I'm off to Moscow on Friday to cover a sociobiology conference, so I'm
sending out a far above average number of articles this week. -- Steve Sailer

Imprisonment rates differ wildly
By STEVE SAILER, UPI National Correspondent
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LOS ANGELES, June 14 (UPI) -- The Justice Department announced Wednesday that
in 2000 violent crime was down a striking 46 percent from its peak in 1994,
which was during the crack epidemic.

This result was according to the annual National Crime Victimization Survey
of 160,000 Americans.

But has this tremendous reduction in violence been accomplished at too high
of a price in terms of the greatly increased numbers of imprisoned blacks and
Hispanics?

The National Center on Institutions and Alternatives (www.NCIAnet.org), a
liberal think tank advocating less imprisonment, has released a new report
arguing that, "The overuse of incarceration is causing severe and potentially
irreparable divisions in society." It wants society to "turn the criminal
justice system off its racist path and begin to repair the damage it is
causing."

The NCIA said, "During the twelve years we examined (1985 to 1997), the U.S.
prisoner population more than doubled from 502,376 to 1,240,962. Nationally,
non-whites accounted for 70 percent of this growth in state and federal
prisons."

The number of blacks and Hispanics behind bars grew 180 percent from 1985 to
1997 compared with only 102 percent for Anglo whites.

In "Masking the Divide: How Officially Reported Prison Statistics Distort the
Racial and Ethnic Realities of Prison Growth," the NCIA broke out Hispanics
as a separate category from non-Hispanic whites, which is an improvement on
standard government criminological statistics that often ignore Hispanic
ethnicity. Until now, comparisons of imprisonment rates across states and
races had been confused by law enforcement agencies' tendency to lump
Hispanics in with Anglo whites.

"Because prison statistics don't separate out Hispanic/Latinos from other
racial groups, we believe the scale of the racial divide in American prisons
is masked," stated the report's author, Barry Holman. "Without distinguishing
between Hispanic/Latinos, whites and African Americans, the number of white
prisoners is significantly overstated."

That's because, according to the NCIA, Hispanics have a 3.7-times-higher rate
of imprisonment that non-Hispanic whites, so including Hispanics in the white
total made the black-white gap in imprisonment look less enormous than it
really is. (In reality, blacks are imprisoned 9.1 times more than Anglo
whites.) The NCIA used a variety of statistical techniques to estimate the
Hispanic prison population.

Nationwide in 1997, non-Hispanic whites comprised 34.8 percent of the
prisoners, African-Americans 46.9 percent, Hispanics 16.0 percent, and others
2.3 percent. Overall, the study found that 2.6 percent of the
African-American adult population was imprisoned in 1997, compared to 1.1
percent of Hispanics, and 0.3 percent of non-Hispanic whites. The report does
not break out imprisonment rates for Asian-Americans, but most experts
believe Asians tend to be imprisoned the least of all major groups.

The NCIA argued that this high rate of imprisonment of blacks and Hispanics
is unfair: "Whites seem to go to jail in smaller numbers than their share of
serious crimes would indicate. During the 1990s, whites committed 56 percent
of violent crimes and 62 percent of felonies in the United States, according
to Justice Department statistics."

Iain Murray, who specializes in the analysis of crime statistics at the
Statistical Assessment Service, a Washington D.C., non-profit, non-partisan
public policy organization, was skeptical. "These people are comparing apples
and pears," he said.

He noted that government's crime statistics have the same problem as its
imprisonment statistics -- they lump together Anglo whites and Hispanics. So,
when the NCIA improves the quality of the prison statistics but not the crime
statistics, it artificially exaggerates the perception that Anglo whites are
being treated more leniently.

Further, the more serious the crime (and thus the longer the prison term),
the greater the black-white gap. For example, in 1990 during the heart of the
crack years, blacks committed 11.4 times more homicides per capita than
whites, according to Justice Department statistics. (And that number
under-estimated the black-to-Anglo white ratio because the white category
included many Hispanics.) By 1999, after a huge increase in the number of
blacks in prison, the black-to-white murder ratio was down to only 6.6 to 1.

The NCIA argued, "What is largely driving the expanding prison population is
the "war on drugs ... America's prisons are full to overflowing with half of
all prisoners confined for non-violent offenses and half of these for drug
offenses." It noted, "Admissions to prison for drug offenses increased a
whopping 1,040 percent between 1986 and 1996."

Of course, one should not assume that someone convicted of a non-violent
offense is necessarily a non-violent individual. Al Capone, for example, was
sent to Alcatraz for tax fraud rather than the numerous murders he oversaw.

Indeed, imprisoning huge numbers of people for crack-related offenses was
followed by a remarkable decline in violent crime in the 1990s. Some
statistical analysts, such as University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt,
argue that the growth of imprisonment accounts for half of the drop in crime.

Nonetheless, the huge growth in the prison population is a serious national
issue. The NCIA has helped make possible a more realistic debate by providing
more accurate statistics.

Interestingly, crunching the data in the report's appendices sheds light on a
number of fascinating topics that did not particularly interest the report's
sponsors.

For example, "The Sopranos" television drama has revived New Jersey's
reputation as a hotbed of white criminals. Yet, to the extent that a tendency
to be law-abiding can be estimated from imprisonment rates, that
much-maligned state appears in fact to have the second most law-abiding
non-Hispanic white people in America. According to a new report that breaks
down imprisonment rates by race and ethnicity, white New Jerseyites trail
only the notoriously nice white folks of Minnesota in staying out of prison.

Some findings confirm common sense -- for example, whites in fast-living
Nevada are more than twice as likely to be in prison as whites in the mostly
Mormon neighboring state of Utah.

In contrast, some of the data undermine common myths. Besides polishing the
tarnished image of New Jersey's whites, the numbers also reveal the
surprising news that politically liberal states, not conservative ones, are
likely to have the largest gap between the imprisonment rates of blacks and
whites.

These ratios varied significantly from state to state. While one might expect
that the highest proportion of black-to-white imprisonment would occur in
politically conservative states, the opposite was true. It was in
Democratic-leaning states where blacks had the highest rates of imprisonment
relative to whites.

For instance, the racial gap in the highly liberal, black-dominated District
of Columbia was found to be off the charts. In D.C., a black person is 56
times more likely than a white person to be in prison. The next-largest
racial disparities were found in liberal mainstays Minnesota (a 31-times
higher rate of blacks being in prison) and Wisconsin (22 times higher),
followed by New Jersey, Iowa, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and
Illinois. All of these states voted for Democratic presidential candidate Al
Gore in 2000.

Of course, it's not uncommon for regions that are highly liberal in terms of
national politics to vote for conservatives in local elections. For example,
the Democratic Party's liberal bastions of New York City and Los Angeles each
elected law-and-order Republican mayors in the mid-1990s, following the crack
epidemic crime wave that began in the late 1980s.

The smallest difference in the black-to-white imprisonment rate was found in
liberal Hawaii (only 2.9 to 1). This may have something to do with many
members of Hawaii's small African-American community being active or retired
members of the U.S. armed forces.

After Hawaii, though, the next 10 states closest to black-white racial
equality in imprisonment rates were all Southern or Western states that voted
for George W. Bush. For example, highly conservative Mississippi and South
Carolina each imprisoned blacks only six times more often than whites per
person, compared to the national average of nine times more often.

Eighteen of the 20 states with the least disparity between blacks and whites
voted for Bush in 2000. These below-average racial ratios are driven in part
by the tendency of whites in Republican states to get themselves thrown in
prison more often than whites in Democratic states. The highest white
imprisonment rates tend to be in old frontier states of the Wild West.

The most often locked up whites are in Alaska, followed by Oklahoma, Nevada,
Arizona and Texas.

For example, to focus on two large states, whites in highly Republican Texas
are 3.4 times as likely to be in the penitentiary compared to whites in
highly Democratic New York. Does that mean white Texans are much more
criminally inclined than white New Yorkers? Or is the criminal justice system
that much harsher in Texas? Or are both true to some degree?

These are difficult questions. For many years, states differed significantly
in length of prison sentences handed out, but in recent years federal minimum
sentencing guidelines have reduced states' discretionary power. So, the
evidence suggests that white Texans really do tend to be less law-abiding
than white New Yorkers.

The same general pattern of liberal states having the highest ratio of
minority-to-white imprisonment rates are found for Hispanics as well as
African-Americans. Hispanics are 12 times more likely than whites to be in
prison in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, 10 times more likely in New York, and
nine times more likely in Massachusetts and Minnesota. All of these states
voted for Gore.

Overall, though, class and race differences within the overall Hispanic
population appear to be a better predictor of a state's Hispanic-to-white
imprisonment ratio than the state's presidential voting tendencies.

Among states with a large Hispanic population, the closest to Hispanic vs.
white equality in imprisonment rates is found in Florida. In the Sunshine
state, a Hispanic is only 1.2 times more likely to be in custody than a
white. That may be because Florida is home to a large middle-class, primarily
white Cuban population.

At the other end of the scale are those Northeastern states, such as
Connecticut and New York, where there is a large underclass Hispanic
population of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. These Hispanic nationalities tend
to be a mixture of white and black.

In between Florida and the Northeast in terms of racial equality fall Western
states whose Hispanic populations are largely working class Mexicans and
Central Americans. These ethnic groups tend to be comprised of admixtures of
whites and New World Indians.

Western states where whites tend to get themselves thrown in prison at above
average rates tend to have fairly small differences in imprisonment between
their whites and their Hispanics. In Nevada -- where whites, not
surprisingly, wind up in cells almost twice as frequently as the national
white average -- the Hispanic-to-white imprisonment ratio is only 1.5 to one.
In Texas, it's 2.2- to-1 and in California, another state with a high rate of
whites in custody, the ratio is only 2.4-to-1.

On the other hand, in Utah, where a majority of whites are Mormons, the
Hispanic to white imprisonment proportion is a substantial 4.4-to-1. This
Hispanic-to-white ratio is also above 4-to-1 in Colorado and Washington,
where relatively few whites get sent to jail.

Across all races, the fewest prisoners per capita were found in the
cold-weather, mostly white states of Minnesota, North Dakota and Maine. Cold
weather tends to discourage street crime.

In contrast, the mostly black District of Columbia had by far the highest
overall imprisonment rate. The next-most-locked-up citizenry was found in
Texas, a state with sizable fractions of both African-Americans and
Hispanics, along with a white population that is far above average in finding
itself behind bars.

Not even frigid weather could keep Alaskans from winding up in prison almost
as often as Texans.

The seemingly mild little state of Delaware came next for highest
imprisonment rate, followed by spicy Louisiana, then Oklahoma, South
Carolina, Nevada, Mississippi, Arizona, and supposedly starchy Connecticut.

-- Copyright 2001 by United Press International. All rights reserved. --