Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA.
Institute on Policing, Incarceration & Public Safety, The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Nature. 2023 May;617(7960):344-350. doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-05980-2. Epub 2023 Apr 19.
The criminal legal system in the USA drives an incarceration rate that is the highest on the planet, with disparities by class and race among its signature features. During the first year of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the number of incarcerated people in the USA decreased by at least 17%-the largest, fastest reduction in prison population in American history. Here we ask how this reduction influenced the racial composition of US prisons and consider possible mechanisms for these dynamics. Using an original dataset curated from public sources on prison demographics across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, we show that incarcerated white people benefited disproportionately from the decrease in the US prison population and that the fraction of incarcerated Black and Latino people sharply increased. This pattern of increased racial disparity exists across prison systems in nearly every state and reverses a decade-long trend before 2020 and the onset of COVID-19, when the proportion of incarcerated white people was increasing amid declining numbers of incarcerated Black people. Although a variety of factors underlie these trends, we find that racial inequities in average sentence length are a major contributor. Ultimately, this study reveals how disruptions caused by COVID-19 exacerbated racial inequalities in the criminal legal system, and highlights key forces that sustain mass incarceration. To advance opportunities for data-driven social science, we publicly released the data associated with this study at Zenodo.
美国的刑事法律制度导致其监禁率位居全球之首，其特点是存在阶级和种族差异。在 2019 年冠状病毒病（COVID-19）大流行的第一年，美国被监禁人数至少减少了 17%-这是美国历史上监狱人口最大、最快的减少。在这里，我们想知道这种减少如何影响美国监狱的种族构成，并考虑这些动态的可能机制。我们使用从全美 50 个州和哥伦比亚特区的公共来源整理的原始数据集来展示被监禁的白人如何不成比例地从美国监狱人口的减少中受益，以及被监禁的黑人和拉丁裔人的比例急剧增加。这种种族差异模式存在于几乎每个州的监狱系统中，与 2020 年 COVID-19 大流行之前和大流行之前相反，当时在被监禁的黑人人数减少的情况下，被监禁的白人比例却在增加。尽管这些趋势有多种因素，但我们发现平均刑期的种族不平等是一个主要因素。最终，这项研究揭示了 COVID-19 造成的破坏如何加剧刑事法律制度中的种族不平等，并强调了维持大规模监禁的关键力量。为了推进数据驱动的社会科学机会，我们在 Zenodo 上公开发布了这项研究相关的数据。
