9617989 Winship The racial composition of U.S. prisons has gone from being less than 25% black sixty-five years ago to being approximately 50% black today. This has occurred along with the substantial improvements in the social and economic status of blacks over this same period. Little research has been done to explain why this change has occurred. This research will examine this change in the racial composition of U.S. prisons through studying factors which might have impacted it. The investigator proposes to more thoroughly and rigorously test the importance of factors examined in prior studies of increases in crime among blacks (i.e., regional migration, differential population growth, urbanization, "the war on drugs," increases in female-headed households, black youth unemployment and the decline in manufacturing). The investigator will create an integrated data base using information from the 1940-1990 U.S. Census PUMS data sets and the U.S. Department of Justice, Uniform Crime Reports Arrest Data from 1960-1990. A process model for imprisonment will be developed and components of this model will be estimated using Poisson regression methods. ***
