Toward a Demographic Understanding of Incarceration Disparities: Race, Ethnicity, and Age Structure

Toward a Demographic Understanding of Incarceration Disparities: Race, Ethnicity, and Age Structure

Vogel, M.S.
Porter, L.C.

Architecture and The Built Environment

OTB

2015-09-12

Objectives Non-Hispanic blacks and Hispanics in the United States are more likely to be incarcerated than non-Hispanic whites. The risk of incarceration also varies with age, and there are striking differences in age distributions across racial/ethnic groups. Guided by these trends, the present study examines the extent to which differences in age structure account for incarceration disparities across racial and ethnic groups. Methods We apply two techniques commonly employed in the field of demography, age-standardization and decomposition, to data provided by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the 2010 decennial census to assess the contribution of age structure to racial and ethnic disparities in incarceration. Findings The non-Hispanic black and Hispanic incarceration rates in 2010 would have been 13–20 % lower if these groups had age structures identical to that of the non-Hispanic white population. Moreover, age structure accounts for 20 % of the Hispanic/white disparity and 8 % of the black/white disparity. Conclusion The comparison of crude incarceration rates across racial/ethnic groups may not be ideal because these groups boast strikingly different age structures. Since the risk of imprisonment is tied to age, criminologists should consider adjusting for age structure when comparing rates of incarceration across groups.

age structure
incarceration
demography

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:92663835-2a31-46d1-99a7-cb2519df0b28

Springer

0748-4518

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-015-9265-6

Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 2015

Institutional Repository

journal article

(c) 2015 The Author(s)
This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com