This diary concerns a report published a few weeks ago by the Sentencing Project. I learned about the report from Jeralyn Merritt of Talk Left, and her post can be found here - http://www.talkleft.com/... - and the report itself is available here - http://sentencingproject.org/... .
The report says that Iowa has the worst black-to-white incarceration ratio of any of the 50 states. Basically, 3 of every 1000 white Iowans are locked up - but 42 of every 1000 black Iowans are locked up, close to 14 times the rate for whites.
How can that NOT be a little bit racist?? Join me below.
Jeralyn didn't spend much time analyzing the report; she was basically just passing it along for those interested. Among those who showed interest in the comments, there was a similar lack of analysis. However, I will analyze those comments myself in a minute.
Full disclosure: I am a PhD, and a former university level instructor in sociology.
So, now, if you've checked out the Talk Left post, and maybe downloaded the pdf and glanced at it, let's talk.
FIrst of all, there really was no particular reason to single out Iowa. The real sweepstakes winner was D.C., with a B-to-W ratio of over 19. But when we look at the top ten states, the result seems rather surprising, considering that "the South" in broad general terms is generally considered by MANY Kos diarists and posters to be the most racist part of the US - by far. I'll go a step further and say that it is the consensus view, attested by MANY diaries and comments, that a large number of the people in "the South" are afflicted with a sort of cultural disease, of which racism is only one part. Indeed, if I said that racism and Republicanism go together, I think I might get a lot of agreement. And there are other things that firmly characterize the South in the minds of many Kossacks - fundamentalist religion, crass materialism, a lack of cultural development, a general unwillingness to see state and especially national government as instruments for improving our society through prudent taxation, a childishly gung-ho view of military action and foreign policy, etc.
Sure, there is also a general recognition that some Southern states can turn blue, or at least purple. It used to be energetically argued here - especially by someone who now hangs at Talk Left (and is doing a great job there) - that Democratic Party electoral strategy should NOT in a sense reward the South by concentrating on breaking the electoral lock in Presidential elections the Republicans have had there. However, to his credit, Markos has always endorsed things like Howard Dean sending resources into deep red states like Mississippi. The election of Jim Webb in Virginia also changed some people's minds about the practicability of making gains for the Democratic Party in southern states.
However, when the discussion turns to racism, pure and simple, there's hardly any doubt that most Kossacks would consider this list of states - KY, TX, LA, SC, FL, OK, ID, TN, AR, AL, MS, GA - as "more racist" than this list: Iowa, Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut, Wisconsin, North and South Dakota, Rhode Island, New York, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania.
And yet the 10 Southern states I just listed, accompanied by "Western redneck" states Oklahoma and Idaho, are ALL at the BOTTOM of the black-to-white lock'em up list, while the 11 Northeastern and Midwestern states are ALL at the TOP.
Let's just say that again so it sinks in. In general, in terms of regions of the country, the Northeast and Midwest lock up proportionately MORE blacks as opposed to whites. The most of any region, in fact, leaving aside D.C., where the B-to-W lockup ratio is almost 20 to 1. The South locks up the FEWEST blacks in proportional terms.
Obviously there is indeed more to racism than incarceration. There are things like access to health care and education and simple employment. There is access to legal representation and to evenhandedness in the justice system. There is what is often referred to here as "white privilege", something that various governmental initiatives like affirmative action seek to counterbalance, and that "red states" are seen as opposing. There is also cultural and "attitude" racism, expressed for example in redlining in mortgage lending, and I think few here would vigorously contest the primacy of the South in that regard.
I would argue, however, that incarceration is itself an important component in other kinds of lack-of-equal-access racism. It seems to me that getting locked up in jail or prison is in a very real sense the "cutting edge" of racism, since when you are locked up you don't even have access to walking down the street (it may be the case that health care and legal services ARE more available for blacks in prison, but I have only heard of a few cases of people getting themselves sent to prison to get health care, and of course jails are a different matter).
I would even go so far as to argue that no matter how much evidence might be brought forward to suggest that Iowans, for example, don't suffer from attitude racism or cultural racism, the lock'em up ratio is a sort of 800-pound gorilla. Which would you rather put up with - muttered curses on the street, lower wages, semi-rigged admissions tests - or prison?? There it is, and you'll have a hard time explaining it away. And we will get to the objections in a minute, but first let's examine some of the data more closely.
As the Sentencing Project report authors clearly note, Southern and certain Western states certainly appear to lock up the most people overall. Taking the Southern and Western states I mentioned already, with the exception of South Carolina, they are all at or near the TOP nationwide in terms of WHITE incarceration. Oklahoma has 740 whites locked up per 100K population. Idaho, Texas, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky and Alabama are in the top ten, with Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas not far behind.
In contrast, many of the states with the WORST black-to-white ratios actually have the LOWEST lockup rates for WHITES: New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, North Dakota, New Hampshire, Vermont, Pennsylvania and Iowa (coming up from the bottom) all lock up significantly fewer white people than the national average, from about a quarter fewer in Iowa to less than half in NY and NJ.
The report makes clear that this is a factor in how bad the B-to-W ratios look. There are a number of states that just lock up fewer people OVERALL. However, some of the Northern states mentioned above still have some of the highest ABSOLUTE lockup rates - not proportional - of blacks. Just in terms of percentage per 100K population, with regard to blacks, the leaders are: South Dakota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Vermont, Utah, Montana, Colorado, Arizona, Oklahoma and Texas, all with rates of black incarceration from 50-120% above the national average. This category is more of a mixed bag. Obviously I'm not doing a very good job of characterizing or distinguishing between different Western states (I tend to consider Texas part of the South). Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Connecticut and New Jersey have absolute black lockup rates above the national average. On the other hand, states that have low absolute rates for blacks include New York, North Carolina, Mississippi, Rhode Island, Arkansas, South Carolina, Alabama, Minnesota, Maine, and Tennessee. That's right - Mississippi. Mississippi locks up about 20% more whites than the national average, but about 20% fewer blacks, and remember we're not talking proportion or ratio right now, but absolute totals.
So we can't simply say that blacks' higher likelihood in PROPORTIONAL terms to get locked up is mitigated in Northern states by overall lower lockup figures for all races. This works for New York and to a lesser extent Rhode Island, but not in many other places.
There are a number of other wrinkles in the data as presented. Most important to my eyes, the authors point out that whites make up 44% of the population of jails, nationally, but only 35% of the prison population. Also, average length of sentences is not calculated. Both these factors would appear to tend to make things even worse for blacks, but we don't have any state-by-state data to determine whether the indications by ratio given here would be weakened or invalidated as a result. It could be that Southern states have higher rates as regards long sentences or as regards prison as opposed to jail - or this could be a wash.
However, for anyone who thinks that I am piling on, I would simply note that in the present diary I have chosen not to discuss the implications of the ratios for HISPANIC-to-white incarceration, but the winners are essentially the same. The top ten states for locking up proportionately MORE HISPANICS than whites: CT, MA, PA, NY, NH, NJ, RI, ND, NE, IA. The lowest Hispanic-to-white ratios (from the bottom): HI, LA, WV, AR, FL, AK, GA, MI, NV, OK, with the Southern states all low in general. A group of Western states (ID, UT, CO, MT) has rates almost as high as those in the Northeast and Midwest.
My preliminary conclusion is that we are suffering from a degree of prejudice with regard to the South - the region in which 60% of all blacks live, notwithstanding its "racist culture". Indeed, if we cite the very low black population of a state like Iowa as a reason why it "cannot be racist", we are closer than we should be to saying that Mississippi's racism is related to the fact that 35% of its population is black. Similarly, if we try to connect high Hispanic-to-white ratios to a recent influx of immigrants, we run up against the fact that the worst H-to-W ratios are in states in New England where the Hispanic populations have been larger for a longer period of time.
I also should note in passing that there are quite a few states for which the data for this survey could not even be obtained - for example, in Wyoming, where apparently such things are none of our business. I'd also like to suggest that an important factor in all this, one which the report does not mention, is the fact that some states benefit financially - or at least they think they do - from high prison populations, and there has been in recent years a movement toward privatization of prisons, something which in commercial terms would certainly not work against high rates of incarceration. It is my impression that this privatization has taken place in the South to a higher degree than elsewhere, but I don't have any data on that.
Now, let's look at some of the reactions of the Talk Left commenters as a way of predicting some of the reactions here.
Cheesehead opined that the high incarceration ratios for blacks in Iowa and Wisconsin were "due to economic status and drug policy". This amounts to saying that in these states, blacks are poorer than whites, AND that this leads to them getting locked up. But surely there are poor white people in Milwaukee and Des Moines! Is it a comfort, if you are poor and white, to know that at least blacks get locked up 5 or 6 (or 12 or 13) times more often than you do? (Indeed, there is room in this report for a certain commonality of interests among poor whites and poor blacks - if we weren't so sure that "racism" in all forms is the property of poor Southern whites above all!) As for the reference to "drug policy", this amounts to saying that in Iowa, black people do all the drug dealing - something which seems unlikely to me, but would still come down to institutional racism in the enforcement of certain laws.
A DC Wonk opines that "nothing causal" can be inferred from two variables (race and incarceration rate). But the report is not talking about the causes of racism: it presents indicators of existing racism, institutional racism to be sure, but we have argued above that incarceration is by ANY measure one of the most serious forms of racism.
Commenter Patrick was gutsy enough to suggest that there are more blacks in prison because they commit more crimes - and so he says by implication that there's really nothing to see here. When blacks go to places like Iowa, they find less competition for their native criminality.
But in pure sociological terms this answer is like "cold fusion" in the eyes of a reputable physicist: "It isn't even wrong." That is, it is impossible. The introduction to the Sentencing Project notes that this country has attained historically massive rates of incarceration - we Americans just luv to lock some folks up. In the last 40 years, the prison population has increased 500%, far more than the increase in population. We have 2.2 MILLION people locked up, a ratio that outstrips China, Russia, and South Africa under apartheid. And 900,000 of these prisoners are black. "If current trends continue, one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime. [...] One in nine (11.7%) African American males between the ages of 25 and 29 is currently incarcerated in a prison or jail."
In sociological terms, for me, this kind of weighting means that the question, do blacks really commit so many crimes? is a framing job worthy of a Karl Rove. NO, THEY DON'T, because it is sociologically impossible for a large population to contain what amounts to a foreign body, a criminal subgroup, without either integrating or expelling this subgroup over time. This same spurious argument followed Jews throughout the Diaspora in the Middle Ages, and no less an authority than Immanuel Kant remarked that it was ridiculous to suppose that "Palestinians" (his term for Jews!) wherever they might be were "naturally" thieves. The same answer should spike the guns of anti-gay speakers who imply that the "ratio of gays" is going to increase until everybody is gay (and thus hasten the end-time), whereas a comparison applied to every society that has ever existed indicates that the ratio of primarily homosexual individuals, even in Ancient Greece, is always somewhere around 7-12%, and there is no such thing as a society without homosexuals.
Is the problem in the justice system, then? Several Talk Left commenters were quick to throw responsibility onto racist courts or racist police forces. But then we're basically saying that Iowa has police and prosecutors and judges that are pretty racist - but the rest of the people there are quite nice. Aren't they even minimally responsible for their own institutions? It seems to me that the best case scenario here would be to say that Midwestern racism is kind of "accidental" - that people had not noticed that their justice system and police forces had become racially prejudiced. And in my mind, there's a question whether that's an excuse at all, whether accidental racism isn't in some ways worse than "intentional" racism.
The same holds for comments about our "police state". We could perfectly well end up with a police state that was not RACIST at all - a state that locks up everybody, with equal opportunity for all.
In general the Talk Left commenters appeared to me to look at everything BUT the broad implications of the report, and its strong indications of at least institutional racism of a very damaging and virulent kind, present at higher levels than we had imagined, in states we might have considered "less racist".
To sum up again: there are a number of areas in which the indication of this report is lacking, and data from these areas MIGHT partially invalidate the surprising conclusion.
- If the ratio for length of sentence is greater in Southern states than in Northern and Midwestern states, this would attenuate the conclusion to a degree. However, the very distinction between prison and jail is blurred to some extent because there are short prison sentences and long jail sentences, depending on the state.
- If the ratio of drug sentences B-to-W (and this was after all the point the Sentencing Project was interested in making based on their data, but data is data) is very highly imbalanced, we MIGHT have a partial case for saying "it's not racism" but just the War on Drugs. However, the continuation of the War on Drugs can equally well be seen as a cover for institutional use of power to imprison blacks disproportionately, and the assumptions that circulate inside that mindset must be termed racist. They may not owe very much to the despised cultural racism supposed to flourish in the South; but it seems impossible to deny that if disproportionate rates of incarceration were REMOVED from the mix, racism in general would be far less severe than it in fact is.
- Nothing is as bad as it seems to be: often, it is worse. The Sentencing Project data shows that low-middle and low-income blacks should think twice about moving to Iowa or similar states. But it also shows that this racially imbalanced justice system is all set to work on Hispanics too. The injustice blacks experience stands as a warning to brown people who are thinking of immigrating. In other words, current conditions are a means of keeping the wedge issue of immigration simmering until right-wing political interests are ready for it to boil. (As a final note, I would like to observe that the data in this report seems to invalidate the "immigrants commit more crimes" theory, especially in the South, where Hispanic lockup rates are sometimes even lower than the rates for whites.)