Professor Pamela Oliver Department of Sociology

State Trends in Racial Disparities in Imprisonment

These links lead to graphs of state-specific trends. They are Excel spreadsheets that have a page of underlying numerical data and several dozen graphs. Each file is about 600KB in size. Data are calculated from the National Corrections Reporting Program 1983-1999. They show prison admissions broken down by 1) whether it is a new sentence, a probation/parole revocation, or other; 2) by offense group (violent, robbery & burglary, larceny & theft, drugs, other); and 3) by race. Both raw numbers of admissions and rates per 100,000 are shown. The spreadsheets also show the population trends by race within each of the 34 states. These spreadsheets include only persons who have been sentenced to a state prision for 12 months or more. There is known to be a significant amount of error in these reports that varies from state to state, but the charts can be useful for detecting trends within states. NOTE: "NH" means "Not Hispanic." All the racial groups are that race minus Hispanic, and the Hispanic group includes Hispanics of all races. You should know that there is quite a bit of variation between states in the ways they count Hispanics.

To use these files, you probably want to download them first and then open them on your own computer. Thus in Internet Explorer you will want to right-click and then choose "save file as" rather than just clicking on the file itself.

• Alabama
• California
• Colorado
• Florida
• Georgia
• Hawaii
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kentucky
• Massachusetts
• Maryland
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Mississippi
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Nebraska
• New Hampshire
• New Jersey
• Nevada
• New York
• Ohio
• Oregon
• Pennsylvania
• South Carolina
• South Dakota
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Utah
• Virginia
• Washington
• Wisconsin
• West Virginia

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Questions or Comments? Email Oliver -at- ssc -dot- wisc -dot- edu. Last updated February 15, 2005 © University of Wisconsin.