This study was inspired by a conversation in DKE daily digest about how one would assess whether or not a state is racist or discuss which states are more racist than others. I maintain that the incarceration rate of a racial minority group is the best empirical evidence of racism against that group. I am using racism here in the institutional sense. This differs from racial animus or prejudice in that people can often bear little personal racial resentment but still uphold racist institutions. Institutional racism is the processes by which people of a particular racial group are less likely to derive benefit and more likely to derive harm from the range of societal institutions – schools, hospitals, police, courts, housing, etc. The percentage of the population that a state removes from society by incarceration is ultimately the percentage of the population that the state has failed, depriving them of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Poverty rate and life expectancy might be similar such metrics. But I focus here on incarceration as it is the costliest, both materially and spiritually.
In a state-by-state analysis of incarceration rates, many people may have encountered some version of the map below. I use 2010 data, because the US census includes data the race of prisoners, whereas the annual department of justice reports do not.
Total Incarceration Rates by State
Black Incarceration: Looking at the map above, we find that incarceration rates are substantially higher in the South than in the North. We could lazily assume that this represents the ongoing legacy of Slavery and Jim Crow, and thereby excuse the North of its institutional racism. But when we look at incarceration rates for black men alone, a more complicated picture emerges:
Black Incarceration Rate by State
The incarceration rate for Black men is in fact far more geographically variable. And indeed the states with the highest black population (the band stretching from Mississippi to North Carolina), have below average incarceration rates. While the rates of incarceration here are still abominably large (at 5-6% of black men), they are well below incarceration rates in the states that were the recipient of the mass migration of American Americans during the lynching and pogroms of the Jim Crow era. The western south appears to be an exception to this trend, imprisoning as many Black men as the Northern states.
It is also useful to look at this data normalized to the incarceration rates for Whites. If a state has low total incarceration, but still imprisons Blacks at 5 to 10 times the rates of Whites, it should still be considered institutionally racist. The normalized data are below:
Black Incarceration Normalized to White Incarceration
The disparities between North and South are much starker in the normalized map. In the deep South, Black men are still around 3.5 times more likely to be incarcerated than White men. But the inequality in incarceration in the North is far worse. In the upper Midwest, the contrast is shocking, with Black men more than 10 times likely to be imprisoned than their White counterparts.
Native Americans: Blacks are of course not the only minority group that is subject to institutional racism. Native Americans and Hispanics also suffer disproportional incarceration, though at lower rates. The rates of Native incarceration by state are below:
Native Incarceration Rate by State
The first lesson we get from this map is that a minority has to be large enough before anybody will think to persecute them. And indeed, the states with very small Native populations have no detectable racism against them. However, states with substantial Native populations are not all alike. Again the upper Midwest has strikingly high rates of institutional racism, as does much of the Intermountain West. Oklahoma, with its large Native population is relative less racist, as is New Mexico. Again, it is useful to normalize to incarceration rates for whites:
Native Incarceration Normalized to White Incarceration
The normalized data further accentuate the trends observed above. The Northern Great Plains are not a good place to be Native. New England also stands out.
Hispanics: Though institutional racism against Hispanics is more minimal (look at the changing scale bars on the left of the figures), we can still look at the two data sets, below:
Hispanic Incarceration Rate by State
Hispanic Incarceration Normalized to White Incarceration
The maps for Hispanics correlate well with the maps for Natives. New England, the Northern plains, and the Intermountain West have higher rates of institutional racism against Hispanics than the south and center of the country.
Synthesis: We can finally go ahead and look at the total percentage of the minority population that is incarcerated in each state (Black + Native + Hispanic):
Black, Native, and Hispanic Incarceration Rates by State
This map is somewhat biased in that states have low Black populations end up with lower total minority incarceration rates, even if their incarceration rates for Blacks are quite high. California is a good example of this. Nevertheless, the map clearly illustrates that the Midwest, in particular, is just as institutionally racist as the South, if not more so. Again, the normalized data are starker:
Black, Native, and Hispanic Incarceration Normalized to White Incarceration
The swath of states running from New England to the High Plains is striking. All of these states imprison minorities at rates 4-8 times those of whites, more so than any other region of the country. In total percentage of minorities imprisoned, this region is comparable to the South. But the South imprisons substantially more whites, so the burden of the state’s institutional failures are at least more equitably distributed on a racial basis there.
Hawaii: Hawaii deserves special mention as a state where total incarceration is low and racism in incarceration rates is modest. Blacks are still incarcerated at twice the rates of Whites, but no racism against Natives or Hispanics exists in the incarceration rate data. Even with Blacks, we are talking about 1.8% vs. 0.9%, well below the rest of the country. Honorable mention goes to West Virginia, which has a relatively low total incarceration rate (just over 1%) and relatively modest racism in incarceration rates. Dishonorable mention goes to Minnesota, which only incarcerates 0.5% of White adult males, but incarcerates black and brown adult males at 10 times that rate.
Conclusions: I bring all this data to counter the perception that institutional racism is somebody else’s problem. Particular there is chauvinism on the part of the so-called Blue states against the Red states. It is true that racism in the South has an utterly barbaric history. But the data illustrate that institutional racism is just as pervasive, and in fact may be stronger, in the North than the South. I have heard to this referred to as the “unreconstructed North”. The South was forced to confront its legacy of racial violence, but the North never was. So when people haphazardly ascribe racist motivation to the politics and policies of various states, these accusations have very little basis in fact, at least when considering racism in its institutional sense.
