Doctoral Dissertation Research: Racial Disparity in American Incarceration, 1868-1950

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Bruce Western Christopher MullerHarvard UniversityBetween 1970 and 2010, the U.S. imprisonment rate increased fivefold, from roughly 100 per 100,000 residents to roughly 500 per 100,000 residents. No other nation incarcerates such a large proportion of its population. As the incarceration rate increased, it retained a striking racial disparity. African Americans today are imprisoned at about six times the rate of whites. The dissertation research proposes that racial disparity in incarceration had different sources in different periods of U.S. history. Immediately following the Civil War, racial differences in incarceration in the South were driven by transformations in the agricultural and industrial economy. During the Great Migration, racial disparity rose in the North due, in part, to status conflicts between migrating African Americans and the recent European immigrants who dominated northern police forces. Today, racial disparity persists not only because of the War on Drugs, but because of suburban voters' influence over urban criminal justice policy. These three hypotheses will be tested using archival records, secondary historical materials, and quantitative data.Broader Impacts In recent years, severe racial disparities in incarceration have been the subject of public and scholarly concern. Some scholars trace a direct path between former institutions of social control, such as slavery and Jim Crow, and high rates of African-American incarceration today. This project aims instead to study empirically the sources of racial disparity in three periods of U.S. history. Understanding these sources will better enable us to understand the problems that have led to vast racial inequality in punishment today.