COVID-19 amplified racial disparities in the US criminal legal system

The criminal legal system in the USA drives an incarceration rate that is the highest on the planet, with disparities by class and race among its signature features. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of incarcerated people in the USA decreased by at least 17%—the largest, fastest reduction in prison population in American history. Using an original dataset curated from public sources on prison demographics across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, we show that incarcerated white people benefited disproportionately from the decrease in the US prison population and that the fraction of incarcerated Black and Latino people sharply increased. This pattern of increased racial disparity exists across prison systems in nearly every state and reverses a decade-long pre-2020 trend during which the proportion of incarcerated white people was increasing amid declining numbers of incarcerated Black people. We highlight plausible mechanisms—including pandemic-related disruptions to court proceedings and, most importantly, racial inequalities in average sentencing lengths—that produced the largest, most rapid single-year increase in the proportion of incarcerated Black, Latino and other non-white people. This study reveals how COVID-19 exposed and amplified key socio-structural inequities in the criminal legal system and has implications for future research. The associated dataset is publicly released on Zenodo.