Short Reports on Criminal Justice Patterns

These are short descriptive and theoretical working papers and reports written as part of the larger project.

Wisconsin Patterns and County Comparisons

Regional Differences in Prison Admissions 1926-1982. Pamela Oliver. Compares North vs South and shows the importance of percent Black. States which have higher percent Black have LOWER Black imprisonment rates. Graphs show trends across time. Neither migration nor missing data explain away the overall rise in Black imprisonment nor the lower Black imprisonment rates in the states of the South where the percent Black is high.
Percent Black, Ceiling Effects, Black Urbanization and Black Prison Admissions 1926-1999. Pamela Oliver. For eight eras, shows scatter plots of states showing the relation between Percent Black and Black and White prison admission rates and the disparity in imprisonment. The data exhibit a ceiling effect such that the maximum Black imprisonment rate is negatively related to the percent Black, suggesting that costs and capacity are the crucial factors. A regression analysis shows that percent Black and not Black urbanization is the important factor in predicting Black imprisonment rates.
State Prison Admissions 1926-1982. Pamela Oliver. These are graphs, one per state, of the Black and White prison admissions rates and the Black/White disparity for years for which there is data. Two formats: (1) one graph per page (46 pages total) (2) two graphs per page (24 pages total).