Racial inequalities deepened in US prisons during COVID

TheCOVID-19 pandemicbrought about the largest decrease of the US prison population in the country’s history. Now, newly compiled data show that white people disproportionately benefited from this fall.

Around the start of the pandemic in early 2020, the proportions of Black and Latino people in the US prison population began to increase, while the proportion of white people started decreasing. The researchers who made the surprising discovery,published on 19 April inNature¹, attribute it largely to the shorter sentencing, on average, that white people receive in US courts. (Although the word Latino is used throughout this story, the study included women, men and people of other genders where data were available.)

“This finding is somewhat unexpected because of the progress that’s been made in recent decades in reducing prison populations and racial disparities in them,” says Robert Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Falling population

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the size of the US prison population dropped by at least 17%: courts in almost every state closed, admissions fell to about 30% of pre-pandemic levels and roughly 200,000 people were released.

To investigate the impact of this change on the racial composition of prisons, researchers in biology, mathematics, data science and history compiled more than 20 years’ worth of demographic records on prison populations in all 50 states and Washington DC.

黑人和拉丁裔人不成比例的公司arcerated in the United States relative to their share of the general population. The researchers found that the proportion of incarcerated Black people had been decreasing in the seven years before 2020 (see ‘How COVID changed racial disparities in US prisons’). In March 2013, Black people accounted for about 41.6% of prison populations. By March 2020, the percentage had fallen to 38.9%. But by November 2020, during the height of COVID-19 restrictions, the percentage of incarcerated people who were Black climbed back up to 39.8%.

Surprising reversal

To explain the reversal, the researchers examined racial differences in admissions, releases and sentencing. Neither admissions nor releases alone could explain the trend.

But researchers found that the trend could be explained largely by the longer sentences that Black people receive, on average, in the United States, combined with the pandemic-induced reduction in admissions.

“Black people are, on average, serving sentences that are 20% longer than white people,” says Brennan Klein, a network scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and a co-author of the study.

The researchers also found that the proportion of imprisoned people who were Latino increased over the same period, but not by as much as the proportion of those who were Black. This was mainly because the differences in sentencing time for Latino people compared with white people vary considerably between states. For example, in Illinois, both Black and Latino people serve longer sentences than white people do, but in Texas, white and Latino people’s sentences are similar in duration.

Policy lessons

By the end of 2021, the proportion of incarcerated people in the United States who were Black or Latino had returned to the level before the pandemic, as admission rates began to increase. But the study’s authors hope their results will help to reshape how the criminal-justice system addresses racial inequalities.

“We can look at the way that we sentence people, who we sentence and how long we sentence people. And that alone will help us reduce these really alarming disparities in our prison system,” says Elizabeth Hinton, a historian at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and a co-author of the study.

The results could also change how policymakers focus efforts to reduce racial inequities in the system, says Nicole Gonazalez Van Cleve, a sociologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Often, the focus is on decriminalizing certain behaviours to avoid disproportionately incarcerating certain racial groups, and using releases as an ‘escape valve’ to ease past injustices, she says. “I think what makes this paper really powerful is that we can see that, despite looking at the admissions and the releases, the sentencing still had this enormous, enduring effect of racism.”

The study authors say that there also lessons to be learnt from the barriers that they faced to gathering and standardizing the data, most importantly the very different methods that criminal systems across the United States use to track race.