In black and white: Inspector General details clear disparities in NY prisons

In a data-driven model of state governance, there are some numbers you want to see trend up, and some you really don’t. The statistical overrepresentation of misbehavior reports issued against Black and Hispanic inmates in state prisons is in the latter camp, so it’s disheartening to see, in a report issued by New York Inspector General Lucy Lang this week, that these disparities had only increased in the period between when the inquiry was ordered in 2016 and now.

That order came in the wake of a New York Times investigation that found that Black and Hispanic prisoners were disciplined at rates were proportionally much higher than for whites, sometimes doubly so.

While there are multiple factors that might go into some of these disparities, such as the type of misbehavior committed by individual inmates and the median age of each racial demographic, what helps establish racial bias is the fact that the discrepancies are most pronounced in infractions that are largely discretionary, like whether a detainee has refused to obey a direct order or created a disturbance, even controlling for factors like detainee age. It doesn’t conclusively pinpoint animus as the driving force, but points strongly in that direction.

All in all, Black detainees were 22% more likely and Hispanic detainees 12% more likely to be cited for misbehavior, an eventuality that can lead to punishments ranging from loss of TV time to cell confinement, rates that were higher than when the data was first reported six years ago. Most concerningly, a total of 226 corrections employees had issued a collective thousands of citations exclusively to non-white detainees.

As the IG makes clear, this plainly suggests that the Department of Corrections must better track infractions in real time, make much clearer what constitutes grounds for certain violations and remove some officer discretion from the equation. We already know that we need to combat bias that disproportionately feeds certain people into the criminal justice system, but we must also address the disparities that exist once they’re already in.