This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The accumulated social science evidence suggests that black and Hispanic convicted defendants tend to be significantly more likely than white defendants to receive a sentence of imprisonment, and that convicted females are significantly less likely to be sentenced to prison than males. This project focuses on whether these demographic disparities in the probability of incarceration have changed during the past two decades in American urban areas and whether any observed changes are associated with other social, economic, and political shifts that have occurred during the same period.
The project examines three specific research questions: (1) Have racial, ethnic, and gender differences in the probability of incarceration among convicted persons changed during the past two decades?; (2) Have racial, ethnic, and gender differences in the probability of incarceration during the past two decades varied across urban counties and states?; and (3) What social, economic, and policy conditions have been most influential in shaping trends in racial, ethnic, and gender differences in the probability of incarceration within and across jurisdictions in the U.S. over this period? These questions are addressed with a multilevel analysis of more than 90,000 criminal convictions in urban American courts between 1990 and 2008. The project focuses on absolute and relative trends in the probability of incarceration for Latinos, non-Latino blacks, non-Latino whites, males, and females, as well as gender-specific racial and ethnic sub-groups. Particular attention is devoted to assessing whether shifts in sentencing policies, changes in racial and gender attitudes, and reductions in objective group differences in social and economic conditions have yielded changes in demographic disparities in the probability of incarceration.
The results will illuminate the social conditions and public policies that characterize places in which racial, ethnic, and gender disparities are smaller and where they have declined most significantly during the past two decades.
