Racial disparity persists in prisons, local jails

SANDUSKY — Whether you look at national, state or local figures, the numbers are startling: Blacks occupy prison cells in numbers drastically out of proportion to their minority status in the United States.Here are some numbers: • The U. S. prison population of about 1.5 million in 2016 includes inmates in federal and state prisons, according to a report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a branch of the U.S. Department of Justice.The number of male prisoners who are black differs according to whether the BLS uses state databases or relies on asking the prisoners how they identify themselves, the BLS report says. Databases say that 41 percent of the male prisoners are black, while self-identification says about 35 percent are black.Blacks made up 14 percent of the U.S. population in the 2010 Census. • Ohio had 22,015 black prison inmates in March 2019, about 45 percent of the total prison population, according to a monthly report issued by Ohio prison officials. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, blacks made up about 12.9 percent of Ohio's population in 2018.• Last year, 3,730 people were booked into Erie County Jail, according to statistics released by the Erie County Sheriff's office. Of those, 1,273 were black, about 34 percent. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, blacks make up about 8.8 percent of Erie County's population.Gary Daniels, the Ohio ACLU's chief lobbyist, said there are likely multiple reasons why blacks are such a large proportion of prison inmates.But Daniels noted the disparity in numbers seems to apply everywhere. Studies show that blacks are more likely to be stopped, searched and arrested by police, he said. They are more likely to be convicted of a crime, more likely to have longer sentences, and more likely to be put to death."It is a fundamental, systemic problem with our justice system," he said. An influential book, "The New Jim Crow," written by Michelle Alexander and published in 2010, argues that the criminal justice system has become a new caste system and that blacks suffered disproportionately from the results of the war on drugs. Alexander formerly was a law professor at Ohio State University but now teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.Studies show that black people are not more likely to use drugs than whites, Daniels said. Alexander's book was a "big eye-opener for a lot of people," Daniels said.There are indications that the racial disparity in the prison population is beginning to ease.According to an analysis by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that studies the criminal justice system, from 2000 and 2015, the imprisonment rate of black men fell more than 24 percent. At the same time, the white male rate went up slightly, according to federal statistics.The disparity remained striking, however.From 2000 to 2015, the rate of black men going to prison went from 3,457 per 100,000 to 2,613. The rate for white men increased from 449 per 100,000 to 457.