PRISONER DEMOGRAPHICS

WHAT DO THEY LOOK LIKE?

WHAT ARE THE DEMOGRAPHICS?

Ike Griffin


Further argument for our social ills stemming from our being unprepared to change from a rural culture to an urban culture can be found in the fact that crime continues to be an urban problem. Almost all crime, at least the crime for which people are caught, tried and sentenced in these post-modern times, takes place in urban settings. Broadly accepted corrections statistics vividly highlight the problem for us:
 90% of prisoners come from urban settings.
 95% of all inmates will finally be released back into society, having spent time in a graduate program for crime called “prison.”
 90% of those released will go back to the community from which they came.
 Most of them will re-offend.

The demographics of America’s prisons closely parallel the demographics of her most intensely urban settings. Bruce Katz, Chief of Staff at HUD from 1993 to 1996, outlined the affect of decentralization of urban economies.
“Now the decentralization of the economy has three kinds of spatial effects. The first is on the central city. What we’ve seen since the early 1970s is a growing, alarming concentration of poverty in the central cities. The number of people living in the neighborhoods of high poverty in this country grew from about 4.1 million people in 1970 to about 8 million people in 1990. These are the number of people living in neighborhoods of high poverty where the poverty rate is 40 percent or more. In certain cities like Detroit or Miami, literally 40 percent of the population, of the entire population, is living in neighborhoods of high poverty.” (Address by Bruce Katz, Congregations, the Government and Social Justice, a Brookings Community Development Summit, December 14, 1999, The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.)


Enduring consistency of these demographics has led police organizations to rely upon “profiling” as a means of limiting the scope of search and seizure procedures, thereby setting in motion a wheel of injustice reminiscent of a perpetual motion machine. While vastly more efficient than random sampling for police operations, the result of profiling tends to concentrate urban African American males in prison.

White males and others who populate rural settings tend to be winnowed out of the criminal justice process at several levels; first in the search and seizure process, then in the review process, where those coming from seemingly stable community situations tend to be remanded to their community more than those coming from high poverty/high crime communities. Of course, at the trial stage, those who have resources to throw into the defense effort have a distinct advantage over those of lesser means to escape being sentenced to prison. The wheel turns. Having experienced prison, they are more likely to re-offend, and the wheel turns. Those who are children of parents who have been incarcerated are more than six times more likely to experience prison, and the wheel turns.

As of 1998, forty-seven percent of the adult prison population was made up of African Americans. The percentage rose to a rumored fifty-four percent before retreating to about 50% in 2008. Yes, that’s right! Although African Americans come from less than fifteen percent of the United States total population, they make up near fifty percent of the prison population. They make up a lesser percentage of those receiving a death-sentence.

The American Correctional Association, using Bureau of Justice Statistics, reports:
RACE - INCARCERATED - DEATH SENTENCE
White - 34% - 46%
Black - 47% - 43%
Hispanic - 16% - 09%
All Others - 03% - 02%