Wisconsin leads the nation in the percentage of its black inhabitants under lock and key. Just over four percent of black Wisconsin, including the very old and the very young of both sexes, are behind bars. Most of the state’s African Americans reside in the Milwaukee area, and most of its black prisoners are drawn from just a handful of poor and economically deprived black communities where jobs, intact families and educational opportunities are the most scarce, and paroled back into those same neighborhoods. So Wisconsin, and in particular the Milwaukee area justly merit the invidious distinction of the Worst Place in the Nation to be Black.
Iowa, with only a small black population, is not far behind. The crime control industries in Wisconsin and Iowa seem to have learned to make the most efficient use of the preferred human material available to them, locking up the few black inhabitants of those states at a rate 11.6 times higher than whites.
Texas, the nation’s second largest state, is the third worst place to be black in America, and is in a class by itself, first because its extraordinary rate of black incarceration affects such a large population. Only New York has more African Americans than Texas, and only the two relatively small states previously mentioned lock up a higher percentage of their black citizens. Though California has 50 percent more people, Texas has a slightly larger prison population and only a 5 to 1 ratio between its black and white rates of imprisonment. We may safely assume that since very few of its wealthy Texans are behind bars, Texas is just a very bad place to be poor, whether you’re black or not.
A total of 900,000 African Americans live in Oklahoma, Arizona, Delaware, Nevada, Oregon and Colorado, and another 2 million-plus in California, where the proportion of prisoners among total African Americans hovers just under 3 percent.
How Much Better is Better? How Much Worse is Worst?
The answer in both cases is, unfortunately: not much. Only one hundredth of a percentage point separates Iowa’s 3.30% rate of black incarceration from that of Texas, with 3.29%. Twenty-seven more states manage to lock up between 2 and 3% of their African American inhabitants, and only Maine, Hawaii and North Dakota fail to incarcerate more than 1.55% of blacks. For whites, the national average ratio of prisoners to the general population is less than 4 tenths of one percent.
The damning truth laid bare once again by this fact, is that America’s policy of racially selective policing, prosecuting and imprisonment of its black one-eighth is a truly consistent and national one, even though it is implemented with arbitrary severity by countless state and local authorities.
BC’s Dishonorable Mention is reserved for those states not already enumerated which have the highest disparity between black and white incarceration rates. Wisconsin and Iowa belong here too, with disparity rates between 11 and 12 to one, but they have already been mentioned. This dismal category is especially significant because black populations in three of the states with extraordinary disparity rates fall largely within the New York City Metropolitan Statistical area, the largest concentration of black people in North America. Suffice it to say that for practical purposes, New York City and its environs are not that much better a place to be black than Texas.
STATE...........BLACK-WHITE DISPARITY
New Jersey............13.15 to one
Connecticut...........12.77 to one
Minnesota.............12.63 to one
Pennsylvania..........10.53 to one
New York.............. 9.47 to one
The second largest concentration of African Americans in New Jersey lies within the Philadelphia Metropolitan Statistical Area. Note Pennsylvania’s fourth place ranking on the Dishonorable list.
The “enlightened” state of Minnesota has two more peculiar distinctions. First, it commits one of the nation’s largest percentages of offenders to community corrections, the generic name for “non-prison” sentencing alternatives. With one of the nation’s highest rates of disparity between its black and white inhabitants, it appears that Minnesota’s white offenders are disproportionately funneled into alternative sentencing situations, but we have no data to support such a conclusion. Secondly, according to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, which together with the US Census Department is the source for all numerical data in this article, Minnesota had the fastest growing prison population in the country as of mid-year 2004, the latest date for which stats are publicly available.
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