Criminal Law & Process – Page 81 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

A Tale of Three States, Part 4: The Racial Threat Hypothesis

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:December 14, 2011
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Public Race & Law Wisconsin Criminal Law & Process

In the previous post in this series, I highlighted a wide gap in the incarceration rates of Indiana and Minnesota, with Wisconsin in the middle. The ordering of the three states from highest incarceration rate to lowest corresponds with the ordering from highest rate of violent crime to lowest. However, for reasons I explained in the previous post, I don’t think we ought to end our analysis with the simple assertion that high crime drives high incarceration. For one thing, there is Minnesota: with a crime rate only a little lower than Wisconsin’s, Minnesota has an incarceration rate that is much lower. There must be other factors at play besides just the crime rate to account for Minnesota’s incarceration rate. For another, to focus on the crime-incarceration connection begs the question of what drives the very different crime rates of the three states.

In this post, I’ll explore another possible way of accounting for differences in the three states’ incarceration rates, the racial threat hypothesis. The basic idea is this: a larger racial minority population causes the majority to feel more threatened by the minority and consequently to prefer to stronger social control measures.

Here are the relevant numbers from Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota:

	IN	WI	MN
Black Population (2010)	591,397	359,148	274,412
Blacks as Percentage of Total Population (2010)	9.1%	6.3%	5.2%
Imprisonment Rate (2010, per 100,000)	459.9	387.2	177.8

As you can see, the incarceration-rate order tracks the order based on the size of the each state’s black population.

A Tale of Three States, Part 3: Harsh Hoosiers

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:December 12, 2011
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Public Wisconsin Criminal Law & Process

In the first post in this series, I explored the large gap between the incarceration rates of Minnesota and Wisconsin. In the second, I discussed racial disparities in the incarcerated populations of the two states. The disparities in both states are wide, although Wisconsin’s are somewhat larger. In this entry, I add a third state, Indiana, to the statistical comparisons. As another medium-sized midwestern state, one might expect that Indiana would have criminal-justice numbers that are similar to Minnesota’s and Wisconsin’s. Indiana’s numbers, however, point to a criminal-justice sustem that is much larger and harsher than those of its northern neighbors.

As detailed in the table that appears after the jump, Indiana’s imprisonment rate (about 460 per 100,000) easily outstrips Wisconsin’s (387) and dwarfs Minnesota’s (178). Perhaps even more surprisingly, Indiana’s probation population also exceeds Minnesota’s. My Minnesota-Wisconsin comparison suggested that Wisconsin imprisons many defendants who would get probation in Minnesota, leading to a much smaller probation population in the former than the latter. But Indiana seems to incarcerate the same way that Wisconsin does, without any accompanying reduction in the probation numbers.

For that reason, Indiana’s total supervised population of 167,872 is the largest of the three states (although Minnesota, with the smallest overall population of three, still has a somewhat larger per capita supervised population, thanks to its enormous per capita probation number).

Indiana also leads the way in crime.

A Tale of Three States, Part 2: Racial Disparities

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:December 10, 2011
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Public Race & Law Wisconsin Criminal Law & Process

In the first post in this series, I highlighted a sizable gap between the incarceration rates of Minnesota and Wisconsin. Although the two states have similar crime rates, Wisconsin has more than twice Minnesota’s incarceration rate (651 per 100,000 versus 310).

In this post, I cover racial disparity data in the two states. As summarized in a helpful new article by Michael Rocque (“Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System and Perceptions of Legitimacy: A Theoretical Linkage,” 1 Race & Justice 292 (2011)), a substantial body of research documents wide racial disparities in the American criminal justice system. Consistent with the national data, and despite longstanding reputations for progressive politics, both Minnesota and Wisconsin exhibit troublingly large disparities in white and black incarceration rates.