Abstract
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 features1,2,3. 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 history4. 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 people5. 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 Zenodo6.
Main
Mass incarceration in the USA is distinguished by striking racial disparities and a rate of imprisonment that surpasses that of all other nations, with 2.12 million people in prisons and jails in 2019 (refs.?1,2,3,7,8,9,10). Owing to a combination of structural inequities and discriminatory enforcement, Black and Latino people are more likely to be stopped by police11, held in jail pre-trial12, charged with more serious crimes13 and sentenced more harshly than white people14,15. These practices have made Black men in the USA six times as likely and Latino men 2.5 times as likely to be incarcerated as white men16,17.
In this study, we demonstrate how the COVID-19 pandemic—which produced the largest, most rapid single-year decrease in prison population in US history—amplified existing inequities in the nation’s criminal legal system4. Across nearly every state and federal prison system, we observe a convergent pattern: a substantial decrease in the overall number of people incarcerated (by approximately 200,000), but a meaningful increase in the proportion of incarcerated Black, Latino and other non-white people. We conclude that sentencing patterns are a central mechanism driving the racial disparity.
The trend we identify represents a substantial deviation from patterns preceding the pandemic. Before COVID-19, incarcerated Black people accounted for a declining share of the total prison population: roughly 41.6% of people incarcerated in state prisons were Black in March 2013, and by March 2020 this number had fallen to 38.9%—a decline of 2.7 percentage points over seven years. During the height of COVID-19 closures, from March 2020 to November 2020, this percentage increased by 0.9 points, erasing much of the progress over the last decade (Figs. 1b and 2 and Supplementary Fig. 2; see Supplementary Fig. 16 for comparison between effects among non-white versus Black populations). The trend we observe at the national level is reproduced exactly among states with the highest Black and Latino populations, and persists in some form in nearly every other state.
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