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Title: What Have We Learned about Incarceration and Race? Lessons from 30 years of Research

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2013

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Abstract: America’s prisons disproportionately house African American males. Incarceration has become almost a norm for the experience of many blacks. One common explanation for the high concentration of black males in prisons and jails is the rise of drug use and drug sales – particularly of low-priced crack cocaine – in the 1980s. This explanation proffered by Fryer, et al. 1 and in the popular media undermines an alternative causal explanation for the rise of black incarceration explored in a series of co-authored books and articles over the past 30 years by Myers that argue that there are clear labor market equilibrating effects of black male incarceration and that explicit discrimination in the criminal justice system explains some if not most of the racial disparity in incarceration.2 The discrimination comes in the form of discrimination in stops and frisks, in arrests, in bail setting and release while pending trial, in conviction rates and guilty pleas, in sentence lengths and ultimately in time served. The main distinction between the conventional wisdom – that blacks disproportionately sell and use drugs and therefore are disproportionately arrested and convicted – and the alternative view that racial disparities in incarceration serves a functional purpose in labor markets is a distinction between behavioral explanations for the rise in incarceration vs. structural explanations. This paper reviews the stylized facts about black incarceration rates from 1970 to the present and explores the variety of explanations for the growth in black imprisonment. Two specific empirical tests are conducted in this review. One is a test of the hypothesis that there is an efficiency justification for the racial differential in imprisonment. Using decades-old federal prison data I show the existence of substantial racial discrimination in sentencing that cannot be attributable to racial differences in anticipated recidivism rates. A second test examines the hypothesis that the rise in racial disparities in incarceration is due to increases in arrests for drugs. Surprisingly and quite contrary to popular opinion, I find that increased arrests for drugs had a larger impact on white arrests than on black arrests. The paper then summarizes some of the consequences of the huge racial disparity in incarceration and suggests implications for future research.

Url: https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2016/retrieve.php?pdfid=1455

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Authors: Myers, Samuel, L

Publisher: University of Minnesota

Data Collections: IPUMS CPS

Topics: Crime and Deviance, Race and Ethnicity

Countries: United States