Created Equal: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the US Criminal Justice System

African Americans make up 13% of the general US population, yet they constitute 28% of all arrests, 40% of all inmates held in prisons and jails, and 42% of the population on death row.
In contrast, Whites make up 67% of the total US population and 70% of all arrests, yet only 40% of all inmates held in state prisons or local jails and 56% of the population on death row.

Hispanics and Native Americans are also alarmingly overrepresented in the criminal justice system.1 This overrepresentation of people of color in the nation's criminal justice system, also referred to as disproportionate minority contact (DMC), is a serious issue in our society.


DMC has been the subject of concern in the juvenile justice system since 1988, when a federal mandate required states to address the issue for system-involved youth. This mandate led to an increase in the information on racial disparities in the juvenile system and efforts to reduce these numbers. However, no such efforts have been made in the adult system.


This report documents DMC in the adult criminal justice system by tabulating the most reliable data available. It does not seek to thoroughly describe the causes of DMC nor does it perform an advanced statistical analysis of how various factors impact disparity.


Disproportionate representation most likely stems from a combination of many different circumstances and decisions. It is difficult to ascertain definitive causes; the nature of offenses, differential policing policies and practices, sentencing laws, or racial bias are just some of the possible contributors to disparities in the system. Some studies have begun to explore these issues and are so cited, but the purpose of this report is to describe the nature and extent of the problem.


DMC is problematic not only because persons of color are incarcerated in greater numbers, but because they face harsher penalties for given crimes and that the discrepancies accumulate through the stages of the system. This report presents the data on DMC in arrests, court processing and sentencing, new admissions and ongoing populations in prison and jails, probation and parole, capital punishment, and recidivism.


At each of these stages, persons of color, particularly African Americans, are more likely to receive less favorable results than their White counterparts.


The data reveal that, overall, Hispanics are also overrepresented, though to a lesser extent than African Americans, and that Asian Pacific Islanders as a whole are generally underrepresented.
Correcting DMC in the adult system will require improvements in state and federal data collection.

In contrast to juvenile DMC data, much of which can be found from a single source and can often be compared across the stages of the juvenile system, data for the adult system are only available through several independent federal and state data collection programs. Each dataset uses different sampling methods, in effect, obscuring how DMC accumulates in the system.
All data in this report reflect national figures; when possible, data by state are also presented. All data reported are categorized by race and, when possible, by ethnicity. The latest available data are usually from 2003 to 2006. Most data are reported as a Relative Rate Index, a ratio of the rates at which people of color and Whites are represented in the system relative to their representation in the general population.


Failing to separate ethnicity from race hides the true disparity among races, as Hispanics -- a growing proportion of the system's population -- are often combined with Whites, which has the effect of inflating White rates and deflating African American rates in comparison. Asian American system populations, while small in comparison to the other groups, also need to be disaggregated. Disaggregation of "Asian," for instance, allows researchers to assess subgroups such as Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, etc., some of which may have disproportion even when the overall group does not. Despite the shortcomings of the data, this report shows clearly that people of color are overrepresented throughout the adult system and that the system often responds more harshly to people of color than to Whites for similar offenses.