In the decade leading up to 2020, racial inequity in U.S. incarceration was trending down––until the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
In the early days of the pandemic, COVID-19 was hitting prison populations hard, prompting federal and state leaders to release tens of thousands of prisoners. But new data from a team of researchers helmed by experts from Northeastern University, Yale University and the Santa Fe Institute reveals that the mass release didn’t apply equally to people of color. The data, collected and released for the first time, reveals a suite of longstanding, persistent inequities in the criminal legal system and how the pandemic was just the spark that lit the fuse.
“We were able to calculate that 15,000 individuals should have been out of jails and prisons if you had no racial inequity over this three- or four-month period of time in early 2020,” says Samuel Scarpino, director of AI and life sciences in Northeastern’s Institute for Experiential AI. “What we uncovered was the persistent, long-running effects of inequity in sentencing targeted towards Black individuals and also targeted, but to a lesser extent, toward non-white, non-Black individuals.”
For Scarpino and Brennan Klein, a postdoctoral researcher at the Network Science Institute, the project began as a continuation of their data-based work looking at disparities in COVID-19 outcomes. When they started looking into incarcerated populations, they ran into a problem. It’s incredibly difficult to get access to data on the number of people incarcerated in any given state prison system, and when they did get access to it, the data was messy or out of date.
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