Pamela Oliver University of Wisconsin, Madison
This pilot project will examine the feasibility of creating a database that will allow the PI to study both the overall trend of rising imprisonment and rising racial disparities in imprisonment, and geographical and temporal differences in these trends. The PI will use official data sets on arrests, imprisonment merged with social, economic, and demographic factors to create the new longitudinal data set that allow one to control for current and previous reported crimes and race-specific arrest rates as well as social factors in predicting imprisonment rates. Cross-sectionally, the most serious crime is found to account for very little of the racial disparity in prison admissions; differential arrest rates and differential prison/arrest ratios in drug offenses and property crimes account for the majority of imprisonment disparity. The research seeks to determine the factors that lead to high enforcement levels against African Americans for drug offenses and lower-level offenses. A range of hypotheses will be tested, i.e., this enforcement arises as a reaction to prior elevated levels of serious violent crimes, to increasing in-migration or integration of minorities and whites, to exogenous macroeconomic or political factors that affect crime or policing, or to "shocks" such as drug panics. Secondly, it seeks to identify the consequences of high rates of imprisonment of African Americans, testing the hypothesis that, net of controls, black imprisonment rates adversely affects black economic well-being and family stability in a manner that indirectly contribute to increasing crime rates
Existing official data sets will be processed to create this new longitudinal data set containing county-level data on race-and offense-specific arrest and incarceration rates, along with a wide variety of social, economic and legal indicators. The data set will be constructed for the time period of 1983-1997 and completed by merging data from the National Corrections Reporting Program and the Uniform Crime Reports, along with other data on law enforcement, corrections, social, economic and demographic factors from the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Justice Statistics and other sources.
