Pamela Oliver
I 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.
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
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
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
Wisconsin 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
Did 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
EDITED June 2020 to update links in the M4BL web site. Under the name Movement for Black Lives , a coalition of contemporary Black Power organizations (including Madison’s Freedom, Inc.) have worked for a year to develop a comprehensive vision and agenda for social change. This is an exciting moment
Does protest help a group’s cause? Do cities with strong Black protest movements improve their policing practices in Black communities? Do police respond more repressively in places with strong Black movements? Does mass incarceration reduce the capacity for Black protest? To answer these questions, we need to know how to
The Mobilizing Ideas blog has partnered with Jenn Earl’s Youth Activism Project which (as the name implies) studies activism by younger people) to provide advice to young activists by way of videos of top social movement scholars addressing important issues in organizing, supplemented with suggestions for further reading. The series
A local reporter sent me an email asking my opinion of proposals to increase community trust of police. My “some general comments” turned out to be really long, so I decided to put them in a blog post. Then I edited it a bit more. As I write, this has