During December 2022, a report by the New York State Inspector General, Lucy Lang, determined that a person of African descent who is incarcerated is up to 22% more likely to receive a citation for misconduct compared to a white person. In this same aspect, Hispanics are 12% more likely than whites.
In this report, Inspector Lang published that the racial disparities in criminal detention centers have not been able to be resolved, much less have the criminal authorities traced a path to follow so that this racial gap is shortened over the years. The data published on that occasion showed that treatment disparities increased slightly between 2017 and 2019, but their growth began in 2020.
According to a recent report by the John Jay College Data Collaborative for Justice, these racial differences increased during the course of 2016 and 2021. According to what was published, Afro-descendants were incarcerated 11.6% more than Caucasians in 2021, reflecting a significant increase compared to 2016, when the figures were 4.8%.
The report shows that black people represent 57% of the new prison population in New York, while Hispanics represent 30% of the total registered by the authorities. In this sense, during these years, the incarceration rate grew 4.7% higher for Hispanics than for whites.
In addition to that, the John Jay College report shows that black people are more likely to return to jail after violating their parole agreement with 60% of the people who entered in 2021.
Olive Lu, a research fellow at the Data Collaborative for Justice, stated when presenting the figures that despite recent advances in New York’s criminal justice system and the reduction of our excessive reliance on incarceration, “it continues to lag behind in new tools to guarantee Let the system improve.”
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