COVID-19 amplified racial disparities in the US criminal legal system.

Autor: Klein B; Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA. b.klein@northeastern.edu.; Institute on Policing, Incarceration & Public Safety, The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. b.klein@northeastern.edu., Ogbunugafor CB; Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. brandon.ogbunu@yale.edu.; Public Health Modeling Unit, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, CT, USA. brandon.ogbunu@yale.edu.; Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA. brandon.ogbunu@yale.edu.; Vermont Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA. brandon.ogbunu@yale.edu.; Department of Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. brandon.ogbunu@yale.edu., Schafer BJ; Department of History, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA., Bhadricha Z; College of Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA., Kori P; College of Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA., Sheldon J; Roux Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA., Kaza N; Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA., Sharma A; Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA., Wang EA; SEICHE Center for Health and Justice, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA.; Department of Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA.; Justice Collaboratory, Yale Law School, New Haven, CT, USA., Eliassi-Rad T; Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA.; Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA.; Vermont Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA.; Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA.; The Institute for Experiential AI, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA., Scarpino SV; Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA. s.scarpino@northeastern.edu.; Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA. s.scarpino@northeastern.edu.; Vermont Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA. s.scarpino@northeastern.edu.; Roux Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA. s.scarpino@northeastern.edu.; Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA. s.scarpino@northeastern.edu.; The Institute for Experiential AI, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA. s.scarpino@northeastern.edu.; Department of Health Sciences, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA. s.scarpino@northeastern.edu., Hinton E; Institute on Policing, Incarceration & Public Safety, The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. elizabeth.hinton@yale.edu.; Department of History, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. elizabeth.hinton@yale.edu.; Justice Collaboratory, Yale Law School, New Haven, CT, USA. elizabeth.hinton@yale.edu.; Department of African American Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. elizabeth.hinton@yale.edu.; Yale Law School, New Haven, CT, USA. elizabeth.hinton@yale.edu.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Nature [Nature] 2023 May; Vol. 617 (7960), pp. 344-350. Date of Electronic Publication: 2023 Apr 19.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05980-2
Abstrakt: 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 features 1-3 . 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 history 4 . 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 people 5 . 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 Zenodo 6 .
(© 2023. The Author(s).)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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