Oliver: Imprisonment patterns show racial tilt

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The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, but this fact hides a potentially more serious problem, says Pamela Oliver, professor of sociology.

Oliver says African-Americans in the United States are imprisoned at 6.6 times the rate of European Americans, and Wisconsin has the second largest racial disparity of this kind in the nation.

“The astronomical imprisonment rates of racial minorities in the U.S. point to serious social problems,” Oliver says.

In a recent research proposal that she and assistant professor of sociology Marino Bruce sent to the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Justice, Oliver outlines the probable causes and consequences of these racial differences in imprisonment rates.

Oliver partly attributes the increase in incarceration rates in the United States, especially among African-Americans, to several historical trends, including policy changes in the 1970s that began the war on drugs and provided more money for police and prisons. Tougher sentences that persisted through the 1980s and 1990s also contributed to rising rates.

As political rhetoric against crime has escalated since the 1970s, so has aggressive policing, Oliver says. One example is “broken window” policing, in which officers arrest juveniles for minor offenses to deter them from committing serious crimes later.

“Public support for aggressive policing seems to be associated with white fear of black crime,” Oliver says. “I’m hypothesizing that black migration into white areas triggers an aggressive police response.”

Higher imprisonment rates for African-Americans tend to be found in areas where blacks make up a smaller proportion of the population. Wisconsin fits this profile, Oliver says, and the disparity grows even larger because the imprisonment rate for black Americans is rising faster than the national average, while the incarceration rate for whites is increasing more slowly than average. This pattern is repeated in Dane County, about 4 percent black, which has double the imprisonment rate of Milwaukee County, 25 percent black.

Oliver says high imprisonment rates and aggressive policing may actually contribute to increased crime. “Imprisonment increases family disruption and economic distress in African-American communities, and both of these are major causes of crime,” she says.

The nature of most crimes that create this racial disparity also suggests deeper social problems, Oliver says. Most of the gap between black and white imprisonment rates is due to property and drug offenses, which are primarily caused by social inequity. “Think about Robin Hood,” Oliver says. “If there are gross inequalities, you get a lot of theft.”

Oliver hopes this study will pinpoint exactly what is causing racial disparities in imprisonment, how these disparities affect crime rates, and what solutions can be developed to influence crime policy.

For now, Oliver says, it is important to realize that, directly or indirectly, recent politics have created the racially unbalanced imprisonment rates of today.

“This is not a legacy of slavery or Jim Crow,” she says. “It’s a result of what we’ve been doing for the past 25 years.”