The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the largest decline in the U. S. population. UU in the history of the country. Now, newly collected knowledge shows that whites have benefited disproportionately from this fall.
Toward the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, the proportion of blacks and Latinos in the U. S. criminal population declinedThe U. S. population began to increase, while the proportion of whites began to decline. The researchers who made the surprising discovery, published April 19 in Nature1, characterize it. largely to the shorter sentences, on average, that whites get in U. S. courts. (Although the word Latino is used in this story, the study included women, men, and other people of other genders where data was available. )
“This location is unforeseen because of the progress made in recent decades in reducing criminal populations and racial disparities,” says Robert Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the length of the U. S. criminal population has slowed. UU. se dropped by at least 17%: Courts in nearly every state closed, admissions fell to about 30% of pre-pandemic levels, and about 200,000 others were released.
To examine the effect of this change on the racial composition of offenders, researchers in biology, mathematics, knowledge sciences and history compiled more than 20 years of demographic data on criminal populations in all 50 states and Washington DC.
Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately incarcerated in the United States relative to their percentage of the general population. The researchers found that the proportion of other black people incarcerated had declined in the seven years leading up to 2020 (see “How COVID Changed Racial Disparities in U. S. Prisons”). UU”). In March 2013, other blacks accounted for approximately 41. 6% of the prison population. By March 2020, the percentage had fallen to 38. 9%. But in November 2020, at the height of COVID-19 restrictions, the percentage of other incarcerated people who were black rose to 39. 8%.
Conversely, the researchers looked at racial differences in admissions, releases and convictions. Neither admissions nor releases alone can set the trend.
But the researchers found that the trend can be largely explained through the longer sentences blacks receive, on average, in the United States, combined with pandemic-induced relief in admissions.
“Blacks serve on average 20 longer sentences than whites,” says Brennan Klein, a network scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and co-author of the study.
The researchers also found that the proportion of other incarcerated people who were Latino increased during the same period, though not as much as the proportion of black people. This is basically because the differences in sentencing between Latinos and whites vary greatly from state to state. For example, in Illinois, blacks and Latinos serve longer sentences than whites, however, in Texas, the sentences of whites and Latinos are similarly long.
By the end of 2021, the proportion of other people incarcerated in the U. S. will be increasingU. S. citizens who were black or Latino had returned to pre-pandemic levels, as admission rates began to rise. formula deals with racial inequality.
“We can see how we condemn people, who we condemn and how long we condemn people. And that will only help us reduce those really alarming disparities in our criminal justice system,” says Elizabeth Hinton, a historian at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and co-author of the study.
The findings may also replace lawmakers’ efforts to reduce racial inequality in the system, says Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, a sociologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
Often, the focus is on decriminalizing certain behaviors to avoid disproportionate incarceration of certain racial groups and on using releases as an “exit valve” to mitigate beyond injustices, he says. “I think what makes this article really difficult is that we can see that, despite the review of admissions and releases, the conviction has had this huge, lasting effect of racism. “
The study’s authors say there are also lessons to be learned from the hurdles they faced in collecting and normalizing data, especially the other strategies that criminal systems in the U. S. have come up with. U. S. They use to track the breed.
Nature 616, 640 (2023)
DOI: https://doi. org/10. 1038/d41586-023-01311-7
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