Race and ethnicity

Below, we've curated a list of virtually all the research about race and the U.S. criminal justice system that is available online.

Racial discrimination in housing, sentencing, and policing frequently explains why data show stark disproportionalities in justice involvement for people of color, particularly Black people. The research below goes into more detail as to how — and why — people of color are overrepresented in jails, prisons, and non-carceral forms of punishment.

You can also see a selection of our best original research on this topic on our Racial Justice page.


  • (New) Racial/ethnic disparities in police recovery of stolen property: A previously unexplored facet of police/victim interaction Paywall :( Alexander J. Vanhee, October, 2024“Analyses of victim race suggested that Black, Asian, and Native American victims were all less likely to have their property recovered than white ones.”
  • (New) Mortality Disparities Among Arrestees by Race, Sentencing Disposition, and Place George Zuo, Beau Kilmer, & Nancy Nicosia, July, 2024“In terms of racial disparities, all-cause mortality risk was 2.37 (95% CI, 1.95-2.88) times higher for American Indian/Alaska Native than White arrestees in the arrest-only disposition.”
  • (New) Bias, Distrust, and Trauma Racial Disparities in Boston Residents' Experiences with Law Enforcement and Related Outcomes Sandra Susan Smith, May, 2024“With few exceptions, Black Bostonians experience disparate treatment by law enforcement within categories of gender, age, educational attainment, neighborhood of residence, and income status.”
  • Lethal injection in the modern era: Cruel, unusual, and racist Reprieve, April, 2024“Black people had 220% higher odds of suffering a botched lethal injection execution than white people from 1976 to 2023.”
  • Misdemeanor Enforcement Trends in New York City, 2016-2022 Brennan Center for Justice, March, 2024“In 2021 and 2022, approximately half of all minor offense cases were dismissed. Overall, the proportion of non-convictions increased steadily from 47% in 2016 to 70% in 2022.”
  • Homicides involving Black victims are less likely to be cleared in the United States Paywall :( Gian Maria Campedelli, February, 2024“The likelihood of a homicide clearance is 3.4 to 4.8 percent lower for homicides involving Black victims, and this race effect is slightly higher for males and that racial disparity has moderately but significantly increased over time.”
  • "They Need to Go in There": Criminalized Subjectivity among Formerly Incarcerated Black Men Lucius Couloute, January, 2024“When explicitly asked about what they would say to powerful state officials, these Black men argued for (1) increased criminal justice transparency, (2) improved prison conditions, (3) additional reintegrative supports...”
  • Structural Racism, Mass Incarceration, and Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Severe Maternal Morbidity Elleni M. Hailu et al, January, 2024“We found that for Black and Hispanic or Latinx birthing people, residing in counties with greater jail incarceration inequity was associated with increased risk of... [severe maternal morbidity] compared with residing in low-inequity counties.”
  • One in Five: Racial Disparity in Imprisonment -- Causes and Remedies (Part 3) Sentencing Project, December, 2023“Extreme sentences for violent crimes and reliance on criminal histories as a basis for determining prison sentences are drivers of racial disparities in imprisonment.”
  • One in Five: Disparities in Crime and Policing (Part 2) Sentencing Project, November, 2023“These racial and ethnic disparities in police contact snowball as individuals traverse the criminal legal system. They also, as discussed below, reduce the perceived legitimacy of policing.”
  • One in Five: Ending Racial Inequity in Incarceration (Part I) Sentencing Project, October, 2023“As national and local politics resume the politicization of crime and drug policies, it is crucial to take stock of the progress that must be defended and built upon.”
  • Racial Differences in Self-Report of Mental Illness and Mental Illness Treatment in the Community: An Analysis of Jail Intake Data Narcissa Plummer, Rubeen Guardado, Yvane Ngassa, et al., September, 2023“In a Massachusetts jail, Hispanic, Black (NH), Asian/Pacific Islander (NH), other race/ethnicity people were less likely to report a history of mental illness at jail intake, and less likely to report receiving psychiatric medications in the community.”
  • Violent Victimization by Race or Hispanic Origin, 2008-2021 Bureau of Justice Statistics, July, 2023“The rate of robbery victimization for black (2.8 per 1,000) and Hispanic persons (2.5 per 1K) was higher than for white persons (1.6 per 1K), but the rate of simple assault was higher for white persons (13.3) than black (11.3) or Hispanic (10.6) persons.”
  • Highlights from 2020-2022 Criminal Summons Data Data Collaborative for Justice, June, 2023“In 2022, Black people were 9.10 times more likely than white people to be issued a summons, and Hispanic people were 6.78 times more likely to be issued a summons.”
  • Racial Injustice Report: Disparities in Philadelphia's Criminal Courts from 2015-2022 Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, June, 2023“Black individuals account for 69% of police stops and 62% of individuals arrested; white people accounted for only 18% of police stops and 21% of arrests, despite the fact that Black and white people make up similar shares of the city's population.”
  • Criminal Convictions in New York State, 1980-2021 Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College, May, 2023“Relative to their representation in the residential population, the conviction rate in 2019 for Black people statewide was 3.1 times higher than for white people.”
  • Jails in Indian Country, 2022 Bureau of Justice Statistics, May, 2023“Indian country jails admitted 5,570 persons during June 2022, a 4% decline from the 5,780 admissions during June 2021.”
  • COVID-19 amplified racial disparities in the US criminal legal system Brennan Klein, C. Brandon Ogbunugafor, Benjamin J. Schafer et al, April, 2023“States with fewer short-term prison sentences (Maine, Maryland, Missouri, Oregon and Wyoming) did not show the same racial disparity we found nationally.”
  • report thumbnail Racial disparities in diversion: A research roundup Prison Policy Initiative, March, 2023“Diversion decisions are often highly subjective, leaving candidates vulnerable to the racial biases held by police, prosecutors, judges, or other decisionmakers.”
  • Persevere: Our Ongoing Fight for an Equal Justice Judiciary The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, February, 2023“Having judges who reflect and represent all of us also increases public trust in the judiciary and improves judicial decision-making.”
  • High-Frequency Location Data Shows That Race Affects the Likelihood of Being Stopped and Fined for Speeding Pradhi Aggarwal et al, December, 2022“Relative to a white driver traveling the same speed, minorities are 24 to 33 percent more likely to be stopped for speeding and pay 23 to 34 percent more in fines.”
  • A Racial Disparity Across New York That Is Truly Jarring New York Civil Liberties Union, December, 2022“In Manhattan -- one of the wealthiest and least equal places in the country -- courts convicted Black people of felonies and misdemeanors at a rate 21 times greater than that of white people over the past two decades.”
  • Special Legislative Commission on Structural Racism in Correctional Facilities of the Commonwealth Former Special Legislative Commission on Structural Racism in Correctional Facilities of the Commonwealth and African American Coalition Committee Structural Racism Commission, December, 2022“Structural racism in Corrections systems produces or perpetuates unfair treatment and impacts by race and other intersecting identities...it can be dismantled with intentional partnership between the Legislative and Executive branches.”
  • Justice Navigator Public Assessments Center for Policing Equity, December, 2022(This platform contains analyses of policing data from seven participating departments across the country, to identify which policing practices have patterns of racial disparities, and what factors may be contributing to those disparities.)
  • Racial Disparities in the Administration of Discipline in New York State Prisons State of New York Offices of the Inspector General, November, 2022“Of DOCCS employees who issued 50 or more Misbehavior Reports during the period reviewed, 226 employees issued them to only non-White incarcerated individuals, including 114 employees who issued them to only Black or Hispanic incarcerated individuals.”
  • Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, November, 2022“This report offers an account of the research evidence that can inform the public conversation and the policy discussion over reducing racial inequality in the criminal justice system and advancing racial equity.”
  • Racial And Ethnic Inequalities In COVID-19 Mortality Within Carceral Settings: An Analysis Of Texas Prisons Paywall :( Neal Marquez, Destiny Moreno, Amanda Klonsky, and Sharon Dolovich, November, 2022“COVID-19 mortality was 1.61 and 2.12 times higher for Black and Hispanic populations, respectively, when compared with the White population in Texas prisons.”
  • Racial and Ethnic Disparities at the Front Door of Massachusetts' Juvenile Justice System: Understanding the Factors Leading to Overrepresentation of Black and Latino Youth Entering the System Massachusetts Juvenile Justice Policy and Data Board, November, 2022“[Racial] disparities are largest at the "front door" of the system-- the arrest and application for delinquency complaint stage. These early disparities matter.”
  • Race and Wrongful Convictions in the United States, 2022 National Registry of Exonerations, September, 2022“Innocent Black people are 19 times more likely to be convicted of drug crimes than innocent whites--a much larger disparity than we see for murder and rape-- despite the fact that white and Black Americans use illegal drugs at similar rates.”
  • Traffic Safety Center for Policing Equity, September, 2022“Racially biased enforcement sets into motion a cascade of interrelated harms for millions of people: unaffordable fines and fees, mounting debt, driver's license suspensions, lost employment, unnecessary arrests, and even injury or death.”
  • Justice System Disparities: Black-White National Imprisonment Trends, 2000 to 2020 Council on Criminal Justice, September, 2022“Faster growth in the nation's Black adult resident population contributed more to its respective imprisonment rate decline than did the White adult resident population growth.”
  • Race, work history, and the employment recidivism relationship Simon G. Kolbeck, Paul E. Bellair, and Steven Lopez, August, 2022“Our findings imply that employment contributes to racial disparities in recidivism via racialized barriers to labor market participation rather than via differential effects.”
  • Diversion: A Hidden Key to Combating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Juvenile Justice Sentencing Project, August, 2022“Nationwide in 2019, 52% of delinquency cases involving white youth were handled informally (diverted), far higher than the share of cases diverted involving Black youth (40%).”
  • Ten Principles on Reducing Mass Incarceration American Bar Association Working Group on Building Public Trust in the American Justice System, August, 2022“It is imperative that jurisdictions across the country reverse the devastating trend of mass incarceration and, in so doing, focus these efforts on reducing disparities in incarceration.”
  • Racial equity in eligibility for a clean slate under automatic criminal record relief laws Paywall :( Alyssa C. Mooney, Alissa Skog, and Amy E. Lerman, August, 2022“In California, one in five people with convictions met criteria for full conviction relief under the state's automatic relief laws. Yet the share of Black Americans eligible for relief was lower than White Americans...”
  • Extended Injustice: Court Fines and Fees for Young People are Counterproductive, Particularly Harm Black Young People, Families, and Communi The Commonwealth Institute, July, 2022“While detailed Virginia data on the impact of juvenile court fines and fees by race is not available, analyses from other states shows that Black youth pay the highest amount in fines as a result of greater frequency and duration of probation conditions.”
  • Law Enforcement Agencies' College Education Hiring Requirements and Racial Differences in Police-Related Fatalities Paywall :( Thaddeus L. Johnson, Natasha N. Johnson, William J. Sabol and David T. Snively, July, 2022“Results show that adopting agency college degree requirements is generally associated with decreases in police-related fatalities (PRFs) over time, with significant reductions observed for PRFs of Black and unarmed citizens.”
  • Over-Incarceration of Native Americans: Roots, Inequities, and Solutions Safety and Justice Challenge, July, 2022“Interventions meant to address over-incarceration of Native people should start at the tribal level. Tribes could impact disparity on a national level by providing supportive and restorative services for those involved in their own justice systems.”
  • Restructuring Civilian Payouts for Police Misconduct Rashawn Ray, Center for Justice Research, July, 2022“By restructuring police-civilian payouts from taxpayer funding to police department insurances, monies typically spent on civilian payouts and lawyer fees can be used for education, jobs, and infrastructure.”
  • Racial Equity in Montana's Criminal Justice System: An Analysis of Court, Corrections, and Community Supervision Systems The Council of State Governments Justice Center, July, 2022“Once incarcerated, American Indian people remain in secure or alternative facilities for an average of 27.4 days longer than similarly situated White people.”
  • The competing effects of racial discrimination and racial identity on the predicted number of days incarcerated in the US: A national profile of Black, Latino/Latina, and American Indian/Alaska Native populations George Pro, Ricky Camplain, Charles H. Lea III, June, 2022“Black respondents with low discrimination exposure had 42 predicted days incarcerated, whereas Black respondents with high discrimination exposure had 130 predicted days incarcerated, or an increase of 209%.”
  • The Usual, Racialized, Suspects: The Consequence of Police Contacts with Black and White Youth on Adult Arrest Anne McGlynn-Wright, Robert D Crutchfield, Martie L Skinner, Kevin P Haggerty, May, 2022“Our findings indicate that police encounters in childhood increase the risk of arrest in young adulthood for Black but not White respondents.”
  • Parole, Victim Impact Evidence, and Race Alexis Karteron, May, 2022“There is reason for concern that victim participation in the parole release process reinforces racial disparities within the criminal legal system.”
  • Racial Bias and Prison Discipline: A Study of North Carolina State Prisons Katherine M. Becker, April, 2022“Holding other variables constant, a Black person incarcerated in North Carolina was 10.3% more likely than a similarly situated white person to receive at least one disciplinary write-up in 2020.”
  • report thumbnail Beyond the count: A deep dive into state prison populations Prison Policy Initiative, April, 2022“Incarcerated people are a diverse cross-section of society whose disadvantages and unmet needs often begin early in life, and persist throughout their often lifelong involvement with the criminal legal system.”
  • Criminal History, Race, and Housing Type: An Experimental Audit of Housing Outcomes Paywall :( Peter Leasure, R. Caleb Doyle, Hunter M. Boehme, and Gary Zhang, March, 2022“Results showed several statistically and substantively significant differences among the criminal record, race, and housing type conditions.”
  • Too Many Locked Doors Sentencing Project, March, 2022“Given the short- and long-term damages stemming from youth out of home placement, it is vital to understand its true scope. In 2019, there were more than 240,000 instances of a young person detained, committed, or both in the juvenile justice system.”
  • Massachusetts Uniform Citation Data Analysis Report Salem State University, Worcester State University, February, 2022“Hispanic motorists, followed by African American/Black motorists are most likely to receive a criminal citation whereas motorists in the Other race category, followed by White motorists were least likely to receive a criminal citation.”
  • Barred from employment: More than half of unemployed men in their 30s had a criminal history of arrest Shawn Bushway et al, February, 2022“By age 35, approximately 50% of the black men in the [survey] have been arrested, 35% have been convicted, and 25% have been incarcerated.”
  • Mortality in a Multi-State Cohort of Former State Prisoners, 2010-2015 U.S. Census Bureau Center for Economic Studies, February, 2022“We found that non-Hispanic white former prisoners were more likely to die within five years after prison release and more likely to die in the initial weeks after release compared to racial minorities and Hispanics.”
  • The Civil Rights Implications of Cash Bail U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, January, 2022(This report examines pretrial incarceration trends, constitutional and legal concerns regarding pretrial and bail practices, an analysis of the role of the federal government regarding bail practices, and an in-depth investigation of four jurisdictions.)
  • The Proliferation of Criminal Background Check Laws in the United States Paywall :( David McElhattan, January, 2022“Panel analyses provide the strongest support for a model of racial classification, with the rate of background check adoption increasing as African-Americans represent larger shares of state criminal record populations.”
  • A Statistical Overview of the Kentucky Death Penalty Frank R. Baumgartner, January, 2022“Race may be the most powerful driving factor in Kentucky's death penalty. But the racial disparities laid out here, extreme as they are, are not the only flaws in the system.”
  • Student Arrests in Allegheny County Schools: The Need for Transparency and Accountability ACLU Pennsylvania, January, 2022“Black students with disabilities (served under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) accounted for 2.3% of total student enrollment, but 8.4% of students referred to law enforcement and 9.1% of students who were arrested.”
  • Association of Incarceration With Mortality by Race From a National Longitudinal Cohort Study Benjamin J. Bovell-Ammon et al, December, 2021“Experiencing an incarceration in adulthood was associated with lower life expectancy for Black but not for non-Black participants. Our study confirmed known racial disparities in rates of incarceration and life expectancy.”
  • Justice in Decision-Making: Studying Racial & Ethnic Disparities in the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office CUNY Institute for State & Local Governance, October, 2021“While our analysis showed that case processing in the Brooklyn DA's office resulted in fewer racial and ethnic disparities than expected overall, there were more notable disparities within specific offense types or charges.”
  • Losing Years Doing Time: Incarceration Exposure and Accelerated Biological Aging among African American Adults Paywall :( Mark T. Berg et al, October, 2021“Incarceration exposure predicted accelerated aging, leaving formerly incarcerated African American individuals biologically older than their calendar age.”
  • report thumbnail The U.S. criminal justice system disproportionately hurts Native people: The data, visualized Prison Policy Initiative, October, 2021“We're lucky when criminal justice data is broken down by race and ethnicity enough to see how Native populations are criminalized and incarcerated. Here's a roundup of what we know.”
  • The predatory dimensions of criminal justice Joshua Page and Joe Soss, October, 2021“Consistent with developments that financialized the broader political economy, predatory criminal justice practices pivoted toward tools that charge prices, create debts, and pursue collections.”
  • Racial Disparities in Law Enforcement Stops Public Policy Institute of California, October, 2021“We analyze data for almost 4 million stops by California's 15 largest law enforcement agencies in 2019, examining the extent to which people of color experience searches, enforcement, intrusiveness, and use of force differently from white people.”
  • Access Denied: Eliminating Barriers and Increasing Economic Opportunity for Justice-Involved Individuals Collateral Consequences Resource Center, September, 2021“The [Small Business Administration] continues to impose extensive criminal record-related restrictions in its general small business loan programs, frustrating lawful efforts by entrepreneurs and employees with criminal histories.”
  • Police Exposures and the Health and Well-being of Black Youth in the US: A Systematic Review Paywall :( Monique Jindal et al, September, 2021“Evidence shows that police exposures are associated with adverse health outcomes for Black youth.”
  • Racial and Ethnic Disparities throughout the Criminal Legal System: A Result of Racist Policies and Discretionary Practices Urban Institute, August, 2021“Racial biases are so deeply embedded in the criminal legal system that disparities based on race exist at each decision point, impacting subsequent decision points and resulting in negative outcomes for Black people and other people of color.”
  • Reducing Restrictive Housing Use in Washington State Keramet Reiter, JD, PhD, August, 2021“A greater proportion of people in DOC experienced Intensive Management Unit confinement over time. In 2002, 24% of the prison population had spent at least one day in an IMU. By 2017, over one-third (34%) of the prison population had spent time in an IMU.”
  • Criminalized or Medicalized? Examining the Role of Race in Responses to Drug Use Paywall :( Sade L Lindsay, Mike Vuolo, August, 2021“We analyze 400 articles from the New York Times and Washington Post to assess the degree to which the two crises were racialized, criminalized, and medicalized. We find that media coverage medicalized and humanized White people who use opiates...”
  • The Thin Blue Waveform: Racial Disparities in Officer Prosody Undermine Institutional Trust in the Police Nicholas P. Camp et al, July, 2021“Officers communicate different levels of respect, warmth, and ease toward Black and White citizens....these interpersonal cues accumulate across interactions to shape citizens' perceptions of and trust in law enforcement.”
  • Black Disparities in Youth Incarceration Sentencing Project, July, 2021“Black youth are more than four times as likely to be detained or committed in juvenile facilities as their white peers. In 2015, Black youth's incarceration rate was 5.0 times as high as their white peers, an all-time peak.”
  • County-Level Context and Sentence Lengths for Black, Latinx, and White Individuals Sentenced to Prison: A Multi-Level Assessment Paywall :( Katherine A. Durante, June, 2021“Race and ethnicity continue to be salient predictors of punishment, with Black and Latinx individuals facing harsher outcomes than their White counterparts.”
  • Enhanced Public Defense Improves Pretrial Outcomes and Reduces Racial Disparities Paul Heaton, May, 2021“Bail advocates did not reduce detention rates (at least on average) but did substantially reduce clients' likelihood of bail violation (-64%) and future arrest (- 26%).”
  • Carceral-community epidemiology, structural racism, and COVID-19 disparities Eric Reinhart, Daniel L. Chen, May, 2021“We find that cycling individuals through Cook County Jail in March 2020 alone can account for 13% of all COVID-19 cases and 21% of racial COVID-19 disparities in Chicago as of early August.”
  • Predictive Properties of a General Risk-Need Measure in Diverse Justice Involved Youth: A Prospective Field Validity Study Jessica Prince et al., April, 2021“Across jurisdictions, there has been debate about the use of structured risk-need assessment measures with diverse justice involved youth (e.g., Indigenous peoples, females).”
  • A Neglected Problem: Understanding the Effects of Personal and Vicarious Trauma on African Americans' Attitudes Toward the Police Paywall :( Daniel K. Pryce et al., April, 2021“Even for the proportion of African Americans who had positive perceptions and interactions with the police, their views of the police seemed to be further complicated by broader concerns of discriminatory treatment.”
  • ALC Court Watch Docket Report #02 Maintaining Apartheid: Arrest and Cash Bail in Allegheny County Abolitionist Law Center, April, 2021“In a county that is less than 13% Black, 56% of all arrests between Aug 14 and Dec 31 of 2020 were of Black residents.”
  • The American Racial Divide in Fear of the Police Justin Pickett, Amanda Graham, and Frank Cullen, April, 2021“Most Whites felt safe, but most Blacks feared the police even more than crime, being afraid both for themselves and for others they cared about.”
  • The cumulative risk of jail incarceration Bruce Western, Jaclyn Davis, Flavien Ganter, and Natalie Smith, April, 2021“The contours of jail incarceration observed in New York City follow the pattern of mass criminalization where large numbers of Black and Latino men are subject to penal control, in most cases for low-level offenses.”
  • Race, Ethnicity, and Official Perceptions in the Juvenile Justice System: Extending the Role of Negative Attributional Stereotypes Paywall :( Laura Beckman and Nancy Rodriguez, April, 2021“Using juvenile probation file content (N = 285) that quantitatively captures court officials' perceptions...youth of color are more likely to be linked to negative internal attributions in comparison with White youth.”
  • Untangling Eviction, Disadvantage, Race, and Social Processes: Neighborhood Factors Influencing Crime Paywall :( Eileen M. Kirk, April, 2021“Eviction is likely concentrated in neighborhoods vulnerable to crime, but the connection between eviction and neighborhood violent crime has not yet been examined...this Boston-based study is a first step in filling this knowledge gap.”
  • Contacts with the Police and the Over-Representation of Indigenous Peoples in The Canadian Criminal Justice System Jean-Denis David and Megan Mitchell, April, 2021“Indigenous peoples are more likely to encounter the police for a variety of reasons including for law enforcement reasons, for non-enforcement reasons, including being a victim or a witness to a crime, and for behavioural health-related issues.”
  • The Evolving Science on Implicit Bias: An Updated Resource for the State Court Community National Center for State Courts, March, 2021“Ultimately, judicial leadership must determine the goals of institutional efforts to address systemic and implicit biases.”
  • Are Effects of School Resource Officers Moderated by Student Race and Ethnicity? Paywall :( Scott Crosse et al., March, 2021“We found that increases in offenses and exclusionary reactions due to increased SRO presence were most evident for Black and Hispanic as opposed to White students.”
  • Better for Everyone: Black Descriptive Representation and Police Traffic Stops Leah Christiani et al., March, 2021“Even though increased black representation would not eliminate racial disparities, it may be an important part of reducing the amount of negative police contact that individuals experience.”
  • Racial Equity and Criminal Justice Risk Assessment Urban Institute, March, 2021“Practitioners and policymakers must determine how (or whether) to balance the use of risk assessment as a component of evidence-based practice with pursuing goals of reducing racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system.”
  • The Declining Significance of Race in Criminal Sentencing: Evidence from US Federal Courts Paywall :( Michael T Light, March, 2021“Sentences [for white and Black people] became more equal almost entirely due to changes in observable case characteristics and not due to changes in the treatment of offenders.”
  • report thumbnail Research roundup: Violent crimes against Black and Latinx people receive less coverage and less justice Prison Policy Initiative, March, 2021“In a 2018 Washington Post analysis of nearly 50,000 homicides around the country, the authors found that an arrest was made in 63 percent of murders of white victims, compared to 48 percent of those with Latinx victims and 46 percent with Black victims.”
  • Collective Bargaining Rights, Policing, and Civilian Deaths Cunningham, Jamein, Donna Feir, and Rob Gillezeau, March, 2021“Using an event-study design, we find that the introduction of duty to bargain requirements with police unions has led to a significant increase in non-white civilian deaths at the hands of police during the late twentieth century.”
  • The Legacy of Slavery and Mass Incarceration: Evidence from Felony Case Outcomes Aaron Gottlieb and Kalen Flynn, March, 2021“We find that a criminal charge in a county with high levels of slavery in 1860 increases the likelihood of pretrial detention, the probability of a sentence of incarceration, and the length of incarceration sentences.”
  • Who Controls Criminal Law? Racial Threat and the Adoption of State Sentencing Law, 1975 to 2012 Scott W. Duxbury, February, 2021“Results illustrate that states adopted sentencing laws in direct and indirect response to white public punitive policy support and the size of the black population.”
  • The Consequences Are Black and White: Race and Poor Health Following Incarceration Paywall :( Julie L. Kuper and Jillian J. Turanovic, February, 2021“Findings indicate that Black respondents reported within-person health declines that were more substantial than those of Whites after first incarceration. Additional analyses revealed that these race differences were more pronounced among Black males.”
  • Racial Disparities in Youth Incarceration Persist Sentencing Project, February, 2021“In ten years, the United States has cut youth incarceration in half.1 While the reduction is impressive, youth involvement in the juvenile justice system continues to impact youth of color disproportionately.”
  • Black and (Thin) Blue (Line): Corruption and Other Political Determinants of Police Killings in America Oguzhan C. Dincer and Michael Johnston, February, 2021“Our evidence suggests that police can kill Black Americans with impunity because of a lack of accountability - exemplified by corruption - that is largely determined by political influences.”
  • The role of officer race and gender in police-civilian interactions in Chicago Paywall :( Ba, Bocar A., Dean Knox, Jonathan Mummolo, and Roman Rivera, February, 2021“Relative to white officers, Black and Hispanic officers make far fewer stops and arrests, and they use force less often, especially against Black civilians.”
  • Poverty and Mass Incarceration in New York: An Agenda for Change Brennan Center for Justice, February, 2021“Roughly 337,000 New Yorkers have spent time in prison at some point in their lives. That burden has fallen disproportionately on people of color: three-quarters of the state's formerly imprisoned population is Black or Latino.”
  • Chasing Justice: Addressing Police Violence and Corruption in Maryland ACLU of Maryland, January, 2021“91% of officers' use of force was targeted toward Black residents.”
  • Prisons, Nursing Homes, and Medicaid: A COVID-19 Case Study in Health Injustice Mary Crossley, 2021“This essay highlights the experiences of Black people and disabled people, and how societal choices have caused them to experience the brunt of the pandemic. It will focus on prisons and nursing homes--institutions that emerged as COVID-19 hotspots.”
  • Trends in Issuance of Criminal Summonses in New York City, 2003-2019 Data Collaborative for Justice, December, 2020“Almost half of all marijuana possession summonses were issued to Black people (45.5%). Over 40% of summonses issued for disorderly conduct, public consumption of alcohol, and violations of transit authority rules were issued to Black people.”
  • Racial prejudice predicts police militarization Tyler Jimenez, Peter J. Helm, Alexis Wilkinson, & Jamie Arndt, December, 2020“Studies 2 and 3 are the first to explicitly connect these variables, finding that racial prejudice is predictive of both support for police militarization and actual police acquisitions of military equipment.”
  • Exploring Disproportionate Minority Contact in the Juvenile Justice System Over the Year Following First Arrest Paywall :( Padgaonkar et al, December, 2020“Black youth committed fewer offenses prior to arrest than White youth, Black and Latino youth were more likely to be formally processed, and Black youth were most likely to be rearrested.”
  • Emergency Department visits for depression following police killings of unarmed African Americans Paywall :( Abhery Das, Parvati Singh, Anju K.Kulkarni, and Tim A. Bruckner, November, 2020“Police killings of unarmed African Americans correspond with an 11% increase in ED visits per 100,000 population related to depression among African Americans in the concurrent month and three months following the exposure (p < 0.05).”
  • ALC Court Watch Docket Report #01 Cash Bail, Arbitrary Detention and Apartheid in Allegheny County Abolitionist Law Center, November, 2020“Black residents of Allegheny County are more likely to be arrested, charged, and have monetary bail imposed against them.”
  • report thumbnail New BJS data reveals a jail-building boom in Indian country Prison Policy Initiative, October, 2020“The share of people held pretrial in Indian country jails increased by 20 percentage points (an 80% increase) from 1999 to 2018, and the average length of stay in Indian country jails has doubled since 2002.”
  • The Intersection of Race and Algorithmic Tools in the Criminal Legal System Vincent M. Southerland, October, 2020“[Algorithmic] tools, as currently designed and deployed in the current legal framework fail to correct or upend the racial inequity that pervades the criminal legal system.”
  • Life Without Parole Sentencing in North Carolina Brandon L. Garrett et al, October, 2020“We find that fewer LWOP sentences are predicted to occur as the number of black victim homicides increase in a county, but no such relationship is found when considering the number of white victim homicides.”
  • Unmasked: Impacts of Pandemic Policing COVID19 Policing Project, October, 2020“Black people specifically were 4.5 times more likely to be policed and punished for violations of COVID-19 orders than white people.”
  • report thumbnail New BJS data: Prison incarceration rates inch down, but racial equity and real decarceration still decades away Prison Policy Initiative, October, 2020“At the current pace of decarceration, it will be 2088 when state prison populations return to pre-mass incarceration levels.”
  • Jails in Indian Country, 2017-2018 Bureau of Justice Statistics, October, 2020“A total of 84 jails in Indian country held an estimated 2,870 inmates at midyear 2018, a 2% increase from the 2,820 inmates held in 84 facilities at midyear 2017”
  • Measuring Racial Discrimination in Bail Decisions David Arnold, Will Dobbie, and Peter Hull, October, 2020“Our most conservative estimates from NYC show that approximately two-thirds of the observed racial disparity in release decisions is due to racial discrimination, with around one-third due to unobserved racial differences in misconduct risk.”
  • Civic Responses to Police Violence Desmond Ang and Jonathan Tebes, October, 2020“We find that exposure to police violence leads to significant increases in registrations and votes. These effects are driven entirely by Blacks and Hispanics and are largest for killings of unarmed individuals.”
  • Punishing status and the punishment status quo: Solitary confinement in U.S. Immigration prisons, 2013-2017 Konrad Franco, Caitlin Patler, and Keramet Reiter, October, 2020“Solitary confinement cases involving immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean are vastly overrepresented in comparison to the share of these groups in the overall detained population.”
  • Tracking Enforcement Trends in New York City: 2003-2018 Data Collaborative for Justice, September, 2020“There were 5.8 enforcement actions among Black people for every one enforcement action among White people in 2018.”
  • Racial Disparities in the Massachusetts Criminal System The Criminal Justice Policy Program, Harvard Law School, September, 2020“The Commonwealth significantly outpaced national race and ethnicity disparity rates in incarceration, imprisoning Black people at a rate 7.9 times that of White people and Latinx people at 4.9 times that of White people.”
  • Trauma, Healing, and Justice: Native Hawaiian Women in Hawaii's Criminal Justice System Paywall :( Toni Bissen, September, 2020“Native Hawaiian women comprise 21% of the female population in Hawaii but account for 40% of the jail and prison population.”
  • NYPD Officer Misconduct Analysis New York University's Public Safety Lab, September, 2020“We find that precincts with higher percentages of Black residents had higher levels of excess misconduct complaints, both all and substantiated, between 2006-2019.”
  • Institutionalizing inequality in the courts: Decomposing racial and ethnic disparities in detention, conviction, and sentencing Paywall :( Marisa Omori and Nick Petersen, September, 2020“Our findings indicate that inequality is, in part, institutionalized through legal case factors, suggesting these factors are not "race neutral" but instead racialized and contribute to inequalities in court outcomes.”
  • Revolving Doors: Examining the Effect of Race and Ethnicity on Discretionary Decision-Making in Parole Revocations Tri Keah S. Henry, August, 2020“Findings suggest that race/ethnicity significantly influences parole revocation outcomes.”
  • An Analysis of Court Imposed Monetary Sanctionsin Seattle Municipal Courts, 2000-2017 Frank Edwards and Alexes Harris, August, 2020“Seattle Municipal Courts still engage in a system of monetary sanctions that leads to disproportionate and negative outcomes for Seattle residents, and in particular, people of color.”
  • Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement Brennan Center for Justice, August, 2020“Alarmingly, internal FBI policy documents have also warned agents assigned to domestic terrorism cases that the white supremacist and anti-government militia groups they investigate often have "active links" to law enforcement officials.”
  • Life Years Lost to Police Encounters in the United States Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, August, 2020“This implies a loss of roughly 16,000 years of life for recent cohorts of Black men.”
  • The Other Epidemic: Fatal Police Shootings in the Time of COVID-19 ACLU, August, 2020“From January 1, 2015, to June 30, 2020, police officers shot and killed 5,442 people.”
  • Reducing Racial Disparities in Crime Victimization Anna Harvey and Taylor Mattia, July, 2020“We find that successful litigation over racially discriminatory practices substantially reduced both absolute and relative Black crime victimization, without increasing white victimization.”
  • Whom the State Kills Scott Phillips & Justin Marceau, July, 2020“The overall execution rate is a staggering seventeen times greater for defendants convicted of killing a white victim.”
  • Criminal Disqualifications in the Paycheck Protection Program Keith Finlay, Michael Mueller-Smith, Brittany Street, July, 2020“Black and Hispanic men, younger men, and Black women experience higher than average exclusion from PPP eligibility due to higher rates of contact with the criminal justice system in each state.”
  • Police Killings in the US: Inequalities by Race/Ethnicity and Socioeconomic Position People's Policy Project, June, 2020“Whites in the poorest areas have a police killing rate of 7.9 per million, compared to 2 per million in the least-poor areas. Blacks in the poorest areas have a police killing rate of 12.3 per million, compared to 6.7 per million in the least-poor areas.”
  • Confronting the Demographics of Power: America's Sheriffs Women Donors Network, June, 2020“Ninety two percent of sheriffs are white. Ninety percent are white men.”
  • Illinois Failing Key Pillar of COVID-19 Response: Prisons Remain Crowded While Early Releases Exacerbate Racial Inequity Restore Justice, June, 2020“White people are being released from prison at much higher rates--and much earlier--than their Black and Latino peers. While white people comprise just 32 percent of the Illinois prison population, they account for nearly half of all early releases.”
  • The Complexities of Race and Place: Childhood Neighborhood Disadvantage and Adult Incarceration for Whites, Blacks, and Latinos Steven Elias Alvarado, June, 2020“Blacks, the findings suggest, experience the weakest neighborhood associations with incarceration, suggesting that residential mobility for blacks does not protect against incarceration as much as it does for whites and Latinos.”
  • America's Hidden Common Ground on Police Reform and Racism in the United States: Results from a Public Agenda/USA Today/Ipsos Hidden Common Ground survey Ipsos and Public Agenda, June, 2020“Most Americans (58%) say racial bias against Black or African Americans committed by police and law enforcement is a serious problem in their community, including 75% of Democrats and 51% of Independents as well as 40% of Republicans.”
  • Proposition 47's Impact on Racial Disparity in Criminal Justice Outcome Public Policy Institute of California, June, 2020“The African American-white arrest rate gap narrowed by about 5.9 percent, while the African American-white booking rate gap shrank by about 8.2 percent.”
  • A large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States Emma Pierson et al, May, 2020“Our analysis provides evidence that decisions about whom to stop and, subsequently, whom to search are biased against black and Hispanic drivers.”
  • Catalyzing Policing Reform with Data: Policing Typology for Los Angeles Neighborhoods Urban Institute, May, 2020“However, across all groups and their varied activity levels, Black people are stopped at the highest rate.”
  • Race and Reasonableness in Police Killings Jeffrey Fagan and Alexis Campbell, May, 2020“Black suspects are more than twice as likely to be killed by police than are persons of other racial or ethnic groups; even when there are no other obvious circumstances during the encounter that would make the use of deadly force reasonable.”
  • report thumbnail Since you asked: What data exists about Native American people in the criminal justice system? Prison Policy Initiative, April, 2020“Problems with data collection - and an unfortunate tendency to group Native Americans together with other ethnic and racial groups in data publications - have made it hard to understand the effect of mass incarceration on Native people.”
  • A Tale of Two Countries: Racially Targeted Arrests in the Era of Marijuana Reform ACLU, April, 2020“On average, a Black person is 3.64 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person, even though Black and white people use marijuana at similar rates.”
  • Racial Inequities in New York Parole Supervision Kendra Bradner and Vincent Schiraldi, March, 2020“Black and Latinx people are significantly more likely than white people to be under supervision, to be jailed pending a violation hearing, and to be incarcerated in New York State prisons for a parole violation.”
  • Opioids, Race, and Drug Enforcement: Exploring Local Relationships Between Neighborhood Context and Black-White Opioid-Related Possession Arrests Paywall :( Ellen A. Donnelly, Jascha Wagner, Madeline Stenger, Hannah G. Cortina, Daniel J. O'Connell, Tammy L. Anderson, March, 2020“Calls for police service for overdoses increase White arrests in more advantaged, rural communities. Economic disadvantage and racial diversity in neighborhoods more strongly elevate possession arrest rates among Blacks relative to Whites.”
  • Driving While Black and Latinx: Stops, Fines, Fees, and Unjust Debts New York Law School Racial Justice Project, February, 2020“Traffc debt suspensions disproportionately harm New Yorkers of color, and will continue to do so if the current law remains unchanged.”
  • In Trouble: How the Promise of Diversion Clashes With the Reality of Poverty, Addiction, and Structural Racism in Alabama's Justice Alabama Appleseed Center for Law & Justice, February, 2020“Fifty-five percent of them made less than $14,999 per year, yet the median amount they reported paying for diversion was $1,600 -- more than ten percent of their total income.”
  • Local Labor Market Inequality in the Age of Mass Incarceration Luke Petach and Anita Alves Pena, 2020“While income inequality is associated with higher rates of incarceration for all race and ethnicity groups (although not always in statistically significant fashion), the effect is largest for non-white, nonHispanic individuals.”
  • Treatment versus Punishment: Understanding Racial Inequalities in Drug Policy Jin Woo Kim, Evan Morgan, Brendan Nyhan, December, 2019“Policy makers were more likely to introduce punitive drug-related bills during the crack scare and are more likely to introduce treatment-oriented bills during the current opioid crisis.”
  • Trends in Correctional Control by Race and Sex The Council on Criminal Justice, December, 2019(For Black individuals, increases in length of stay, admissions per arrest, and arrests per offender offset the 3% decline in offending rates for rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.)
  • We All Pay: Mississippi's Harmful Habitual Laws FWD.us, November, 2019“Despite making up 13 percent of the state's population,75 percent of the people with 20+ year habitual sentences are Black men.”
  • Rethinking Approaches to Over Incarceration of Black Young Adults in Maryland Justice Policy Institute, November, 2019“Nearly eight in 10 people who were sentenced as emerging adults and have served 10 or more years in a Maryland prison are black. This is the highest rate of any state in the country.”
  • report thumbnail How race impacts who is detained pretrial Prison Policy Initiative, November, 2019“In large urban areas, Black felony defendants are over 25% more likely than white defendants to be held pretrial.”
  • The Effect of Scaling Back Punishment on Racial Disparities in Criminal Case Outcomes John MacDonald and Steven Raphael, September, 2019“The findings from this study suggest that policy reforms that scale back the severity of punishment for criminal history and active criminal justice status for less serious felony offenses may help narrow racial inequalities in criminal court dispositions”
  • Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race-ethnicity, and sex Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito, August, 2019“For young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death.”
  • The National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice: Key Process and Outcome Evaluation Findings Urban Institute, August, 2019“Although community perceptions improved in the aggregate, views of police and police legitimacy remain largely negative in the neighborhoods most affected by crime and disadvantage.”
  • The Race of Defendants and Victims in Pennsylvania Death Penalty Decisions: 2000-2010 Paywall :( Jeffery T. Ulmer, John H. Kramer, and Gary Zajac, August, 2019“We find that those who kill white victims, regardless of defendant race, are more likely to receive the death penalty.”
  • Changes in Enforcement of Low-Level and Felony Offenses Post-Ferguson: An Analysis of Arrests in St. Louis, Missouri Lee Ann Slocum, Claire Greene, Beth M. Huebner, and Richard Rosenfeld, July, 2019“We find that there was an initial reduction in low-level arrests of Whites and Blacks in the wake of Ferguson. Enforcement of misdemeanors and ordinance violations then increased and returned to expected levels, but only for Blacks.”
  • State Supreme Court Diversity Brennan Center for Justice, July, 2019“Twenty-four states currently have an all-white supreme court bench, including eight states in which people of color are at least a quarter of the state's general population.”
  • Felony Disenfranchisement: A Primer Sentencing Project, June, 2019“Only two states, Maine and Vermont, do not restrict the voting rights of anyone with a felony conviction, including those in prison.”
  • Racialized Re-entry: Labor Market Inequality After Incarceration Bruce Western and Catherine Sirois, June, 2019“Qualitative interviews suggest that whites more than blacks and Hispanics find stable, high-paying jobs through social networks.”
  • LGBTQ Youth of Color Impacted by the Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice Systems: A Research Agenda UCLA Williams Institute, June, 2019“LGBTQ youth of color appear to stay longer in child welfare and juvenile justice systems and to be at elevated risk of discrimination and violence once system-involved compared to other groups of youth.”
  • The California Death Penalty is Discriminatory, Unfair, and Officially Suspended. So Why Does Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey Still Seek to Use It? ACLU, June, 2019“All of the 22 people who have received death sentences while Lacey has been in office are people of color.”
  • Aggressive Policing and Academic Outcomes: Examining the Impact of Police "Surges" in NYC Students' Home Neighborhoods Joscha Legewie, Chelsea Farley, Kayla Stewart, May, 2019“Aggressive policing in communities can harm Black boys' educational performance, as measured by state tests.”
  • Using Shifts in Deployment and Operations to Test for Racial Bias in Police Stops John M. MacDonald and Jeffrey Fagan, May, 2019“For blacks, impact-zone formation increases arrests, summons, and frisks. For Hispanics, impact-zone formation increases arrests, frisks, and street detention.”
  • More Black than Blue: Politics and Power in the 2019 Black Census The Black Futures Lab, May, 2019“More than half (55 percent) of respondents have personally had a negative interaction with the police at some point, and 28 percent have had at least one negative interaction in the last 6 months.”
  • Racial Disparities in D.C. Policing: Descriptive Evidence From 2013-2017 ACLU of the District of Columbia, May, 2019“From 2013 to 2017, Black individuals composed 47% of D.C.'s population but 86% of its arrestees. During this time, Black people were arrested at 10 times the rate of white people.”
  • Prosecutorial Misconduct: Mass Gang Indictments and Inflammatory Statements Babe Howell, May, 2019“Inflammatory narratives which improperly attribute carnage and enormous amounts of violence to large groups of young men of color play into three pressing problems of society--racism, wrongful convictions, and mass incarceration.”
  • Misdemeanors by the Numbers Sandra Mayson and Megan Stevenson, April, 2019“With a single exception, the per-capita misdemeanor case-filing rate is higher for black people than for white people for every offense type, in every jurisdiction.”
  • Shifting Power: The Impact of Incarceration on Political Representation Brianna Remster and Rory Kramer, April, 2019“Drawing on data from the Census, Pennsylvania Dept. of Corrections, and Pennsylvania Redistricting Commission, we develop a counterfactual framework to examine whether removing and returning prisoners to their home districts affects equal representation.”
  • What Percentage of Americans Have Ever Had a Family Member Incarcerated?: Evidence from the Family History of Incarceration Survey Enns et al., March, 2019“45 percent of Americans have ever had an immediate family member incarcerated. The incarceration of an immediate family member was most prevalent for blacks (63 percent) but common for whites (42 percent) and Hispanics (48 percent) as well.”
  • How Police Technology Aggravates Racial Inequity: A Taxonomy of Problems and a Path Forward Laura Moy, February, 2019“Police technology may (1) replicate inequity in policing, (2) mask inequity in policing, (3) transfer inequity from elsewhere to policing, (4) exacerbate inequitable policing harms, and/or (5) compromise oversight of inequity in policing.”
  • At the Intersection of Health and Justice: How the Health of American Indians and Alaska Natives Is Disproportionately Affected by Disparities in the Criminal Justice System Bette Jacobs, Mehgan Gallagher, and Nicole Heydt, February, 2019“Issues related to unemployment, substance abuse, and systemic legal disparities are precursors to many cases leading to disability and death. Incarceration affects one's life course and, consequently, one's health.”
  • The State of Black Immigrants Black Alliance for Just Immigration, January, 2019“Black immigrants are disproportionately represented among immigrants facing deportation in immigration court on criminal grounds.”
  • Examining Judicial Pretrial Release Decisions: The Influence of Risk Assessments and Race Brian P. Schaefer and Tom Hughes,, January, 2019“The findings indicate that Black, moderate or high risk felony arrestees are more likely to be required to post a financial bond than non-financial bond compared to their White or lower risk counterparts.”
  • Bias in Video Evidence: Implications for Police Body Cameras Ashley Kalle, Georgina Hammock, 2019“While watching the same video, diff erent conclusions were drawn about what transpired, who was culpable, the character of the individuals involved, and the level of force used based on observers' focus and their racial attitudes.”
  • Testifying while black: An experimental study of court reporter accuracy in transcription of African American English Taylor Jones, Jessica Rose Kalbfeld, Ryan Hancock, and Robin Clark, 2019“Here, we demonstrate that Philadelphia court reporters consistently fail to meet this level of transcription accuracy when confronted with mundane examples of spoken African American English.”
  • The Determinants of Declining Racial Disparities in Female Incarceration Rates, 2000-2015 Samuel L. Myers, Jr., William J. Sabol, and Man Xu, December, 2018“From 2000 to 2016 there was considerable narrowing of the disparity in incarceration rates between black females and white females in America's prisons.”
  • report thumbnail Police stops are still marred by racial discrimination, new data shows. Prison Policy Initiative, October, 2018“Police threatened or used force against nearly 1 million people, who were disproportionately Black or Hispanic.”
  • Racial Profiling in Louisiana: Unconstitutional and Counterproductive Southern Poverty Law Center, September, 2018“For example, in 2016, black people were 2.9 times as likely as white people to be arrested for marijuana possession in Louisiana, despite evidence that black people and white people use marijuana at similar rates.”
  • The Color of Youth Transferred to the Adult Criminal Justice System: Policy & Practice Recommendations Campaign for Youth Justice, September, 2018(Black youth are disproportionately sent to adult court by judges at some of the highest percentages seen in 30 years.)
  • Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Arrests for Drug Possession After California Proposition 47, 2011-2016 Mooney et al., August, 2018“Reducing criminal penalties for drug possession can reduce racial/ethnic disparities in criminal justice exposure and has implications for improving health inequalities linked to social determinants of health.”
  • Risk of Police-Involved Death by Race/Ethnicity and Place, United States, 2012-2018 Paywall :( Frank Edwards, Michael H. Esposito, and Hedwig Lee, August, 2018(Police were responsible for about 8% of all homicides with adult male victims between 2012 and 2018, with Black men having the highest risk of mortality from police violence.)
  • report thumbnail Nowhere to Go: Homelessness among formerly incarcerated people Prison Policy Initiative, August, 2018“Formerly incarcerated people are almost 10 times more likely to be homeless than the general public.”
  • Militarization fails to enhance police safety or reduce crime but may harm police reputation Jonathan Mummolo, August, 2018(This article argues that militarized police units are more often deployed in communities with large shares of African American residents, they fail to enhance officer safety or reduce local crime, and may diminish police reputation in the mass public.)
  • report thumbnail Out of Prison & Out of Work: Unemployment among formerly incarcerated people Prison Policy Initiative, July, 2018(This report calculates that 27% of formerly incarcerated people are looking for a job, but can't find one.)
  • Unequal Treatment: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Miami-Dade Criminal Justice ACLU Florida Greater Miami, July, 2018(This report finds that from arrest to sentencing, racial disparities exist at each decision point in the Miami-Dade County's criminal justice system.)
  • Swept Up in the Sweep: The Impact of Gang Allegations on Immigrant New Yorkers New York Immigration Coalition, May, 2018“By broadly casting immigrant Latinx youth as gang members to be targeted for incarceration and deportation, even the outward pretense of basic rights and due process is pushed to the side.”
  • An Unjust Burden: The Disparate Treatment of Black Americans in the Criminal Justice System Vera Institute of Justice, May, 2018(This brief presents an overview of the ways in which America's history of racism & oppression continues to manifest in the criminal justice system, & a summary of research demonstrating how the system perpetuates the disparate treatment of black people.)
  • From Bondage to Bail Bonds: Putting a Price on Freedom in New Orleans The Data Center, May, 2018(This report examines the extent to which money bail in New Orleans is a descendant of slavery and subsequent practices of racial exploitation.)
  • Racial Bias in Bail Decisions David Arnold, Will Dobbie, and Crystal S. Yang, April, 2018“Estimates from Miami and Philadelphia show that bail judges are racially biased against black defendants, with substantially more racial bias among both inexperienced and part-time judges.”
  • Report to the United Nations on Racial Disparities in the U.S. Criminal Justice System The Sentencing Project, April, 2018“This report chronicles the racial disparity that permeates every stage of the United States criminal justice system, from arrest to trial to sentencing to post prison experiences.”
  • Police Stops and Searches of Indigenous People in Minneapolis: The Roles of Race, Place, and Gender Marina Mileo Gorsuch and Deborah Rho, April, 2018“Our analysis shows that Minneapolis police disproportionately stopped Native Americans in Minneapolis in non-vehicle stops and suspicious vehicle stops, but not in traffic enforcement stops.”
  • Criminalizing Race: Racial Disparities in Plea-Bargaining Carlos Berdejo, April, 2018“Efforts to mitigate racial disparities in sentencing and incarceration rates should consider disparities in the plea-bargaining process and initial charging decisions.”
  • The Relationship Between Structural Racism and Black-White Disparities in Fatal Police Shootings at the State Level Paywall :( Aldina Mesic et al, April, 2018“For every 10-point increase in the state racism index, the Black-White disparity ratio of police shooting rates of people not known to be armed increased by 24%.”
  • A Deeper Dive into Racial Disparities in Policing in Vermont Stephanie Seguino and Nancy Brooks, March, 2018(This report substantiates earlier analyses, finding that Black and Hispanic drivers in Vermont are more likely to be stopped and arrested than White or Asian drivers.)
  • The Scale of Misdemeanor Justice Megan T. Stevenson and Sandra G. Mayson, March, 2018(There are 13.2 million misdemeanor cases filed in the United States each year, but contrary to conventional wisdom, this number is not rising. There are, however, profound racial disparities in the misdemeanor arrest rate for most offense types.)
  • Divided Justice: Trends in Black and White Jail Incarceration, 1990-2013 Vera Institute of Justice, February, 2018(This report looks at incarceration trends from 1990 to 2013, finding that although significant racial disparities still exist between black & white jail incarceration rates, rates for black people are declining while rates for white people are rising.)
  • One War. Two Races. Bias Reigns in Florida's War on Drugs Herald Tribune, January, 2018“Blacks represent 17 percent of Florida’s population but have accounted for 46 percent of the state’s felony drug convictions since 2004.”
  • report thumbnail New poll shows mass incarceration is a Latinx issue Prison Policy Initiative, January, 2018“The majority of Latinxs favor rehabilitation over more punitive responses to crime, such as added police or prisons.”
  • Mass Probation and Inequality: Race, Class, and Gender Disparities in Supervision and Revocation Michelle Phelps, 2018“The results suggest that probation supervision contributes to racial disparities in imprisonment, both by diverting more white defendants to probation initially and by revoking black probationers at greater rates.”
  • 1844 No More New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, December, 2017“Rather than strengthen our democracy, New Jersey’s decision to deny the right to vote to people with criminal convictions deprives its most vulnerable communities of valuable voices needed to affect systemic change.”
  • Jails in Indian Country, 2016 Bureau of Justice Statistics, December, 2017“An estimated 2,540 inmates were held in 80 Indian country jails at midyear 2016, a 1.2% increase from the 2,510 inmates held in 76 facilities at midyear 2015.”
  • An Analysis of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Case Dispositions and Sentencing Outcomes for Criminal Cases Presented to and Processed by the Office of the San Francisco District Attorney John MacDonald & Steven Raphael, December, 2017(This study finds substantial racial & ethnic disparities in criminal justice outcomes that disfavor Black people in particular. These disparities are primarily due to case characteristics related to arrest charges, pre-trial detention, & criminal history.)
  • Racial disparities in health conditions among prisoners compared with the general population Kathryn M. Nowotny, Richard G. Rogers, Jason D. Boardman, December, 2017“The incarcerated population generally has worse health than the noninstitutionalized population, especially for hypertension, heart problems, asthma, kidney problems, stroke, arthritis, and cancer.”
  • report thumbnail The parallel epidemics of incarceration & HIV in the Deep South Prison Policy Initiative, September, 2017“HIV disproportionately impacts communities that are already marginalized by poverty, inadequate resources, discrimination -- and mass incarceration.”
  • report thumbnail What "Stop-and-Frisk" Really Means: Discrimination & Use of Force Prison Policy Initiative, August, 2017“This report analyzes the racially disparate use of force in police stops in New York City in 2011.”
  • It Matters If You're Black or White: Racial Disparities in the Handling of Complaints against North Charleston Police Officers NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., July, 2017“Although 60 percent of the citizen complaints against NCPD officers were filed by Black residents, their complaints were much less likely to be sustained by NCPD than complaints filed by White residents.”
  • report thumbnail Data confirms that police treat Black Americans with less respect Prison Policy Initiative, June, 2017“Analyses of police body cam footage reveals racial disparities in officer respect toward civilians.”
  • Hate Crime Victimization, 2004-2015 Bureau of Justice Statistics, June, 2017“In 2015, the rate of violent hate crime victimization was 0.7 hate crimes per 1,000 persons age 12 or older.”
  • Language from police body camera footage shows racial disparities in officer respect Stanford University, June, 2017“Officers speak with consistently less respect toward black versus white community members, even after controlling for the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, the location of the stop, and the outcome of the stop.”
  • Selling Off Our Freedom: How insurance corporations have taken over our bail system Color of Change and the American Civil Liberties Union, May, 2017“Fewer than 10 insurance companies are behind a significant majority of bonds issued by as many as 25,000 bail bond agents.”
  • report thumbnail Unpacking the connections between race, incarceration, and women's HIV rates Prison Policy Initiative, May, 2017“If it weren't for the racial disparity in male incarceration rates, Black women would have lower rates of HIV infection than white women.”
  • Paying More for Being Poor: Bias and Disparity in California's Traffic Court System Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, May, 2017“The available county-level data shows that African-American people in particular are four to sixteen times more likely to be booked on arrests related to failure to pay an infraction ticket.”
  • Racism & Felony Disenfranchisement: An Intertwined History Brennan Center for Justice, May, 2017“One in every 13 voting-age African Americans cannot vote, a disenfranchisement rate more than four times greater than that of all other Americans.”
  • Still Life: America's Increasing Use of Life and Long-Term Sentences The Sentencing Project, May, 2017“Nearly half (48.3%) of life and virtual life-sentenced individuals are African American, equal to one in five black prisoners overall. As of 2016, 1 in every 9 people in prison was serving a life sentence.”
  • Bullies in Blue: Origins and Consequences of School Policing American Civil Liberties Union, April, 2017“[A]t at its origins, school policing enforced social control over Black and Latino youth who could no longer be kept out of neighborhoods and schools through explicitly discriminatory laws.”
  • Mass incarceration, public health, and widening inequality in the USA Christopher Wildeman, Emily A Wang, April, 2017“Soaring incarceration since the mid-1970s has profoundly affected health in the USA, especially in poor and minority communities.”
  • Race and Wrongful Convictions in the United States National Registry of Exonerations, University of Michigan Law School, March, 2017“Innocent black murder suspects, especially those who are falsely convicted...are additional victims of murders committed by others. Those who have been exonerated spent on average more than 14 years in prison before they were released.”
  • Prison: Evidence of its use and over-use from around the world Institute for Criminal Policy Research, March, 2017“Whether you would end up in prison is also affected by who you are. For example, Roma people make up around 40% of Hungary’s prison population, despite representing only 6% of the national population.”
  • Sentencing Outcomes in U.S. District Courts: Can Offenders' Educational Attainment Guard Against Prevalent Criminal Stereotypes? Travis W. Franklin, Sam Houston State University, February, 2017“[C]ourt actors may be less concerned (or not at all concerned) with factors typically linked to perceptions of dangerousness (e.g., race, ethnicity, age, sex, detention status) when dealing with offenders of higher educational status.”
  • Behind the Badge: How Police View Their Jobs, Key Issues, and Recent Fatal Encounters Between Blacks and Police Pew Research Center, January, 2017“27% of all white officers but 69% of their black colleagues say the protests that followed fatal encounters between police and black citizens have been motivated at least to some extent by a genuine desire to hold police accountable.”
  • Florida: An Outlier in Denying Voting Rights Brennan Center for Justice, December, 2016“With roots tracing back to Reconstruction and the Jim Crow period, racial discrimination has stifled the right to vote in Florida for hundreds of years.”
  • The Geography of Incarceration: Boston Indicators Project, MassINC, and the Massachusetts Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, November, 2016“Many people of color live in Boston neighborhoods with such highly concentrated rates of incarceration that nearly every street—in some cases every other building— contains a resident who has been incarcerated.”
  • Every 25 Seconds: The Human Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use in the United States Human Rights Watch and the ACLU, October, 2016“More than one of every nine arrests by state law enforcement is for drug possession, amounting to more than 1.25 million arrests each year.”
  • Driving While Black: A Report on Racial Profiling in Metro Nashville Police Department Traffic Stops Gideon's Army, October, 2016“Between 2011-2015, MNPD (Metro Nashville Police Department) stopped an average of 1,122 per 1,000 black drivers: more black drivers than were living in Davidson County.”
  • Evaluating the Role of Race in Criminal Justice Adjudications in Delaware John M. MacDonald and Ellen A. Donnelly, University of Pennsylvania, September, 2016“African American-White disparities in incarceration sentences are largely explained by differences in most serious of arrest charge, type of arrest charge, detention between arrest and final disposition, and county location.”
  • Who Pays for Government? Descriptive Representation and Exploitative Revenue Sources Michael W. Sances and Hye Young You, September, 2016“We find municipal governments with higher black populations rely more heavily on fines and fees for revenue. Further, we find that the presence of black city council members significantly reduces - though does not eliminate - this pattern.”
  • report thumbnail Why do we lock juveniles up for life and throw away the key? Race plays a big part. Prison Policy Initiative, September, 2016“The Phillips Black Project found that black youth are twice as likely to receive a juvenile life without parole sentence compared to their white peers for committing the same crime.”
  • Police Violence and Citizen Crime Reporting in the Black Community Professor Matthew Desmond, Harvard University; Professor Andrew Papachristos, Yale University; Professor David Kirk, University of Oxford, September, 2016“This study shows that publicized cases of police violence against unarmed black men have a clear and significant impact on citizen crime reporting.”
  • Unjust: How the broken criminal justice system fails LGBT people of color Center for American Progress, Movement Advancement Project.., August, 2016“This report focuses on LGBT people of color and their interactions with the criminal justice system.”
  • Racial Profiling in Hiring: A Critique of New National Employment Law Project, August, 2016“Ban-the-box is working, both by increasing employment opportunities for people with records and by changing employer attitudes toward hiring people with records.”
  • Investigation of the Baltimore City Police Department U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, August, 2016“[T]he Department of Justice concludes that there is reasonable cause to believe that BPD engages in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the Constitution or federal law.”
  • Is Justice Really Blind? Race and Reversal in US Courts Journal of Legal Studies, July, 2016“[B]lack federal judges are consistently overturned on appeal more often than similar white judges.”
  • The Gavel Gap: Who Sits in Judgment on State Courts? American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, June, 2016“We find that courts are not representative of the people whom they serve -- that is, a gap exists between the bench and the citizens.”
  • Ban the Box, Criminal Records, and Statistical Discrimination: A Field Experiment Amanda Agan and Sonja Starr, June, 2016“Our results confirm that criminal records are a major barrier to employment, but they also support the concern that BTB policies encourage statistical discrimination on the basis of race.”
  • The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in State Prisons The Sentencing Project, June, 2016“This report documents the rates of incarceration for whites, African Americans, and Hispanics, providing racial and ethnic composition as well as rates of disparity for each state.”
  • Voting Rights of Former Felons ACLU of Nebraska, June, 2016“Disturbingly, a decade after our ex-felon voting rights law was adopted, only half of all counties provided correct and accurate information.”
  • Stemming The Rising Tide: Racial & Ethnic Disparities in Youth Incarceration & Strategies for Change W. Haywood Burns Institute, May, 2016“Youth are being incarcerated for longer periods of time, with Black and Latino youth having the longest stays out of home.”
  • Race and the Jury: How the Law is Keeping Minorities off the Jury Stephanie Adamakos, May, 2016“Federal statute requires that registered-voters lists be used as source lists, but many states supplement with Department of Motor Vehicle records of people with licenses...whites are more likely to be included in both of these source lists.”
  • Louisiana Death-Sentenced Cases and Their Reversals, 1976-2015 The Journal of Race, Gender, and Poverty, April, 2016“Not only are these reversal rates extremely high, but the racial discrepancies are shocking as well.”
  • Racial Disparities in Youth Commitments and Arrests The Sentencing Project, April, 2016“As of 2013, black juveniles were more than four times as likely to be committed as white juveniles[.]”
  • Racial Disparities in Florida Safety Belt Law Enforcement ACLU, February, 2016“American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) analysis of the most recent seatbelt citation data confirms that the Florida Safety Belt Law has been applied more often to Black motorists than white motorists.”
  • Lethally Deficient: Direct Appeals in Texas Death Penalty Cases Texas Defender Service, 2016“Review by the U.S. Supreme Court was not sought in 34.6% of the cases surveyed, meaning that defense lawyers waived the first opportunity for federal review in more than a third of Texas death penalty cases decided on direct appeal between 2009 and 2015.”
  • Selective Policing: Racially Disparate Enforcement of Low-Level Offenses in New Jersey ACLU of New Jersey, December, 2015“Racial disparities between Black and White arrests exist in every city studied.”
  • Suspended Childhood: An Analysis of Exclusionary Discipline of Texas' Pre-K and Elementary School Students Texas Appleseed, November, 2015“In the 2013-2014 school year, Texas schools issued 88,310 out-of-school suspensions to young children.”
  • Hate Crime Statistics, 2014 Federal Bureau of Investigation, November, 2015“Of the 5,462 single-bias incidents reported in 2014, 47 percent were racially motivated. Other motivators included sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, gender identity, disability, and gender.”
  • A Multi-Level Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings at the County-Level in the United States, 2011-2014 University of California, Davis, November, 2015“The results provide evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans[.]”
  • The Conditioning Effects of Race and Gender on the Juvenile Court Outcomes of Delinquent and "Neglected" Types of Offenders Justice Quarterly, November, 2015(The main inverse effect for status, probation violation, contempt, misdemeanor property, felony property, felony person, drugs, and other offenses with detention, was conditioned by whether the youth was Black.)
  • Federal Sentencing Disparity: 2005-2012 Bureau of Justice Statistics, October, 2015“Federal Sentencing Disparity, 2005-2012, examines patterns of federal sentencing disparity among white and black offenders, by sentence received, and looks at judicial variation in sentencing since Booker vs. United States, regardless of race.”
  • Diversity on the Force: Where Police Don't Mirror Communities Governing, September, 2015“Despite efforts to improve diversity, minorities remain largely underrepresented in many local police departments.”
  • Race-Of-Victim Discrepancies in Homicides and Executions, Louisiana 1976-2015 Loyola University of New Orleans Journal of Public Interest Law, August, 2015“Black male victims comprise 61% of homicide victims in present day Louisiana, yet their killers have been executed in only 3 cases out of 12,949 homicides since Gregg v Georgia reinstated the death penalty in 1976.”
  • Disproportionate Impact of K-12 School Suspension and Expulsion on Black Students in Southern States University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, August, 2015“In 132 Southern school districts, Blacks were disproportionately suspended at rates five times or higher than their representation in the student population.”
  • Blackstrikes: A Study of the Racially Disparate Use of Preemptory Challenges by the Caddo Parish District Attorney's Office Reprieve Australia, August, 2015“In short, over the course of a ten year period, Caddo parish prosecutors exercised peremptory challenges against black prospective jurors at more than three times the rate at which they exercised peremptory challenges against white prospective jurors.”
  • Stuck in the '70s: The Demographics of California Prosecutors Stanford Criminal Justice Center, July, 2015“Latinos are almost 39 percent of the population but only nine percent of California prosecutors.”
  • report thumbnail In prisons, Blacks and Latinos do the time while Whites get the jobs Prison Policy Initiative, July, 2015“Stark racial and ethnic differences between incarcerated people and staff members continue to persist in Attica, New York State, and across the national prison landscape”
  • Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women African American Policy Forum, July, 2015(The failure to highlight and demand accountability for the countless Black women killed by police over the past two decades leaves Black women unnamed and thus underprotected in the face of their continued vulnerability to racialized police violence.)
  • Investigation of the St. Louis County Family Court St. Louis, Missouri Department of Justice, July, 2015“Black children are almost one-and-a-half times (1.46) more likely than White children to have their cases handled formally, even after introducing control variables such as gender, age, risk factors, and severity of the allegation.”
  • report thumbnail The Racial Geography of Mass Incarceration Prison Policy Initiative, July, 2015“Entirely separate from the more commonly discussed problem of racial disparities in who goes to prison, this data addresses a distressing racial and ethnic disparity in where prisons have been built.”
  • San Francisco Justice Reinvestment Initiative: Racial and ethnic disparities analysis for the reentry council The W. Haywood Burns Institute for Juvenile Justice Fairness & Equity, June, 2015“Black adults are 7.1 times as likely as White adults to be arrested, 11 times as likely to be booked into County Jail, and 10.3 times as likely to be convicted of a crime in San Francisco.”
  • Reducing Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Jails: Recommendations for Local Practice Brennan Center for Justice, June, 2015“Overuse of Pre-Trial Detention: Studies consistently find that African American and Hispanic defendants are more than twice as likely to be detained in jail pending trial.”
  • Racial Inequalities in Connectedness to Imprisoned Individuals in the United States Du Bois Review, May, 2015“We show that 44% of Black women (and 32% of Black men) but only 12% of White women (and 6% of White men) have a family member imprisoned.”
  • San Francisco's Disproportionate Arrest of African American Women Persists Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, April, 2015“African American women, 5.8 percent of San Francisco's total female population, constituted 45.5 percent of all female arrests in 2013.”
  • Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, March, 2015“This investigation has revealed a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct within the Ferguson Police Department that violates the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and federal statutory law.”
  • Stop and Frisk in Chicago ACLU of Illinois, March, 2015“Black Chicagoans were subjected to 72% of all stops, yet constitute just 32% of the city’s population.”
  • In Brief: Examining the Changing Racial Composition of Three States' Prison Populations CSG Justice Center, March, 2015“In each of these cases, closer inspection of the data shows that these states experienced considerable reductions in the overall number of people being admitted to prison, and that the decline in admissions has been steepest for blacks and Hispanics.”
  • Native Lives Matter Lakota People's Law Project, February, 2015“Native American men are admitted to prison at four times the rate of white men and Native women at six-fold the rate of white women.”
  • Black Lives Matter: Eliminating Racial Inequity in the Criminal Justice System Sentencing Project, February, 2015(The report identifies four key features of the criminal justice system that produce racially unequal outcomes, beyond the conditions of socioeconomic inequality that contribute to higher rates of some crimes in marginalized communities.)
  • Reducing Harms to Boys and Young Men of Color from Criminal Justice System Involvement Urban Institute, February, 2015“A natural extension of this work would be to make explicit consideration of the racial impact of proposed policies, as in racial impact statements, into routine tools.”
  • Where Do We Go from Here? Mass Incarceration and the Struggle for Civil Rights Economic Policy Institute, January, 2015“In other words, society chose to use incarceration as a welfare program to deal with the poor, especially since the underprivileged are disproportionately people of color.”
  • Whitewashing the Jury Box: How California Perpetuates the Discriminatory Exclusion of Black and Latinx Jurors Berkeley Law Death Penalty Clinic, 2015“We evaluated nearly 700 cases decided by the California Courts of Appeal from 2006 through 2018, which involved objections to prosecutors' peremptory challenges. In nearly 72% of these cases, district attorneys used their strikes to remove Black jurors.”
  • The Cumulative Probability of Arrest by Age 28 Years in the United States by Disability Status, Race/Ethnicity, and Gender Erin J. McCauley, 2015“Estimates demonstrated that those with disabilities have a higher cumulative probability of arrest than those without. The risk was disproportionately spread across races/ethnicities, with Blacks with disabilities experiencing the highest risk of arrest.”
  • Applying a racial equity lens to fines and fees in the District of Columbia D.C. Policy Center, 2015“Fixed fines and fees can disproportionately harm families of color, both due to discriminatory practices in issuing fines and fees and in the systemic issues of income and wealth inequities that make it more difficult for these families to pay”
  • The criminogenic and psychological effects of police stops on adolescent black and Latino boys Del Toro et al., 2015“Our findings suggest that the single most common proactive policing strategy--directing officers to make contact with individual boys and young men in "high-crime" areas--may impose a terrible cost.”
  • Born Suspect: Stop-and-Frisk Abuses & the Continued Fight to End Racial Profiling in America NAACP, 2015“This report is an analysis of the fight to end racial profiling in New York and the potential for nationwide implementation these efforts in every jurisdiction across the country.”
  • Demographic Differences in Sentencing: An Update to the 2012 Booker Report United States Sentencing Commission, 2015(Black male offenders continue to receive longer federal sentences than similarly situated White male offenders.)
  • CPD Traffic Stops and Resulting Searches in 2013 ACLU of Illinois, December, 2014“City-wide. The rate of black drivers in the stops (46%) is far higher than the rate of black residents in the city population (32%).”
  • Incorporating Racial Equity into Criminal Justice Reform Sentencing Project, October, 2014“Reform strategies that do not directly tackle racial disparity ignore the multifaceted ways in which public safety is produced. Key among these is the perception of the criminal justice system by the community.”
  • Shadow Report of The Sentencing Project to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination: Regarding Racial Disparities in the United States Criminal Justice System Sentencing Project, July, 2014(Our report documents continuing disparities in incarceration, the imposition of juvenile life without parole, the death penalty, and felony disenfranchisement.)
  • Illusion of Justice: Human Rights Abuses in US Terrorism Prosecutions Human Rights Watch and Columbia Law School, July, 2014“This report documents the significant human cost of certain counterterrorism practices, such as aggressive sting operations and unnecessarily restrictive conditions of confinement.”
  • Race and Prosecution in Manhattan Vera Institute of Justice, July, 2014(Blacks and Latinos were particularly likely to be held in pretrial detention for misdemeanor person offenses, followed by misdemeanor drug offenses. Blacks and Latinos were also most likely to have their cases dismissed for misdemeanor drug offenses.)
  • Collatoral Damage A Roadmap to Restore Rights and Status After Arrest or Conviction National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, May, 2014“NACDL recommends a broad national initiative to construct a legal infrastructure that will provide individuals with a criminal record with a clear path to equal opportunity.”
  • Unintended Consequences: Effects of Paternal Incarceration on Child School Readiness and Later Special Education Placement Anna R. Haskins, April, 2014“Mass incarceration facilitates the intergenerational transmission of male behavioral disadvantage, and because of the higher exposure of black children to incarceration, it also plays a role in explaining the persistently low achievement of black boys.”
  • The Color of Corporate Corrections, Part II: Contractual Exemptions and the Overrepresentation of People of Color in Private Prisons Radical Criminology, February, 2014“...this study finds that people of color are overrepresented in private minimum and/or medium security private facilities relative to their public counterparts in each of the nine (9) states examined.”
  • Prosecution and Racial Justice in New York County Technical Report Vera Institute of Justice, January, 2014(For all offenses combined, compared to similarly-situated white defendants, black and Latino defendants were more likely to be detained, to receive a custodial plea offer, and to be incarcerated; but they were also more likely to benefit from dismissals.)
  • Justice in Washing State Survey, 2012 Revised and Updated 2014 The Washington State Minority Health Commission, The Washington State Center for Court Research, 2014“When we asked about their personal encounters with police officers and the courts, we found substantial differences between Whites and African Americans in terms of the frequency of negative encounters.”
  • The Degree of Disadvantage: Incarceration and Inequality in Education Stephanie Ewert, Bryan L. Sykes, and Becky Pettit, November, 2013“Nearly three in ten white male dropouts in the United States can expect to serve time in a state or federal correctional facility in their lifetime, and nearly 60 percent of black male dropouts are imprisoned at some point in their lives...”
  • Criminal Justice in the 21st Century: Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Criminal Justice System National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, October, 2013“We have to question why we are using the long arm of the criminal justice system to arrest... black and Latino men who write their name on a wall, or why we arrest kids for pot in a pocket when we don't arrest other kids for pot.”
  • Report of the Sentencing Project to the UN Human Rights Committee Regarding Racial Disparities in the United States Criminal Justice System The Sentencing Project, August, 2013“If current trends continue, one of every three black American males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime, as can one of every six Latino males--compared to one of every seventeen white males.”
  • Racial Disparities in Arrests in the District of Columbia, 2009-2011 Washington Lawyers' Committee, July, 2013“While there are about as many African Americans aged 18 or older (47.6%) as there are adult whites (42%) living in this city, eight out of 10 adults arrested for a crime in Washington are African American.”
  • Race, Justifiable Homicide, and Stand Your Ground Laws: Analysis of FBI Supplementary Homicide Report Data Urban Institute, July, 2013“Regardless of how the data are analyzed, substantial racial disparities exist in the outcomes of cross-race homicides. In addition, the recent expansion of Stand Your Ground laws in two dozen states appears to worsen the disparity.”
  • The War on Marijuana in Black and White: Billions of Dollars Waster on Racially Biased Arrests American Civil Liberties Union, June, 2013“On average, a Black person is 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person, even though Blacks and whites use marijuana at similar rates”
  • Wisconsin's Mass Incarceration of African American Males: Workforce Challenges for 2013 Employment and Training Institute, University of Wisconsin, April, 2013“From 1990 to 2011 Wisconsin incarcerated 26,222 African American men from Milwaukee County in state correctional facilities. As of January 2012, 20,591 men had been released back into the community and 5,631 were still imprisoned.”
  • The Dose-Response of Time Served in Prison on Mortality: New York State, 1989-2003 Evelyn J. Patterson, University of Vanderbilt, March, 2013“After controlling for a variety of demographic and offense-related factors...each year in prison increased the odds of death by 15.6% in this 1989 to 1993 parole cohort...an increased odds of death of 78% for somebody who spent 5 years in prison.”
  • Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying and its Impact on American Muslims The Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition (MACLC), The Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR), The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF)., March, 2013“Interviewees noted deep apprehension of the NYPD's intentions and practices towards them, including day-to-day interactions with beat-police officers such as filing stolen phone complaints, asking an officer for directions, or reporting hate crimes.”
  • Addressing Racial Disparities In Bail Determinations New York University Journal of Legislation and Public Policy, 2013“...Seventy-five percent of pretrial detainees are charged with relatively minor property crimes, drug offenses or other non-violent acts, and remain in jail simply because the money bond was set in an amount they cannot afford to pay.”
  • Criminal Records, Race, and Redemption New York University Journal of Legislation and Public Policy, 2013“...poor individuals of color disproportionately shoulder the weight of a criminal record.”
  • In Search of Racial Justice: The Role of the Prosecutor New York University Journal of Legislation and Public Policy, 2013“...one of every three African American males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime, as can one of every six Latino males. One of every eighteen African American females and one of every forty-five Hispanic females face a similar fate.”
  • Tracked and Trapped: Youth of Color, Gang Databases and Gang Injunctions Youth Justice Coalition RealSearch Actions Research Center, December, 2012“Currently 291,094 people across California are in the CalGang database. Of these, 94% are male, nearly 20% are African-American, and 66% are Latino.”
  • The Native Hawaiian Justice Task Force Report 2012 The Native Hawaiian Justice Task Force, December, 2012“Implicit, unconscious bias and disparate treatment on the part of workers at all stages of the criminal justice system may explain a portion of the disproportionate representation of Native Hawaiians in the criminal justice system.”
  • The Disparate Treatment of Native Hawaiians In the Criminal Justice System Office of Hawaiian Affairs, November, 2012“An analysis of data, controlling for age, gender, and type of charge, found that for any given determination of guilt, Native Hawaiians are much more likely to get a prison sentence than almost all other groups, except for Native Americans.”
  • Tribal Crime Data Collection Activities Bureau of Justice Statistics, October, 2012“Suspects investigated for violent offenses in Indian country totaled 23% of all federal investigations for violent offenses in FY 2010.”
  • Do Race and Ethnicity Matter in Prosecution? A Review of Empirical Studies Vera Institute of Justice, June, 2012“Most of the 34 studies reviewed here suggest that defendants' or victims' race directly or indirectly influence case outcomes, even when a host of other legal and extra-legal factors are taken into account.”
  • Report of Findings: (investigation of allegations of national origin discrimination) Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, March, 2012“...AOC policy does not provide interpreters in child custody hearings; child support hearings, civil no-contact order 50C proceedings, foreclosures, and divorce proceedings”
  • The Disproportionate Impact of the Criminal Justice System on People of Color in the Capital Region Center for Law and Justice, February, 2012“Statewide, from 2000 to 2011 the number of minorities incarcerated dropped by 29%; in Albany County, the number of minorities incarcerated increased by 60% over the same time period.”
  • A Stubborn Legacy: The Overwhelming Importance of Race in Jury Selection in 173 Post-Batson North Carolina Capital Trials Michigan State University College of Law, 2012“Over the twenty-year period we examined, prosecutors struck eligible black venire members at about 2.5 times the rate they struck eligible venire members who were not black.”
  • Forensic DNA Database Expansion Growing Racial Inequities, Eroding Civil Liberties and Diminishing Returns Generations Ahead, November, 2011“Given the existing racial bias in other aspects of the criminal justice system, we need to ensure that DNA databases do not unfairly and disproportionately affect communities of color.”
  • Breaking Schools' Rules: A Statewide Study of How School Discipline Relates to Students' Success and Juvenile Justice Involvement The Council of State Governments Justice Center, July, 2011“Nearly six in ten public school students studied were suspended or expelled at least once between their seventh- and twelfth-grade school years.”
  • Tribal Crime Data Collection Activities Bureau of Justice Statistics, June, 2011“For the first time, the Bureau of Indian Affairs' (BIA) submissions to the Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) were disaggregated by tribe and reported in Crime in the U.S., 2009.”
  • Justice for All? Challenging Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System Sentencing Project, June, 2011“[The] data generated by the U.S. Department of Justice project that if current trends continue, one of every three black males born today will go to prison in his lifetime, as will one of every six Latino males.”
  • Missouri Vehicle Stops 2009 Annual Report Missouri Attorney General's Office, 2011
  • The Racial Geography of the Federal Death Penalty Washington Law Review Association, December, 2010“Federal death sentences are sought disproportionately where the expansion of the venire from the county to the district level has a dramatic demographic impact on the racial make-up of the jury.”
  • Separate but Unequal The Federal Criminal Justice System in Indian County University of Colorado Law Review, December, 2010“The”
  • Comparing Homicides to Capital Cases East Baton Rouge Parish, 1990-2008 Timothy Lyman, November, 2010([T]here is a less than one-in-ten-thousand chance that the prosecuted cases were a racially random sample drawn from the homicide group.)
  • Stop, Question & Frisk Policing Practices In New York City A Primer Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, March, 2010“In 2009 alone, Blacks and Hispanics combined were stopped 9 times more than Whites.”
  • Created Equal: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the US Criminal Justice System National Council on Crime and Delinquency, March, 2009“African Americans make up 13% of the general US population, yet they constitute 28% of all arrests, 40% of all inmates held in prisons and jails, and 42% of the population on death row.”
  • Compounded Disadvantage Race, Incarceration, and Wage Growth National Poverty Center, October, 2008“Multilevel growth curve models show that black inmates earn considerably less than white inmates, even after considering human capital variables and prior work histories. Furthermore, racial divergence in wages among inmates increases following release...”
  • Racial Disproportionality in the American Prison Population: Using the Blumstein Method to Address the Critical Race and Justice Issue of the 21st Century Justice Policy Journal, September, 2008“Two key themes are that a national figure of explained racial disparity in imprisonment is not generalizable to the states and that drug offenses consistently have one of the lowest amounts of disproportionality explained by arrest.”
  • Racial Disparities in Criminal Court Processing in the United States Sentencing Project, December, 2007“[This report] offers input regarding the nation's compliance, and need to reform current criminal justice practices and was submitted to the United Nations' Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.”
  • Report to U.S. Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination that U.S. Census practices dilute votes of minority populations Demos and Prison Policy Initiative, December, 2007(A report to the Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva on racially discriminatory redistricting practices violating Article 5 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.)
  • Real Impacts: The actual results of Rhode Island's new policy that charges 17-year-olds as adults Rhode Island Family Life Center, October, 2007“[A]lthough it was not an explicit intention of the bill, one of the most important outcomes is that these juveniles will now have adult records, seriously limiting them as they become adults.”
  • America's Cradle to Prison Pipeline Children's Defense Fund, October, 2007“A Black boy born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in his lifetime; a Latino boy a 1 in 6 chance; and a White boy a 1 in 17 chance.”
  • Analysis of the NYCPD's in the Context of Claims of Racial Bias Andrew Gelman, Jeffrey Fagan, and Alex Kiss, September, 2007“[F]or violent crimes and weapons offenses blacks and Hispanics are stopped about twice as often as whites.”
  • Black Victims of Violent Crime Bureau of Justice Statistics, August, 2007“Blacks accounted for 13% of the U.S. population in 2005, but were victims in 15% of all nonfatal violent crimes and nearly half of all homicides.”
  • Who Survives on Death Row? An Individual and Contextual Analysis American Civil Liberties Union, August, 2007“The findings show that despite efforts to transcend an unfortunate racial past, residues of this fierce discrimination evidently still linger, at least when the most morally critical decision about punishment is decided.”
  • Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration by Race and Ethnicity Sentencing Project, July, 2007
  • The Persistent Problem of Racial Disparities in the Federal Death Penalty American Civil Liberties Union, June, 2007“[M]odern Attorneys General seek the death penalty at far higher rates if the victim is White, and White federal defendants are far more likely to have their death charges reduced to life sentences through plea bargaining.”
  • Prisoner-assisted homicide: more 'volunteer' executions loom Amnesty International, May, 2007“Race and mental health appear to be the strongest predictors of who will waive their appeals - most”
  • Contacts between Police and the Public, 2005 Bureau of Justice Statistics, April, 2007“In 2005 police searched 9.5 percent of stopped blacks and 8.8 percent of stopped Hispanics, compared to 3.6 percent of white motorists.”
  • And Justice for Some: Differential Treatment of Youth of Color in the Justice System The National Council on Crime and Delinquency, January, 2007“This report details the accumulated disadvantage for youth of color as they move through the juvenile justice system and, too often, into the adult system.”
  • An Analysis of Racial Disproportionality in Juvenile Confinement An Analysis of Disproportionate Minority Confinement in the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center Council on Crime and Justice, August, 2006“The major findings show that all nine police departments studied refer a disproportionate number of minority juveniles to the JDC.”
  • Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 40 of the Covenant United Nations - Human Rights Committee, July, 2006(The UN expresses numerous concerns about the state of civil and political rights in the United States)
  • Instituting Lasting Reforms for Prisoner Reentry in Philadelphia Urban Institute, June, 2006“Those with multiple periods of incarceration were more likely to be black, single and have more dependents.”
  • Law Enforcement and Arab American Community Relations After September 11, 2001: Engagement in a Time of Uncertainty Vera Institute of Justice, June, 2006“Although community members also reported increases in hate victimization, they expressed greater concern about being victimized by federal policies and practices than by individual acts of harassment or violence.”
  • A Report on Pre- and Post-Katrina Indigent Defense in New Orleans Southern Center for Human Rights, April, 2006“More than six months after Katrina, a majority of [indigent defendants] remain behind bars, where they have languished on average for over a year without any communication with a defense attorney.”
  • Hidden Challenges: Juvenile Justice and Education Issues Affecting Asian and Pacific Islander (API) Youth in Richmond, California National Council on Crime and Delinquency, March, 2006“The intent of [this] report is to provide a detailed assessment of the status of Southeast Asian youth in Richmond. To this end, the report contains data from the areas of juvenile justice and education, with relevant demographic data provided for context”
  • Reducing Racial Disparity While Enhancing Public Safety: Key Findings and Recommendations Council on Crime and Justice, 2006“The racial disparity in Minnesota's justice system is exceptionally high compared to other states. From arrest to imprisonment, the disparity is over twice the national average.”
  • Census of Tribal Justice Agencies in Indian Country, 2002 Bureau of Justice Statistics, December, 2005“Almost 75% (140) of the tribes relied on the States for some justice services (for example, correctional and counseling services).”
  • Human Rights in the Heartland: An assessment of social, economic, civil, and political rights in the Midwest Heartland Alliance, December, 2005“Historically, the U.S. has been a beacon of hope for those seeking safety and opportunity, but our nation falls short of its potential in assuring a full complement of human rights - civil, political, social, economic, and cultural.”
  • Hennepin County Disproportionate Minority Contact Study Examining Extended Jurisdiction Juvenile and Adult Certification Cases Council on Crime and Justice, October, 2005“[R]ace was not significant when considering the disposition of Extended Jurisdiction Juvenile or Adult Certification motioning. Instead, weapons and firearms appear to be the most influential factor in both motioning and dispositions.”
  • Searching for Justice: American Indian Perspectives on Disparities in Minnesota's Criminal Justice System Council on Crime and Justice, August, 2005“This report indicates that in one county, while American Indians make up only 11.5% of the population, they account for over 50% of the arrest rates.”
  • Black Male Incarceration Rates and the Relatively High Rate of AIDS Infection Among African-American Women and Men Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley, July, 2005“Our results reveal that the higher incarceration rates among black males over this period explain a substantial share of the racial disparity in AIDS infection between black women and women of other racial and ethnic groups.”
  • Incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment Prison Policy Initiative, June, 2005(Who imprisons more Blacks?; Current incarceration rates for the U.S. compared with 1993 apartheid South Africa)
  • Root Causes and Solutions to Disparities for Hispanics/Latinos in the Juvenile Justice System Council on Crime and Justice, May, 2005“Statistical analysis indicated that Hispanic/Latino youth were over represented in the juvenile system by 227% in 1990 and by 92% in 2000.”
  • The Governor's Preventing Crime in Virginia's Minority Communities Task Force Department of Criminal Justice Services, March, 2005
  • Race & Imprisonment in Texas: The Disparate Incarceration of Latinos and African Americans in the Lone Star State Justice Policy Institute, February, 2005
  • Don't Mind If I Take a Look, Do Ya? An Examination of Consent Searches and Contraband Hit Rates at Texas Traffic Stops Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, February, 2005(2005 Racial Profiling Report)
  • Racial disparity in sentencing: A review of the literature Sentencing Project, January, 2005
  • Race and Incarceration in Delaware: A Preliminary Consideration Thomas P. Eichler, Published by Delaware Center for Justice and Metropolitan Wilmington Urban League, 2005“Delaware's criminal justice system treats Blacks differently and far less favorably than similarly situated Whites. The data shows that the racial disparities in the criminal justice system are increasing.”
  • American Indians and Crime: A BJS Statistical Profile, 1992-2002 Bureau of Justice Statistics, December, 2004
  • Fifteen Years of Guidelines Sentencing U.S. Sentencing Commission, November, 2004
  • Civil Rights Enforcement by Bush Administration Lags Trac Reports, November, 2004
  • Low Level Offenses in Minneapolis: An Analysis of Arrests and their Outcomes Council on Crime and Justice, October, 2004(The diperate treatment of Black and White people is greater at the hand of the police than in the courts.)
  • The Vanishing Black Electorate: Felony Disenfranchisement In Atlanta, Georgia Sentencing Project, September, 2004
  • Race and Drug Law Enforcement in Seattle Defender Association's Racial Disparity Project, May, 2004
  • Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration Becky Pettit and Bruce Western, May, 2004
  • Racial disparities in incarceration by state, 2000 Prison Policy Initiative, May, 2004(Graphs showing the percentage of each state's total and prison population that is of a particular racial/ethnic group)
  • Schools and Prisons: Fifty Years After Brown v. Board of Education Sentencing Project, April, 2004
  • Incarceration rates by race, 2001: Prison Policy Initiative, April, 2004(Blacks, Whites, Latinos per 100,000 for each state and the U.S.)
  • State Rates of Incarceration by Race Sentencing Project, January, 2004
  • Seeing Black: Race, Crime, and Visual Processing Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2004“Black faces looked more criminal to police officers; the more Black, the more criminal.”
  • Race and Incarceration in Maryland Justice Policy Institute, October, 2003
  • Minnesota Statewide Racial Profiling Study Council on Crime and Justice, September, 2003“Results show that law enforcement officers stopped and searched Black, Latino, and American Indian drivers at greater rates than White drivers, yet found contraband on Blacks, Latinos, and American Indians at lower rates than in searches of White drivers.”
  • Racial Disparities in North Carolina incarceration Prison Policy Initiative, September, 2003
  • Hispanic Prisoners in the United States Sentencing Project, August, 2003
  • Disproportionate Minority Confinement In Massachusetts: Failures in Assessing and Addressing Overrepresentation of Minorities in the Massachusetts Juvenile Justice System American Civil Liberties Union, June, 2003
  • Identifying the HIV/AIDS/STD-related Needs of African American Ex-Offenders Council on Crime and Justice, April, 2003“Health effects associated with incarceration exacerbate existing health disparities in the larger African American community.”
  • Death by discrimination: The continuing role of race in capital cases Amnesty International, April, 2003
  • Incarcerated America: Backgrounder Human Rights Watch, April, 2003
  • The Mark of a Criminal Record Prof. Devah Pager, Northwestern University, March, 2003
  • East Side of St. Paul: Crime Related Needs Assessment Council on Crime and Justice, February, 2003“In order to assess the needs of racial/ethnic communities experiencing heightened criminal activity within their neighborhoods, five focus groups were undertaken: African American, Hmong, Hispanic/Latino, Native American, and Caucasian.”
  • On The Level: Disproportionate Minority Contact in Minnesota's Juvenile Justice System Minnesota Department of Public Safety, October, 2002“African American youth, who comprise just 8% of the youth population White but are 34% of juvenile delinquency arrests. On a smaller scale, American Indian youth are 2% of the youth population but account for 4% of juvenile delinquency arrests.”
  • A Department in Denial: The San Francisco Police Department's Failure to Address Racial Profiling ACLU of Northern California, October, 2002
  • ¿Dónde Está la Justicia? A Call to Action on behalf of Latino and Latina Youth in the U.S. Justice System (English Version) Building Blocks for Youth, July, 2002(Available in English and Spanish)
  • Hispanic Victims of Violent Crime, 1993-2000 Bureau of Justice Statistics, April, 2002
  • Defining the Disparity -Taking A Closer Look: Do Drug Use Patterns Explain Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Drug Arrests in Minnesota Council on Crime and Justice, April, 2002“For African American males the reported drug use rate was 51% greater than White males, while the arrest rate was 400% higher nationally and 1000% higher in Minnesota.”
  • Race and Incarceration in the United States Human Rights Watch, February, 2002“first state-by-state incarceration rates for whites, blacks and Latinos based on actual correctional facility counts”(Note the links to the report and tables on the right)
  • Reducing Disproportionate Minority Confinement: The Multnomah County Oregon Success Story and its Implications Justice Policy Institute, January, 2002
  • Race and Class Penalties in Crack Cocaine Sentencing Sentencing Project, 2002
  • Wisconsin Racial Disparities in Criminal Justice Project Professor Pamela Oliver University of Wisconsin Department of Sociology, 2002
  • The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation Chicago Urban League, 2002
  • African American Males in the Criminal Justice System Council on Crime and Justice, 2002“In 2000, 37.2% of the state's prisoners were African American. By comparison only 3.5% of the population of Minnesota was African American.”
  • Public Opinion on Youth, Crime, and Race: A Guide for Advocates Youth Law Center, October, 2001
  • Mass Incarceration as Reverse Reparations Chicago Urban League, September, 2001
  • Color of the Keystone: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in the Use of Incarceration in Pennsylvania Justice Policy Institute and National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, August, 2001
  • The brotherhood: Racism and intimidation among prison staff at Indiana Correctional Facility-Putnamville Kelsey Kauffman, July, 2001
  • Racism and the administration of justice Amnesty International, July, 2001(Covers the whole world, based in international law)
  • Report to the Supreme Court Systemic Proportionality Review Project 2000-2001 Term New Jersey Supreme Court, June, 2001“there is unsettling statistical evidence indicating that cases involving killers of White victims are more likely to progress to a penalty trial than cases involving killers of African-American victims.”
  • Masking the Divide: How Officially Reported Prison Statistics Distort the Racial and Ethnic Realities of Prison Growth National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, May, 2001
  • Off Balance: Youth, Race & Crime in the News Building Blocks for Youth, April, 2001
  • Race and the Death Penalty in North Carolina An Empirical Analysis: 1993-1997 The Common Sense Foundation, April, 2001
  • Drugs and Disparity: The Racial Impact of Illinois' Practice of Transferring Young Drug Offenders Building Blocks for Youth, April, 2001
  • Violent Victimization and Race, 1993-98 Bureau of Justice Statistics, March, 2001
  • The Color and Geography of Prison Growth in Illinois Chicago Urban League, 2001
  • Color Bind: Prisons and the New American Racism Chicago Urban League, 2001
  • Justice on Trial: Racial Disparities in the American Criminal Justice System Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Leadership Conference Education Fund, 2001(2.5MB)
  • Reducing Racial Disparity in the Criminal Justice System: A Manual for Practitioners and Policymakers Sentencing Project, October, 2000
  • Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs Human Rights Watch, May, 2000
  • And Justice for Some Building Blocks for Youth, April, 2000
  • The Color of Justice An Analysis of Juvenile Adult Court Transfers in California Building Blocks for Youth, February, 2000
  • The Impact of Race and Ethnicity on Charging and Sentencing Processes for Drug Offenders in Three Counties of Washington State Washington State Minority and Justice Commission, December, 1999
  • Driving While Black: Racial Profiling On Our Nation's Highways American Civil Liberties Union, June, 1999“All the evidence to date suggests that using traffic laws for non-traffic purposes has been a disaster for people of color and has deeply eroded public confidence in law enforcement.”
  • Crisis of the Young African American Male and the Criminal Justice System Sentencing Project, April, 1999
  • Prisons as a Growth Industry in Rural America: An Exploratory Discussion of the Effects on Young African American Men in the Inner Cities Tracy Huling, consultant to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, April, 1999
  • American Indians and Crime Bureau of Justice Statistics, February, 1999“American Indians are victims of violent crime at double the rate of the general population”(includes some incarceration statistics)
  • Double Jeopardy: An Assessment of the Felony Drug Provision of the Welfare Reform Act Justice Policy Institute, October, 1998
  • The Death Penalty in Black & White: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Decides Death Penalty Information Center, June, 1998
  • Juvenile Justice and Disproportionality: Patterns of Minority Over-Representation in Washington's Juvenile Justice System State of Washington Sentencing Guidelines Commission, December, 1997
  • Profile of anti-drug law enforcement in urban poverty areas in Massachusetts William N. Brownsberger, November, 1997
  • From Classrooms to Cell-blocks: How Prison Building Affects Higher Education and African American Enrollment in CA Justice Policy Institute, October, 1996(California)
  • Race and drug law enforcement in the state of Georgia Human Rights Watch, July, 1996
  • A Preference for Vengeance: The Death Penalty and the Treatment of Prisoners in Georgia Southern Center for Human Rights, June, 1996
  • Young African Americans and the Criminal Justice System in California: Five Years Later Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, February, 1996
  • Continuing Crime of Black Imprisonment Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, 1995
  • Young Black Male Victims Bureau of Justice Statistics, December, 1994
  • Racial Disparities: in Federal Death Penalty Prosecutions 1988-1994 Death Penalty Information Center, 1994
  • Does the punishment fit the crime? Drug users and drunk drivers, questions of race and class Sentencing Project, May, 1993(Executive summary to longer report not available online)
  • Race of Prisoners Admitted to State and Federal Institutions, 1926-86 Bureau of Justice Statistics, May, 1991“The recorded number of black prisoners In 1986 was nearly 9 times larger than the number recorded In 1926 (80,814 In 1986 versus 9,292 in 1926). The recorded number of white prisoners was 3 times larger (100,874 in 1986 versus 33,626 In 1926)...”
  • Buckle of the Death Belt: The Death Penalty in Microcosm (Chattahoochee Judicial District) Death Penalty Information Center, 1991(racial discrimination in one region of Georgia)
  • Death Penalty Sentencing: Research Indicates Pattern of Racial Disparities Government Accountability Office, February, 1990“Our synthesis of the 28 studies shows a pattern of evidence indicating racial disparities in the charging, sentencing, and imposition of the death penalty....”
  • A Question of Race II: New York and Its Neighbors A Look at the Incarceration of Whites and Minorities in the United States New York State Coalition for Criminal Justice, 1990
  • A Question of Race Minority/White Incarceration in New York State Center for Justice Education, January, 1987
  • Disproportionate Imprisonment of Blacks in the United States: Policy, Practice, Impact, and Change Prepared by Scott Christianson for the National Association of Blacks in Criminal Justice, March, 1982“This report seeks to promote a better understanding of the problem of racially differential imprisonment and attempts to offer some specific goals and strategies for reducing racial disparities in American criminal justice.”

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