Segregation and African-American imprisonment rates for drug offenses

Abstract

Scholars argue that the dramatic increase in the African-American incarceration rate that occurred after the civil rights era was in part a reflection of the declining utility of residential segregation as a modern form of social control. Existing research has not thoroughly investigated the association between racial segregation and prison admission rates. Using 2002 data for 198 metropolitan counties, this research examines the relationship between two dimensions of racial residential segregation and African-American prison admission rates for drug offenses. The results from a multivariate regression analysis reveal that the prison admission rates of African-Americans for drug offenses are lower in counties where White residents are more residentially isolated from African-Americans. The admission rates are unaffected by the dissimilarity index. Consistent with recent research on the level of coercive control, the findings suggest that the effect of the percentage of African-Americans residing in an area is nonlinear.

Keywords:

• Racial threat
• Segregation
• Incarceration rates
• War on drugs
• Jim Crow

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Lance E. Hannon, and Robert H. DeFina for their helpful comments and Mariana Pardes for her assistance with the preparation of the manuscript.

Notes

1 White “refers to individuals who, regardless of ethnicity, are categorized as “white alone” or “white, in combination with one or more other races” (Beatty et al., 2007, p. 5).