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  • The Marshall Project

    A Mass Incarceration Mystery

    Why are black imprisonment rates going down? Four theories.
    by Eli Hager Dec 15, 2017 6 minutes

    One of the most damning features of the U.S. criminal justice system is its vast racial inequity. Black people in this country are imprisoned at more than 5 times the rate of whites; one in 10 black children has a parent behind bars, compared with about one in 60 white kids, according to the Stanford Center on Poverty & Inequality.

    The crisis has persisted for so long that it has nearly become an accepted norm.

    So it may come as a surprise to learn that for the last 15 years, racial disparities in the American prison system have actually been on the decline, according to a Marshall Project analysis of yearly reports by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting system.

    Between 2000 and 2015, the imprisonment rate of black men dropped by more than 24 percent. At the same time, the white male rate increased slightly, the BJS numbers indicate.

    Among women, the trend, the racial disparity between black and white women’s incarceration was once 6 to 1. Now it’s 2 to 1.

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