Introduction

Mass Incarceration

This project is motivated by the desire to understand mass incarceration in the US. Some of the questions we sought to better understand are:

  • What crimes are resulting in so many convictions?
  • Do felons racial backgrounds differ based on the crime for which they were convicted?
  • What role does the prison industry play in mass incarceration?
  • How do different states vary in their use of private prisons?
  • What factors predict imprisonment (e.g. race, socio-economic status, sex)

Data Sets

We have Included data from a wide range of sources including:

Summary statistics

Dataset: Carl V Lewis Private/Public prisons data set

There are 136 private prisons in the United States. Meanwhile, there are 898 public prisons in the United States for a total of 1034. 13.1528046% of prisons in America are private. However, only 6 companies own all 136 of the private prisons in the country.

Percent of prisons that are private prisons by state

Private prisons are important to note because unlike public prisons, private prisons are not required by law to disclose how their funds are being used. Most private prisons are run as for-profit enterprises, which is concerning because such prisons want to expand simply for the purposes of making more money. The

This chart shows the percent of prisons in each state that are private prisons. This helps you see which state governments tend to contract prisons out to private corporations. The operations of a private prison are opaque and as such not well regulated.

Interesting observations:

This map is interactive. If you click on each state, you can see the exact percentage for that state.

Incarceration in 2019

This plot lays out the number of crimes committed in 2019 by type. It also shows the racial background of those convicted for crimes. This graph helps us see what areas might be more problematic than others, and what types of convictions are contributing most to mass incarceration. Given what we know about US the racial breakdown of the US population, we can see that black individuals are disproportionately represented in incarceration.

Table: Mass Incarceration by Neighborhood

This table shows how black neighborhoods are disproportionately poor, and less likely to get a college education, and at the same time more likely to be convicted for crimes. We chose to include this table as a way to illustrate the multiple factors that contribute to mass incarceration and help illustrate how disproportionate outcomes arise, and what areas we need to target in order to fix the problem. We can see from this table that mass incarceration is much higher in neighborhoods that are disproportionately black, and poor, and that college attendence is much lower in these areas as well.

Incarceration Rate Black Percentage of Population Child Poverty Rate College Attendance
0% 1.3% 2.95% 78%
0.1% 2.38% 2.65% 73.77%
9% 62% 34.47% 26.74%
10% 73.73% 41% 25.47%
11% 63.6% 40.2% 24.4%
14% 93% 42% 30%

Prison and school expenditures by state and local goverments from 1977 to 2017

This chart below compares the current expenditures by state & local governments toward schools and prisons from 1977 to 2017. This helps you visualize how much funding has been allocated toward different agencies over time and how much funding has changed.

Something to note: Despite the increases in state and local government spending toward schools, prison expenditures have proportionally doubled in the same time.

The reason for this is that a majority of money that is spend to run the correctional system goes to staffing. This provides reasoning behind increased spending and little reform, because the influential lobbies that fund the correctional system don’t want reform as it will cut into political profit margins. The return on investment is high, however, since political influence is still high even when prison populations drop so investment in corrections is desirable for profiteering politicians.

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