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Date: Mon, 3 Mar 1997 17:37:47 -0800 (PST)
From: Brian Scearce <bls@best.com>
Subject: Prison demographics

Since this came up on the list, I checked out some Department of Justice statistics. My figures are a mish-mash of several available reports. I've tried to get data as close as possible to 1994, but some of the numbers are from earlier.

Populations are in thousands.

Race    In jail State   Federal Total   Population      Rate
                prison  prison          (millions)      (per 100k)
------------------------------------------------------------------
All     490     959     95      1544    261              592
White   192         397          589    192              307
Black   215         456          671     31             2165
Hisp.    76         138          214     26              823
Other     8         ???          ???     10              ???

Sorry for the mangled "prison" columns; the report gave totals broken down by state/federal, but the racial detail lines only gave total prison sums.

As a sanity check, this fits with the DOJ estimates that blacks are about seven times as likely as whites to be in jail.

The "Prison" report says that about five million people were "under some form of correctional supervision" at the end of 1993. The other 3.5 million who aren't incarcerated are on parole (about 700,000) or probation (about 290 million).

Assuming that the racial breakdown of non-incarcerated offenders breaks down the same way as jailed ones, that means about 1.5 million blacks are on parole or probation, for a total "under correctional supervision" of about 2.2 million, or a rate of 7100 per 100k.

Having gone all through this, I can't remember what the original claim was (something like half of black men in their twenties under correctional supervision?). Getting from 7% to 50% is a bit of a climb.

The US Census figures are again maddeningly over-summarized, but in 1994 there were 19 million men in their 20's; 127 million men total; and 15.5 million black men. Just blindly doing the multiplication (probably not a smart idea) gives 2.3 million black men in their 20's.

And that's about as far as I can take it with the data at hand. The original claim looks plausible -- the only further assumption required to be made is that at least half of the convicted black criminals are men in their twenties -- but I can't confirm or refute it.