The finding suggests the COVID19 pandemic may have modestly exacerbated racial disparities in the criminal justice system by disadvantaging Black prisoners.
The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have reversed a promising trend in the racial makeup of U.S. prisoners. In recent years, Black people have comprised a smaller percentage of the incarcerated population than in decades past. But in 2020, the percentage of Black people behind bars increased slightly, despite a sharp decline in the overall prisoner population, according to a new study.
The COVID-19 pandemic had a big impact on prisoner numbers. In an effort to curb the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, several states released prisoners early, and many trials were suspended. One year into the pandemic, the authors found, the number of incarcerated people had dropped 17%, bringing the overall prison population to levels not seen since the past century.
The result was a public set of more than 9000 data points across more than 20 years. The data revealed that although the total prison population declined rapidly in March 2020, the number of incarcerated Black people increased by almost 1% in the first year of the pandemic. It then returned to prepandemic levels by 2022. The researchers also found the Latino prison population increased slightly, about 0.2%, but quickly dropped back to prepandemic levels.
The 1% increase is very small, so it may not mean much in the grand scheme of things, says Shawn Bushway, an economist and criminologist at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit policy research institute, who was not involved in the study. He thinks the authors are “essentially making a big deal over a slight blip that goes down within a year.”
To figure out what could be causing the disparity, Klein’s team looked at the racial differences in admissions and release records in a sample of 18 states. In every state except Nebraska, the authors found, courts closed at the beginning of the pandemic, which reduced or even halted prison admissions for months. The admissions of Black people were even lower than the admissions for white people, which wouldn’t explain the blip.
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