Pamela Oliver
There’s a new campaign you can read about at sentback.org to stop sending people to prison on crimeless revocations. The campaign is sponsored by Restoring Our Communities (ROC) Wisconsin, WISDOM and EXPO (Ex-Prisoners Organizing). According to a report by Health Impact Partners (short web summary or PDF full report), about 1/3 of the
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A few days after Donald Trump won the electoral votes for president, some people started suggesting that pro-immigrant people in the US wear safety pins in emulation of the movement in Britain after Brexit to signal support for immigrants. A social media debate quickly ensured about what this might mean,
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Madison and Dane County have an affordable housing crisis. On the west side of Madison, one new owner of a 90-unit complex has recently non-renewed two thirds of his tenants, leaving them to scramble to try to find housing in an impossible market for lower-income renters. In addition, recent changes
Read moreOn August 24, 2016, I was interviewed by Wisconsin Public Radio regarding the explanations for Wisconsin’s high racial disparities rates. You can listen to the interview online or download it on the WPR web site
Read moreI had the great honor to appear with Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm and UW-Madison Law Professor Michelle Lavigne at the Wisconsin Ideas lecture series to talk about criminal justice in Wisconsin. Michelle goes first, I do my graphs second, and the star of the show, John Chisholm speaks last.
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Dane County has the highest Black/White rate of prison admissions among Wisconsin counties with large Black populations, but it does NOT have the highest Black prison admission rate. That dubious honor goes to Kenosha County. Milwaukee County has high racial disparities in prison admissions and has over 70% of the
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These graphs are calculated from the restricted files of the National Corrections Reporting Program. They show the rate of admissions to prison for new sentences by offense group separately for Blacks, Whites and the Black/White disparity. A chart for the offense codes is between the Black and White graphs. They
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UPDATE: CLICK HERE TO SEE THESE FIGURES FOR 1978-2013 in a later post These graphs allow you to see the growth of state imprisonment 1978-2007, by race. I will have updated and error-checked data for 1978-2013 soon. Because I live in Wisconsin, I flagged the Wisconsin rates. These update at
Read moreWisconsin has stayed at the top of the pile in Black incarceration even though its Black incarceration rate has been declining. How can this be? The answer is that all the other states have been declining faster. By putting a scatter plot of state imprisonment rates on consistent axes, I’ve
Read moreDid Bill Clinton’s policies cause the mass incarceration of Black people? Since I’ve done a lot of analysis of incarceration trends in the 1990s, I thought I’d bring some facts into this discussion. Short version: The steep increase in the mass incarceration of Black people happened before Bill Clinton took
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