in the criminal justice system and broader society. We previously published a list of common sense reforms that could slow the spread of the virus in jails and prisons. In light of the rapid spread of COVID-19 throughout the U.S., and specifically in prisons and jails, we found it necessary to update these recommendations with more detail about who has the power and responsibility to enact policy change, and how to reform the criminal justice system in the midst of a public health crisis.

Quick action is necessary for three reasons: Correctional staff and incarcerated populations are already testing positive, the justice-involved population disproportionately has health conditions that make them more vulnerable, and the staffing resources required to make policy changes will be depleted long before the pandemic peaks.

The incarcerated and justice-involved populations contain hundreds of thousands of people who may be particularly vulnerable to COVID-19, including those with lung disease, asthma, serious heart conditions, diabetes, renal or liver disease, and with other immunocompromising conditions. Protecting vulnerable people will not only improve outcomes for them, but will also reduce the burden on the healthcare system, protect essential correctional staff from illness, and slow the spread of the virus.

The final reason to move quickly is that, even under normal circumstances, establishing and implementing new policies and practices is something that the government finds challenging to do on top of its other duties. Now that the number of COVID-19 cases is higher in the U.S. than any other country, we know that more people will continue to be directly impacted by illness, including policymakers and government leaders. With the possibility of up to 40% of government lawyers and other policymakers getting sick or taking care of sick relatives, making policy change is going to be much harder and take far longer. If the government wants to protect both justice-involved people and their already overstretched justice system staff from getting the virus and spreading it further, they need to act now.

Here are five places to focus:

1. Reduce the number of people in local jails.

State leaders must remember that local jails are even less equipped to handle pandemics than state prisons, so it is even more important to reduce the burden of a potential pandemic on jails. Generally speaking, there are two ways to reduce jail populations: reduce admissions or release more people.

Reduce admissions. This may be the simplest strategy that would show quick results because of the high turnover in jails.¹ If a typical jail stopped admitting people entirely, its population would be cut by 54% in just 7 days. More realistically, if that same jail could reduce admissions by just half, its population would be more than 25% smaller in a week.²
Different actors within the system can achieve this using their discretionary powers:

• Police can reduce the number of arrests, particularly for what they determine to be “petty offenses.”
• Prosecutors can refuse to prosecute certain offenses and consent to release on one’s own recognizance³ (ROR) for most or all people charged with crimes. They can defer prosecution, dismiss charges outright, or instead refer defendants to social services or other alternatives to incarceration or detention.
• Courts can vacate “bench warrants” (warrants for unpaid court fines/fees and for failure to appear for hearings) so that law enforcement can focus on public safety concerns and so that people with active bench warrants do not avoid seeking medical attention for fear of arrest. Recognizing the extreme economic stress that most low-income people will experience during this time, courts should refuse to jail anyone for unpaid fines and fees, automatically postpone any court hearings related to fines and fees, or just proactively forgive these debts.
• Jails can refuse to rent space to other agencies. In some states, as much as 8% of the capacity is dedicated to USMS⁴, 10% to ICE⁵, and 66% to state prisons.⁶ In addition, jails should refuse to admit people accused of violating technical rules of their state probation or parole. As we recently found, technical violators can make up a huge part of a jail’s population.
• State and local legislatures can expand the list of “non-jailable” offenses, which are not subject to arrest but can only be fined or cited.

Release more people. Jail administrators can also accelerate releases of people currently in custody. In situations where administrators and sheriffs may not have the authority⁷ to do this on their own, they are still well positioned to suggest to courts, prosecutors and defense attorneys who could be released. Here are some suggested categories for release eligibility:

• People nearing the end of their sentence. 35% of people in jails are serving a sentence, typically under a year. That means that nationally, roughly 75,000 people in jail today are within 3 months of their release date.
• People who are medically fragile, including older people (there are 20,000 people over the age of 60 in jails) and people with chronic illnesses, especially those that have higher mortality risks from COVID-19, like chronic lung disease, moderate to severe asthma, serious heart conditions, diabetes, renal failure, liver disease and the immunocompromised, including those undergoing cancer treatment. Facilities should also release pregnant women.⁸
• People held on low bail amounts. Sadly, bail is often used as a wealth test for freedom rather than a test of dangerousness or likelihood to show up for court. But consider this: if your facility is currently holding people who would be released if they could come up with a small ⁹ amount of money, why are you still holding them? Once bail has been set, the court has already concluded that the individual is not a threat to public safety, since bail is meant to incentivize court appearance, not to detain people the court considers dangerous. Prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and the jails — preferably in cooperation with each other — need to generate a list of people whose bail should be lowered to $0 and then make sure those people are released as soon as possible.
• People held for offenses that would not result in detention if they were arrested today, now that some offense-based changes have already been implemented in response to the pandemic.

2. Reduce the number of people in state and federal prisons.

This can be done through some restrictions to admissions and most dramatically by increasing releases.

The simplest way to reduce admissions is to refuse admissions for technical violations of probation and parole rules. In 2016, 60,000 people were returned to state prison for behaviors that, for someone not on probation or parole, would not be a crime.

The decision to reduce admissions for technical violations can be made at the level of individual parole or probation officers, at the supervisory level, at the level of parole and probation boards, or at the level of state and county executives and legislatures. Any and all of these actors should take immediate action.

Other groups that states should immediately consider for release include:

• People nearing the end of their sentence. Approximately 600,000 people are released from prison every year. If they are going to be released within the next few months anyway, why not release them now? ¹⁰
• People in minimum security facilities and who are on work-release.
• People who are medically fragile or are older. Prisons house large numbers of people with chronic illnesses and complex medical needs that make them more vulnerable to becoming seriously ill and requiring more medical care for COVID-19. (There are 132,000 people who are at least 55 years old in state prisons. The prevalence rates of chronic health conditions that put people at risk for serious complications from COVID-19 are higher in state and federal prisons than the general population.)
• Anyone whose offense is considered “minor” or anyone who has a “low likelihood” of committing another serious offense.¹¹

States have many options for how to release these individuals. Mechanisms for increasing releases include:

• Parole boards can parole more people who are parole-eligible. They can also accelerate the normal review process, reduce the time between parole reviews, and eliminate the often months-long delays between parole decisions and actual release. (For instance, such delays are often the result of parole boards requiring people to complete program requirements, but under the circumstances, these requirements can and should be waived.)
• Governors can grant partial clemency to people who are a short period away from parole eligibility so that the parole board can consider them for release now.
• Governors, legislatures and other agencies can change good-time formulas to allow people additional credit for time served. Commonly called things like “good time,” “meritorious credit” or something similar, these systems shorten the time incarcerated people must serve before becoming parole eligible or completing their sentences. Many states give correctional agencies some discretion on awarding good time. The maximum allowed should be granted, and the formulas should be changed to make the rewards more generous.
• Governors can explore letting some people go on temporary furloughs who already meet most other criteria for release. (This used to be common in the U.S., and in response to the pandemic, Iran temporarily released 85,000 people and Ethiopia released 4,000 people.)
• Judges can resentence individuals to make them eligible for release on parole or on completion of the revised sentence.
• ICE, the U.S. Marshals Service and other agencies that send detainees to local jails for confinement can order their release, just as they should do for the people confined in the facilities that they run. These systems should not think for a moment that just because they have outsourced the jailing of these detainees, they are exempt from their moral and public health duty to reduce the density of correctional facilities.

For a model plan for releasing people from prisons, see this emergency plan developed for Indiana by a coalition of formerly incarcerated people and current volunteers and employees of the Indiana correctional system. The plan answers logistical questions such as how people can be quarantined outside of prisons before reentering their communities, how the reentry system can manage the release of thousands of people on short notice, and how to protect correctional staff and their families throughout the process.

3. Eliminate unnecessary face-to-face contact for justice-involved people.

The criminal justice system makes it difficult for people on probation, parole, and registries — and the staff of those systems — to practice the social distancing necessary to prevent the spread of COVID-19. There are at least 7 strategies that probation, parole, registries and the courts can implement to promote social distancing:

• Judges should postpone as many court sessions as possible. They should do so automatically and in advance. Courts should be reluctant to try cases or hold hearings over video monitors,¹² and they should never consider detaining someone they do not feel comfortable — for public health reasons — having in their court room.
• Reduce the number of people on the probation and parole rolls. This would reduce the number of people subject to the conditions of probation and parole, which often contradict social distancing guidelines (i.e. required in-person meetings with parole or probation officers), and would free up probation and parole staff to focus limited resources on the higher-need people who remain under their supervision. This may require help from the governor via mass clemency, the legislature, or the courts, and could also involve strategies like applying time-served credits for successful past compliance with probation or parole restrictions.
• Reduce, rather than expand, use of GPS/electronic monitoring. Electronic monitoring requires correctional staff to install (and maintain) the devices and thus to violate social distancing guidelines. Because these devices require monitored people to request permission to leave their designated areas — a process which can take days — electronic monitoring will restrict people from seeking appropriate medical treatment, not to mention imposing additional user fees payable to the monitoring companies that low income people struggle to pay during the best of times.
• Minimize in-person requirements. Parole and probation offices should limit face-to-face meetings (especially in crowded offices), suspend on-site drug testing, and limit home visits.
• Courts should cancel pretrial meetings, court-ordered classes, collection of court debt, and all collateral consequences for failure to pay fines and fees.
• Courts, probation offices, and parole offices should eliminate supervision fees, including those that are paid to third-party monitoring services. Under the additional financial pressure created by the pandemic, many more people under supervision will be unable to afford fees, which will put them at risk of arrest and incarceration. This isn’t a good use of criminal justice resources right now.
• When faced with technical violations of parole or probation rules — behaviors that, for people not on parole or probation, would not warrant incarceration — police should refuse to arrest, jails should refuse to admit, and parole/probation boards should not consider revocation. If necessary, alternative sanctions should be imposed that can be complied with from home, such as completion of an online course or more frequent phone/video check-ins.

4. Make correctional healthcare humane (and efficient) in a way that protects both health and human dignity.

Both incarcerated people and staff would benefit from a health care system that prioritizes human life and dignity over money. Here are some ideas:

• Eliminate medical copays that deter people from seeking healthcare in prison and jail. As of March 27, Hawaii, Kansas, and Nevada state prisons are still charging copays, and Delaware, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Utah have at least twice failed to respond to our inquiries about their copay policy during the pandemic. (For the current status of all states see the copays section of our virus response page.)
• Ensure that staff have sufficient paid sick leave and encourage staff to stay home if they or anyone in their family shows symptoms. Making the necessary changes to reduce overcrowding (and confinement overall) will greatly reduce the need for over-burdened administrators to ask staff to work when sick.
• Provide for basic healthcare needs behind bars, starting with the basic requisites for effective hand-washing. Stop charging incarcerated people for basic products that can protect them from illness. People in prison should not be reliant on COVID-19 fundraisers for necessities such as soap.
• Ensure that facility overcrowding never reduces the quality of the health care provided. When overcrowding or budget concerns impact health care, the first response should always be to reduce the facility population until health care can meet constitutional standards.
• Staff in courts, prisons, and jails should ensure that incarcerated people’s health concerns are taken seriously.
• Ensure that the physical and mental health–and human dignity–of people who remain in prison is protected. Particularly helpful is the 40 point checklist prepared by the Washington State Office of Corrections Ombuds, based on the CDC’s guidance to correctional facilities.

5. Don’t make this time more stressful for families (or more profitable for prison telephone providers) than absolutely necessary.

For people in the free world, communication is almost free, but for the families of incarcerated people, phone calls, video calls and emails are quite expensive. At this time of great stress for everyone, the facilities need to do better:

• Provide unlimited, free phone calls so that families can maintain contact throughout the pandemic when visitation is suspended. Allowing people to assure themselves that their families are safe will greatly reduce stress and anxiety, which, due to the pandemic, are sky-high inside prisons and jails.
• Facilities that do not have video calling systems already in place should temporarily refit the now-empty visiting rooms to support free video calling options with publicly available services like Zoom and Skype. These services can often be installed quickly without the involvement and costs of the prison telephone industry giants.

~

Since our first coronavirus briefing at the beginning of March, we have been tracking how federal, state, and local officials have responded to the threat of COVID-19 in the criminal justice system. A number of jurisdictions have taken quick and laudable actions to protect the most vulnerable justice-involved people, including reducing the number of arrests and bookings, releasing people held pretrial, reducing admissions to state prisons, and suspending medical copays in most states. Given the toll COVID-19 has already taken on our jails and prisons, as well as our society at large, the time is now for federal, state, and local officials to put public health before punishment.

“What percent of the U.S. is incarcerated?” (And other ways to measure mass incarceration)

Nearly one out of every 100 people in the United States is in a prison or jail.

by Peter Wagner and Wanda Bertram, January 16, 2020

We’re often asked what percent of the U.S. population is behind bars. The answer: About 0.7% of the United States is currently in a federal or state prison or local jail. If this number seems unworthy of the term “mass incarceration,” consider that 0.7% is just shy of 1%, or one out of a hundred. And a little more context shows that this fraction is actually incredibly high.

Because talking about portions of a percentage can be confusing, this concept is more often expressed as a rate: The United States currently incarcerates 698 per 100,000 people. (The rate is out of 100,000, rather than 1,000 or 10,000, because back when incarceration was much rarer you needed a larger denominator to express the rate in whole numbers. But either way, these are all different ways of expressing the same percentage.)

In some ways, though, looking at the portion of a country that is incarcerated understates the sheer size of mass incarceration, because the denominator includes many groups that are infrequently incarcerated. For example, no toddlers, few adolescents, and not very many teenagers are incarcerated.

Rather than calculating how many people in the U.S. are incarcerated, you could calculate how many adults are incarcerated (0.88%), or how many working-age adults are incarcerated (1.07%). These statistics are rhetorically useful, but are often difficult to pair with compatible data from other countries, states or topics, so they’re not used very often.

There is another way to look at the scale and uniqueness of the U.S mass incarceration experiment: Less than 5% of the world’s population is in the United States, but 20% of the world’s incarcerated people are right here:

For more perspectives on the scale of mass incarceration, see:

• Our report Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie, which breaks down how many people are locked up in the United States, where, and why
• Our related reports looking specifically at how women and youth are locked up and why: Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie and Youth Confinement: The Whole Pie
• States of Incarceration: The Global Context, our report showing that all U.S. states have incarceration rates higher than most independent countries
• Our state profiles pages with data about mass incarceration in your state

As of August 2021, the newest available data on incarceration in both the U.S. and globally does not change any of the statistics or percentages referenced in this article.

How race impacts who is detained pretrial

The government hasn’t collected national data on the race or ethnicity of people awaiting trial in jail since 2002. We review the academic literature published since then to offer a more current assessment of racial disparities in pretrial detention.

by Wendy Sawyer, October 9, 2019

Being jailed before trial is no small matter: It can throw a defendant’s life into disarray and make it more likely that they will plead guilty just to get out of jail.¹ As advocates bring national attention to these harms of pretrial detention, many places – most recently New Jersey, California, New York, and Colorado – have passed reforms intended to dramatically reduce pretrial populations.

But it’s not enough to simply bring pretrial populations down: Another central goal of pretrial reform must be to eliminate racial bias in decisions about who is detained pretrial and who is allowed to go free. Historically, Black and brown² defendants have been more likely to be jailed before trial than white defendants. And recent evidence from New Jersey and Kentucky shows that while some reforms have helped reduce pretrial populations, they’ve had little or no impact on reducing racial disparities.

As of 2002 (the last time the government collected this data nationally), about 29% of people in local jails were unconvicted – that is, locked up while awaiting trial or another hearing. Nearly 7 in 10 (69%) of these detainees were people of color, with Black (43%) and Hispanic (19.6%) defendants especially overrepresented compared to their share of the total U.S. population. Since then, pretrial populations have more than doubled in size, and unconvicted defendants now make up about two-thirds (65%) of jail populations nationally. With far more people exposed to the harms of pretrial detention than before, the question of racial justice in the pretrial process is an urgent one – but the lack of national data has made it hard to answer.

While pretrial jail populations have grown to make up almost two-thirds of jail populations nationally, and Black and Hispanic defendants were overrepresented in the 2002 population, no national data have been collected since then to assess how racial disparities may have changed.

So what, exactly, is the state of racial justice in pretrial detention? And how can advocates assess racial justice in their county or state? What data do they need, and where can they find it? This briefing reviews findings from recent studies of racial disparities in pretrial decisions – including both national and more geographically-limited analyses – and then suggests sources for further research to understand and address the problem.

To assess the state of racial justice in pretrial detention since the last national survey was conducted nearly 20 years ago, I reviewed more recent academic literature – studies that utilize other data sources and offer more nuanced analysis.

Overall, the available research suggests that:

• In large urban areas, Black felony defendants are over 25% more likely than white defendants to be held pretrial.
• Across the country, Black and brown defendants are at least 10-25% more likely than white defendants to be detained pretrial or to have to pay money bail.
• Young Black men are about 50% more likely to be detained pretrial than white defendants.
• Black and brown defendants receive bail amounts that are twice as high as bail set for white defendants – and they are less likely to be able to afford it.
• Even in states that have implemented pretrial reforms, racial disparities persist in pretrial detention.

National data is limited and outdated

Only one publicly-accessible study uses a nationally representative sample to measure pretrial detention status by race: the Survey of Inmates in Local Jails (SILJ), which was last conducted in 2002. Considering that jails and policing practices have changed significantly since 2002, an update to this dataset – now slated for 2021 – is long overdue.

Since 2002, national studies have been limited to felony cases in large urban counties. These studies are based on the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS), data which were last collected in 2009. The data include both demographic and case characteristics for each defendant, allowing researchers to control for legally-relevant factors like offense type, number of arrest charges filed, prior criminal record, and whether the defendant had failed to appear in court before. While BJS’ own publications based on this dataset (the Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties series) do not provide a breakdown of pretrial detention by race or ethnicity, some academic researchers have used it for that purpose. (For a full list of their studies, see the appendix to this article.)

These national studies of felony cases in large counties generally conclude that the direct impact of race on pretrial decisions is weak, but that racial bias acts cumulatively to affect outcomes, and indirectly via factors like ability to pay for bond or a private attorney. McIntyre & Baradaran’s analysis of 1990-2006 SCPS data concludes that Black defendants are over 25% more likely to be held pretrial than white defendants. The most recent SCPS data, from 2009, supports that finding: Even after controlling for age, gender, and a number of conceivably legally-relevant factors (most serious charge, prior arrests, etc.), Dobbie & Yang (2019) find that over half (58%) of the 39 sampled counties had higher rates of pretrial detention for Black defendants than for white defendants. In 5 counties, the unexplained racial gap was over 20%.

More recent, but geographically-limited, studies help fill in the gaps

More recent analyses shed further light on racial justice in pretrial decision-making, even though their samples are not nationally representative. I looked at 16 of these more geographically-limited studies, with subjects ranging from federal drug cases in the Midwest to misdemeanor cases in Harris County (Houston), Texas. In all, they include samples from 11 states spread across the U.S., and major cities including New York City, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Miami.

Of course, no single estimate of racial disparity in pretrial detention will apply to all counties nationwide. In the studies I reviewed, the racial gap in pretrial detention between Black and white defendants ranges widely, from about 10% to 80% depending on the study and jurisdiction (that is, the county or city).

However, these studies most frequently confirm that unexplained racial disparities continue to plague the pretrial process.³ Throughout the literature, researchers report that rates of pretrial detention and receiving financial conditions of release (i.e. money bail) are consistently higher for Black and Latinx defendants (and often Native American defendants, when they are included in the analysis). Bail bond amounts, too, are consistently higher for Black and brown defendants, even though they are less able to afford money bail. Rates of release on recognizance or other nonfinancial conditions of release, such as pretrial supervision, are likewise lower for Black and brown – versus white – defendants. Furthermore, the studies that included sex and age in their analysis found that young Black males face the greatest disadvantages.

Specifically, these studies report significant racial disparities, such as:

• Most of these studies find that Black and brown defendants are 10-25% more likely to be detained pretrial or to receive financial conditions of release.
• Median bond amounts, when compared, are often about $10,000 higher for Black defendants compared to white defendants. In at least one study, the median bond set for Black defendants was double the median bond set for white defendants.
• The most recent analyses of racial disparities in pretrial detention – assessing the effects of reforms in New Jersey and Kentucky – show that pretrial assessment tools have not reduced these disparities as much as advocates hoped. After New Jersey essentially ended the use of money bail for most defendants in 2017, the total pretrial population dropped significantly, but the racial composition of the pretrial jail population changed very little. And in Kentucky, the racial disparity in pretrial release rates actually worsened after the state enacted a law requiring the use of a pretrial assessment tool.

Advocates may be able to find data about their local jails

Of course, county or city jail administrators may collect and maintain data on the racial/ethnic composition of their pretrial populations. Advocates in some jurisdictions may be able to request data about their own local pretrial jail populations, which they can compare with the overall local population for a simple measure of racial disparity. Such a comparison, however, will exclude other relevant characteristics (such as seriousness of offense or past failures to appear in court) and won’t identify what stage(s) of pretrial decision-making are affected by race (such as the decision to set a money bail amount, or how high bail was set). Nevertheless, even a crude estimate of racial disparity in local pretrial detention can help advocates draw attention to the issue and raise important questions with decisionmakers.

Where to look next for more data

Jailing Black and brown pretrial defendants more often than white defendants isn’t just unfair; it also contributes to racial disparities later in the justice process. But in order to solve this problem, local advocates and policymakers need current data about who is held pretrial in their counties and states. And in order to identify broader patterns in pretrial decision-making, we need more data at the national level as well.

Until the Bureau of Justice Statistics updates its Survey of Inmates in Local Jails – which, unfortunately, is not guaranteed to happen on schedule in 2021 due to chronic underfunding – advocates and policymakers must rely on independently-produced local studies. Academic researchers (including those referenced in this briefing) have already developed models for these local studies.

In places where there appears to be little or no data published about racial disparities in the pretrial process, advocates can partner with local academic institutions or ask state Statistical Analysis Centers for assistance. Several large-scale projects led by non-governmental organizations are also actively working to assist local jurisdictions in using their data to inform policy changes that will reduce unnecessary incarceration. For example, the MacArthur Foundation’s national Safety and Justice Challenge supports initiatives in 52 jurisdictions across the U.S. to reduce the misuse and overuse of jails. And Arnold Ventures recently launched the National Partnership for Pretrial Justice, advancing a variety of pretrial justice projects across 35 states. Measures for Justice is developing a broad, publicly-accessible database of county criminal justice data; currently it offers data from 6 states, with data from 14 more states expected in 2020. And of course, community bail funds across the country have been collecting data as they bail low-income defendants out of jail – no strings attached – and reporting high success rates that underscore just how unnecessary money bail is. These kinds of resources can help local advocates and future researchers find the data they need to measure racial disparities in pretrial justice processes, and work to eliminate them.

See the Appendix for a list of all of the sources reviewed for this briefing, with links and summaries of their findings related to racial disparities in pretrial detention.

Footnotes

Cruel and unusual punishment: When states don’t provide air conditioning in prison

13 states in the hottest parts of the country lack universal A/C in their prisons. We explain the consequences.

by Alexi Jones, June 18, 2019

Air conditioning has become nearly universal across the South over the last 30 years, with one exception: in prisons. Although 95% of households in the South use air conditioning, including 90% of households that make below $20,000 per year,¹ states around the South have refused to install air conditioning in their prisons, creating unbearable and dangerous conditions for incarcerated people.

The lack of air conditioning in Southern prisons creates unsafe—even lethal—conditions. Prolonged exposure to extreme heat can cause dehydration and heat stroke, both of which can be fatal. It can also affect people’s kidneys, liver, heart, brain, and lungs, which can lead to renal failure, heart attack, and stroke.

Many people in prison are especially susceptible to heat-related illness, as they have certain health conditions or medications that make them especially vulnerable to the heat. Conditions such as diabetes and obesity can limit people’s ability to regulate their body heat, as can high blood pressure medications and most psychotropic medications (including Zoloft, Lexapro, Prozac, Cymbalta, and more but excluding the benzodiazepines). Old age also increases risk of heat-related illness, and respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses, such as asthma, are exacerbated by heat.

In Texas, a state that has air conditioning in all inmate housing areas in only 30 of its 109 prisons, a high percentage of incarcerated people are particularly vulnerable to heat:

• 21% are prescribed psychotropic medications
• 19% are taking medication for high blood pressure
• 19% have asthma
• 7% are older than 55
• 5% have diabetes.

The structure of prisons and prison life can also make incarcerated people more vulnerable to heat. Prisons are mostly built from heat-retaining materials which can increase internal prison temperatures. Because of this, the temperatures inside prisons can often exceed outdoor temperatures. Moreover, people in prison do not have the same cooling options that people on the outside do. As Prison Legal News explains in a 2018 article on prison air conditioning litigation, “people outside of prison who experience extreme heat have options that prisoners often lack – they can take a cool shower, drink cold water, move into the shade or go to a place that is air conditioned. For prisoners, those options are generally unavailable.” Even fans can even be inaccessible. For example, despite the fact that incarcerated people in Texas are not paid for their labor, purchasing a fan from the Texas prison commissary costs an unaffordable $20.

The lack of air conditioning in prisons has already had fatal consequences. In 2011, an exceptionally hot summer in Texas, 10 incarcerated people died from heat-related illnesses during a month-long heat wave. (It’s just not incarcerated people who get sick from the heat in the state’s prisons. In August 2018, 19 prison staff and incarcerated people had to be treated for heat-related illnesses.) As David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project, explained to The Intercept, “Everyone understands that if you leave a child in a car on a hot day, there’s a serious risk this child could be injured or die. And that’s exactly what we’re doing when we leave prisoners locked in cells when the heat and humidity climb beyond a certain level.”

Courts in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Mississippi have ruled that incarceration in extremely hot or cold temperatures violates the Eighth Amendment. But these court cases have not had a national impact on air conditioning in prisons. As Alice Speri of The Intercept explains, “There’s no national standard for temperatures in prisons and jails, and as jurisdiction over prisons is decentralized among states and the federal system, and jurisdiction over jails is even more fragmented among thousands of local authorities across the country, fights over excessive heat in detention can only be waged facility by facility.” As a result, incarcerated people in the South are subjected to unbearable conditions that violate their basic human and constitutional rights. Benny Hernandez, an incarcerated man in Texas, describes how torturous heat gets in prisons: “It routinely feels as if one’s sitting in a convection oven being slowly cooked alive. There is no respite from the agony that the heat in Texas prisons inflicts.”

Refusing to install air conditioning is a matter not just of short-term cost savings, but of appearing tough on crime. State and local governments go to astonishing lengths to avoid installing air conditioning in prisons. In 2016, Louisiana spent over $1 million in legal bills in an attempt to avoid installing air conditioning on death row, an amount four times higher than the actual cost of installing air conditioning, according to an expert witness. Similarly, in 2014, the people of Jefferson Parish, LA only voted to build a new jail after local leaders promised there would be no air conditioning.

With air conditioning nearly universal in the South, air conditioning should not be considered a privilege or amenity, but rather a human right. States and counties that deny air conditioning to incarcerated people should understand that, far from withholding a “luxury,” they are subjecting people to cruel and unusual punishments, and even handing out death sentences.

Footnotes

Policing Women: Race and gender disparities in police stops, searches, and use of force

We analyze gender and racial disparities in traffic and street stops, including arrests, searches, and use of force that occurs during stops.

by Prison Policy Initiative, May 14, 2019

Jails have been described as the criminal justice system’s “front door,” but jail incarceration typically begins with the police, with an arrest. Before any bail hearing, pretrial detention, prosecution, or sentencing, there is contact with the police. But despite their crucial role in the process, we know less about these police encounters than other stages of the criminal justice system.

In particular, the experiences of women and girls¹ – especially Black women and other women of color – are lost in the national conversation about police practices. They are also largely invisible in the the data. But as Andrea Ritchie details in Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, women, too, are subject to racial profiling, use of excessive force, and any number of violations of their rights and dignity by police. In fact, women make up an increasing share of arrests and report much more use of force than they did twenty years ago. Yet while increasing recognition of women as a growing share of prison and jail populations has prompted facilities to adopt gender-responsive policies and practices, women’s rising share of arrests and other police contact has received less attention and policy response.

The current study

To shed more light on how women’s experiences at the front end of the criminal justice system differ from men’s experiences, we look at both arrest data and data about women’s other contacts with police. We first look at trends in arrest data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. To complement this data, we also examine differences in other police encounters reported in the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) Contacts Between Police and the Public (CPP) reports, which are based on responses to the Police-Public Contact Survey (PPCS).

Critically, the UCR Program does not require police to report arrests by both sex and race/ethnicity, so that dataset offers no way to compare arrest trends of white, Black, and Latina women to each other or to their male counterparts. The PPCS partially fills that gap by including both sex and race/ethnicity of survey respondents; however, the BJS reports based on that survey do not engage this valuable intersectional data.² The second section of this briefing includes our analysis of the most recent PPCS survey (conducted in 2015), to finally offer a view – from nationally representative data – of how women of different races and ethnicities experience police-initiated encounters differently than each other and men.

Part 1: Gender differences in interactions with police

Arrests: Women make up an increasingly large share of arrests

In the past two decades, the total number of arrests in the U.S. has dropped by more than 30 percent, from 15.3 million in 1997 to 10.6 million in 2017. However, this drop was mostly due to fewer arrests of men: the number of men arrested declined by 30.4 percent in that time, while the number of women arrested declined only 6.4 percent. As men’s arrest rates have fallen women’s arrest rates have remained fairly flat. As a result, women make up an increasingly large share of all arrests; as of 2017, women accounted for 27 percent of all arrests, up from 21 percent in 1997, and just 16 percent in 1980.³

An increase in arrests of women for drug offenses helps explain why women’s arrest rates have remained steady, even as crime rates have hit historic lows and men’s arrest rates have plummeted. Of the more than 2 million arrests of women in 2017, 13.9 percent were for drug abuse violations – second only to property crimes (15.8 percent), and far more frequent than arrests for violent crimes (3.8 percent). Over the past five years – while the country has been in the throes of the opioid epidemic – drug arrests have increased 6 percent among men, but almost 25 percent among women.⁴

Changes in arrest patterns over 5 years, by sex

Other police-initiated contact: Women interact with police more than arrest statistics suggest

A key finding from the Contacts Between Police and the Public series is the true scale of women’s interactions with police, which is far greater than arrest numbers alone suggest. While arrests are sometimes used as a measure of the “first stage” of involvement with the criminal justice system, many encounters between the public and police do not result in arrest. This is especially true for women, who account for a much greater share of public-police interactions than they do actual arrests.

In 2015, there were about 2.1 million arrests – but about 12 million police-initiated contacts⁵ – with women ages 16 and over.⁶ That means that for every woman arrested, five more women were approached by police, either in a traffic stop, street stop, or in the execution of an arrest warrant. All police-initiated contacts are non-voluntary encounters, which are more likely than resident-initiated contacts (e.g. calling the police for help) to lead to arrest, further justice involvement, and other negative outcomes. The 2015 survey shows that women made up almost half (44 percent) of all police-initiated contacts, 41 percent of traffic stops (in which they were the drivers), and 36 percent of street stops, compared with 27 percent of all arrests. This is a critical point when assessing the need for gender-responsive policing policies and practices: basing an analysis solely on arrests would grossly underestimate the non-voluntary interactions women have with police.⁷

Use of force: Nearly doubled for men since 1999, but more than quadrupled among women

As with women’s share of arrests, women’s share of police encounters that involve the use or threat of force has increased significantly since 1999.⁸ That year, women made up just 13 percent of the approximately 422,000 people who experienced use of force during a police encounter. This percentage almost doubled by 2015, when women accounted for 25 percent of all people who experienced police use of force. Moreover, the total number of people experiencing police use of force more than doubled in that time, to 985,300 in 2015. But the increase in use of force was especially dramatic among women: the number of women experiencing police use of force in 2015 was 4.5 times (353%) the number experiencing force in 1999, up from 55,181 to 250,200. Meanwhile, the number of men experiencing police use of force doubled from 366,533 in 1999 to 735,100 in 2015.

Traffic stops: Stops declined more for men, and women make up a larger share of those searched during stops

The 2015 survey shows another noteworthy shift in the numbers of men and women stopped by police while driving. While the percentages of both men and women experiencing traffic stops declined since 1999, women saw a smaller decline in stops than men did. In 2015, 10 percent of male drivers were stopped (down from 12.5 percent in 1999) compared with 7 percent of female drivers (down from 8.2 percent). These changes may sound small as percentages, but the decline in the rate among women actually masks a 378,000 increase in total number of traffic stops of women since 1999, while men were stopped 451,000 fewer times than in 1999.⁹

Women also make up a larger percentage of all people searched during traffic stops. In 1999, men who were stopped while driving were about four times as likely to be searched during the stop than women; by 2015, men were just twice as likely to be searched. The narrowing of this gap reflects a decline in searches of men; for women, the share of stops that resulted in search remained the same, at 2.3 percent. In 1999, police searched the driver or vehicle in 9.4 percent of stops of men, which amounts to over one million stops involving a search. In 2015, however, the percentage of stops involving male drivers that resulted in search or arrest dropped by half, to 4.7 percent – or over 500,000 stops. Female drivers, however, saw no change in their likelihood of search or arrest during a traffic stop.

Part 2: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Police Stops

Data from the Police-Public Contact Survey (PPCS) allow us to take a more intersectional view of women’s contact with police, going beyond gender differences to include racial and ethnic differences among men and women, too. Again, this is the only national data we are aware of that enables any intersectional analysis of civilian experiences with police, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) does not attempt this analysis in its report on the survey’s results. That arrest data indicate racial disparities is well documented, but little is known – outside of individual stories – about how Black, Latinx, and white women experience police contact differently from each other and from their male counterparts.

Our analysis examines how race and gender, together, affect police-initiated stops, including arrests and use of force that occur during stops. It’s worth noting that police stops and arrests during these stops are relatively infrequent events, and that our findings are based on survey data from over 90,000 respondents, not the total U.S. population. That said, we find that the race, ethnicity, and gender affect policing outcomes differently depending on the context:

• Both race and gender affect the likelihood of a traffic stop.
• Race seems to matter more for men when it comes to street stops and more for women when it comes to arrests during a stop.
• Racial disparities are most apparent in use of force during a police-initiated stop, with Black and Latino men experiencing use of force more often than other groups, and Black women reporting similar use of force rates to white men.

Traffic stops: Black women are more likely than white or Latina women to be stopped

Both race and gender affect a person’s chances of being stopped by police while driving (excluding accidents or when they were passengers). Most broadly, the PPCS data shows that women were less likely than men to be stopped, and Black drivers were more likely to be stopped than white and Latinx drivers.¹⁰ More specifically, Black women were about 17 percent more likely to be in a police-initiated traffic stop than white women, and 34 percent more likely to be stopped than Latina women. Among men, Black drivers were about 12 percent more likely than white drivers – and 17 percent more likely than Latino drivers – to be stopped.

Percentage of drivers who experienced a vehicle stop in 2015

These estimates are not adjusted for driving behavior, however, and given reported differences in driving patterns between demographic groups, it is likely that traffic stops of Black and Latina women per mile driven could be even higher compared to other groups than the survey data suggest.¹¹

Street stops: Significant racial disparities among men, but not women

In contrast to traffic stops, the survey data on police-initiated street stops only showed significant racial disparities among men – not among women. Less than one percent of white, Black, and Latina women surveyed experienced a police-initiated street stop in 2015. However, the percentage of Black men who experienced a street stop (2.2 percent) was double that of white men (1 percent). A slightly greater portion of Latino men (1.2 percent) reported experiencing a street stop than white men, but this difference was not statistically significant.

Percentage who experienced a street stop in 2015

Arrests during stops: Significant racial disparities among women, but not men

Police-initiated traffic and street stops sometimes result in arrest, and the survey data show that Black women were at least as likely as white men to be arrested during a stop. White women, meanwhile, were about half as likely as white men to be arrested during a stop. Black women were arrested in 4.4 percent of police-initiated stops, which was roughly three times as often as white women (1.5 percent), and twice as often as Latinas (2.2 percent).

Among men, racial disparities in arrest-during-stop rates appear to be more related to the frequency of being stopped than the likelihood of being arrested if stopped. For women, on the other hand, racial disparities seem to be more related to what happens during the stop than whether they are stopped at all.

Percentage who were arrested during a traffic or street stop in 2015

Use of force during stops: Rates of Black women similar to white men; Black and Latino men most likely to experience force

About one percent of people surveyed indicated that they had experienced force or threat of force¹² during a police-initiated stop, but use of force rates were higher for Black women than white or Latina women,¹³ and were highest among Black and Latino men. Black women actually experienced use of force during a stop about the same rate as white men, while white women were significantly less likely to experience use of force than white men. The marked gender disparity in reported use of force that is included in the BJS report Contacts Between Police and the Public, 2015 (2.7 percent for men versus 0.9 percent for women) masks the reality that these percentages are averages of racial and ethnic groups that are experiencing force at markedly different rates.

Percentage who experienced force during a police-initiated stop

Conclusion

As women become a more visible presence in our criminal justice system, it becomes increasingly urgent that we understand their experiences within it, both to better meet their needs and to enhance our analysis of how justice works (and doesn’t work) in the U.S. The policing of women, especially women of color, has received less attention than the policing of men; it’s even received less attention than the incarceration of women. Similarly, while correctional facilities are increasingly adopting gender-responsive policies and programs, there have been virtually no concerted efforts to create or implement trauma-informed or gender-responsive policing practices.

This oversight has serious consequences. Rates of sexual and physical abuse are high among justice-involved women – estimates range from half to over 90 percent – and are much higher than reported for men. Almost a third (31 percent) of women in jail have a current serious mental illness, which is over twice the rate among men in jail (14.5 percent) and over six times the rate among women in the general population (4.9 percent). With 12 million women per year experiencing police-initiated contacts – many of which involve searches, use of force, and other traumatizing experiences – it is critical that law enforcement take seriously the need for more female police officers,¹⁴ protocols, and trainings that can improve police-public interactions and reduce the harms to women.

Finally, the invisibility of Black women and other women of color in the national discourse about policing – even in the wake of high-profile tragedies like the arrest and jail death of Sandra Bland – means that the full scope of racial discrimination in policing is unknown, and certainly understated. Making policing more transparent, accountable, effective, and just will mean bringing the experiences of these women to light.

Data sources and methodology

Arrest data come from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program (reported annually in the Crime in the United States series). Other police contact data are from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Police-Public Contact Survey (PPCS), most recently conducted in 2015 and published in 2018. The police contact data in Part 1 comes from the BJS reports based on the results of that survey, in the Contacts Between Police and the Public series. The analysis in Part 2 used the raw PPCS data, available from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) here.

Using the PPCS data for the analysis in Part 2, respondents were coded into one of eight mutually exclusive sex-race categories: Black female, Black male, Latina (female), Latino (male), white female, white male, non-Hispanic other race female, and non-Hispanic other race male (the last two categories include multi-racial respondents, and results were not included in this report because of the small sample sizes and the disparate racial and ethnic categories they included.)

Our analysis focuses on non-voluntary, police-initiated stops. Therefore, the two types of police contacts included in the analysis were “stopped by police in public place (non-vehicle)” and “stopped by police while driving.” Types of police contacts excluded from the analysis were: “respondent in vehicle stopped by police” (i.e. not driving), “in traffic accident,” “other police stops or approaches,” “crime/non-crime emergencies,” and “seeking other help from police.”

“Arrests” in our analysis of the PPCS (in Part 2) refer to only those arrests that occurred during non-vehicle (street) stops, vehicle (traffic) stops, or either type of stop. Use of force refers to whether, during the encounter, the police officer did any of the following to the respondent: push, grab, kick, hit, spray with chemical or pepper spray, use an electroshock weapon (Taser), or point a gun at them.

We used Wald tests to determine whether there were statistically significant differences in average (mean) incidence of stops, arrests, and use of force between each sex-race category in comparison to two references categories: white women and white men. We used the weighting provided by the Bureau of Justice Statistics to approximate a nationally representative sample.

Acknowledgements: This briefing was a collaborative effort, but Wendy Sawyer served as the editor and created the graphics. We thank Public Welfare Foundation for their support of our research into the experiences of women who come into contact with the criminal justice system.

Footnotes

Police stops are still marred by racial discrimination, new data shows.

So why does Trump continue to endorse stop-and-frisk?

by Alexi Jones, October 12, 2018

President Trump is again encouraging Chicago police to use stop-and-frisk – a policy that allows police officers to stop citizens for virtually any reason – even as new government data reminds us why such policies can be disastrous for people of color. Just days after Trump endorsed stop-and-frisk in Chicago, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released its new report on interactions between police and the public, using survey data from 2015. The report reminds us that police stops and use of force are already racially discriminatory, with predictable consequences for public trust of the police.

The report reveals:

• Black residents were more likely to be stopped by police than white or Hispanic residents, both in traffic stops and street stops.
• Black and Hispanic residents were also more likely to have multiple contacts with police than white residents, especially in the contexts of traffic and street stops. More than 1 in 6 Black residents who were pulled over in a traffic stop or stopped on the street had similar interactions with police multiple times over the course of the year.
• When police initiated an interaction, they were twice as likely to threaten or use force against Black and Hispanic residents than white residents.

These racial disparities in policing have predictable effects on public trust of the police:

• There were marked racial differences in perceptions of police behavior and legitimacy of police stops. Less than half of Black and Hispanic residents stopped on the street by police thought the stop was legitimate, while two-thirds of white residents did. And 60% of Black residents who experienced the threat or use of force perceived the force as excessive, compared to 43% of white residents who experienced force.
• White residents were more likely than Black, Hispanic, and residents of other races to initiate contact with police – for example to report a crime, a non-crime emergency, or to seek help for another reason. 46% of white residents who had contact with police initiated the contact, compared to less 37% of Black residents.

The report’s findings related to the use of force are particularly relevant to the national conversation about policing. The scale of police use of force alone is overwhelming. Nearly 1 million U.S. residents age 16 or older experienced the threat or use of force by police in 2015. And the people experiencing threats or use of force by police were disproportionately Black and Hispanic.

Previous local studies suggest that stop-and-frisk is particularly discriminatory. In 2010, near the peak of the city’s use of stop-and-frisk, Black residents in New York City were 8 times more likely to be stopped by the police than white residents and 11 times more likely to be frisked. And in 2011, New York City police reported using force in 23% of stops of Black and Latino residents, but in only 16% of stops of white residents.

Given these past and current policing disparities, it is not surprising that Black and Hispanic communities are less trusting of police. As the BJS report shows, Black and Hispanic people are less likely view the use of force as legitimate and less likely to seek help from police compared to white people. This is in line with Pew’s 2016 finding that only about a third of Black Americans believe that police treat racial and ethnic groups equally and that police in their community used the appropriate amount of force, compared to three-quarters of white Americans.

These disparities undermine the legitimacy of law enforcement and create a two-tiered policing system; moreover, they compromise public safety. If residents do not trust the police, they are less likely to report crimes and cooperate with police investigations. So despite what Trump says, stop-and-frisk remains as bad a policy as ever. Police should be looking to address these disparities, not implementing a policy that exacerbates them.

Findings from Knox County, Tenn.: Replacing in-person visits with video calling is bad policy

A new report highlights how the replacement of in-person visits with video calling makes jails less safe, but more profitable for sheriffs.

by Lucius Couloute, January 30, 2018

In April 2014 the sheriff’s office in Knox County, Tennessee banned in-person visits at its jail facilities and entered into a contract with Securus Technologies, forcing incarcerated people to interact with their loved ones through video screens alone. The sheriff’s office cited concerns about contraband, safety, and efficiency to justify the switch from in-person visits to video chats, but failed to illustrate how a new video calling system would provide the magic bullet.

In a new report from Face To Face Knox, a grassroots coalition of citizens in Knox County seeking humane treatment for incarcerated individuals, data from an open records request shows that the replacement of family visits with video calls has resulted in more violence, no drop in the rate of reported contraband, and higher levels of disciplinary infractions, putting more demand on staff.

The video-only “visitation” system did exactly the opposite of what the sheriff’s office intended – except for turning a profit. At a cost of $6 a visit, the sheriff’s office has generated nearly $70,000 from the 50% commissions it makes on the backs of people attempting to stay in touch with their incarcerated loved ones.

As the report explains, “The results are clear: The ban on in-person visits makes the jail more dangerous, does nothing to stop the flow of contraband, and strips money from the pockets of families. It’s time to end the ban and give visitors the option to see their friends and loved ones face to face.”