Experts: Racial disparities persist in CT prisons
More than 42 percent of people in Connecticut’s prison system are Black, a ratio that has stayed consistent despite a significant decrease in the number of people behind bars over the last decade.
“There’s no question that our criminal justice policies and our criminal justice practices have a significantly disparate impact on people of color,” said Mike Lawlor, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven. “It is the case that you’re way more likely to end up in prison if you’re a person of color than if you’re white.”
A CT Insider analysis of the demographics of Connecticut’s prison population showed that the vast majority of prisoners in the state are minorities, despite a steep drop in the number of prisoners.
As of January 2011, there were 13,580 people being incarcerated in Connecticut — 42.7 percent of whom were Black, 26.6 percent were Hispanic and 30 percent were white.
At the time, Black people made up about 10 percent of the state’s total population.
Those percentages have fluctuated over the intervening years, but fast forward a decade and the numbers are nearly identical. Of the 8,885 people in prison on Jan. 1, 42.7 percent of Connecticut’s prisoners
were Black, 26.4 percent were Hispanic and 29.9 percent were white.
As of 2019, 12 percent of Connecticut residents were Black, according to census data.
Real numbers versus percentages
As for why there are fewer people in prison, Lawlor — who was Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s chief criminal justice adviser — credits a series of diversionary tactics begun under the Malloy administration.
“In the late ’80s, the legislature said that if you get caught with any quantity of any drug within 1,500 feet of a school, day care center or public housing project, you were facing a two-year mandatory prison sentence,” Lawlor said.
When those laws, and others like them, were changed, the prison population began to drop.
“The results speak for themselves, we have almost no one incarcerated in Connecticut, where the underlying crime is possession of drugs,” Lawlor said.
Nonetheless, Black peo
ple do make up nearly 50 percent of prisoners serving time for crimes related to drugs and alcohol, as of the beginning of this year.
In fact, Black people make up the majority of every category — violent crimes (called crimes against “persons”), socalled “public order” offenses and drug-related crimes. Only prisoners in jail for property crime — theft, for example — are predominantly white.
The fact that the demographic breakdown of prisoners in the state has not changed — and has remained so skewed from the overall state demographics — is an indication, according to Lorenzo Jones, that criminal justice reform has been applied in an unequal fashion.
“To have that number stay steady at 40 (percent) means that the most effective implementation of Connecticut’s progressive criminal justice reform has actually taken place in communities that are not Black and brown,” said Jones, co-founder and coexecutive director of the Katal Center for Equity, Health, and Justice.
Where Lawlor and Jones disagreed is which should be the priority: An overall drop in the prison population or more equitable application of criminal justice reform.
“If you had to pick between two goals, one is decreasing the percentage of people in prison who are people of color and decreasing
the total number of people in prison, I’d pick the latter,” Lawlor said.
But for Jones, the inequity is a larger problem, because even though the number of Black people in prison has decreased, “The percentage could still be in the same relationship to the aggregate population.”
In reality, don’t those Black people didn’t just disappear,” he said. “They’re somewhere else in the system, probation, parole, community supervision, house arrest, and so forth. It means that while the numbers in the prison population number came down, the level of enforcement hasn’t changed.”
Going in and staying in
When asked why the
percentage of the prison population that are racial minorities hasn’t changed, Lawlor said it’s a question of long-term prisoners.
“What hasn’t really changed is the number of people continuing to serve these very long sentences that were imposed 10, 15, 20 years ago,” he said. “And that number is not really changing very much, because most of those people are not eligible for parole or anything like that. So you see a big racial disparity among those people.”
Then there’s what Alex Tsarkov called the “frontend of the system.”
“There are a lot of people in prison with very long sentences,” he said. “So, that racial disparity is not going away. What was
before sort of continues. And then, the second biggest contributor is people coming into the system.”
Tsarkov, executive director of the Connecticut Sentencing Commission, said that while the number of people in prison has decreased, the pre-trial population — the people in jail while they await trial — has not kept pace with that decrease.
If a person is arrested and held on bail, and cannot pay the bail, they are incarcerated until their case is settled either by a jury or an agreement.
“The front-end of the system, and no question about it, exacerbates racial disparities, by definition, because it’s a money-based system,” he said. “You’re
going to have inequities there, by definition. Those who have more money have more of a chance to just to get out. Those who don’t have money are more likely to be detained.”
Lawlor said that with continued criminal justice reform, the inequities will begin to smooth out.
“I think, over time, since there’s fewer and fewer young people coming in the front door of the system, that racially disparate impact will begin to dissipate,” he said. “At least I hope it does.”
‘Systemic’ or ‘systematic’
Lawlor acknowledges that there are inequities in the system that sends people to prison in Connecticut, but he argued that while it may be “systemic” racism, it’s not “systematic.”
“Systemic implies that that’s the way the system works. That’s the outcome. Those are the consequences of decisions that were made,” he said. “But doesn’t necessarily mean they were intentional. Systematic means it was designed to be like that.”
Over the course of his career he has been a special deputy sheriff — “I put handcuffs on people in courthouses,” he said — as well as a prosecutor, a defense attorney, a public defender, a courtroom clerk, a state legislator (including chair of the Judiciary Committee), the governor’s criminal justice advisor and a criminal justice professor for 25 years.
“If it was systematic, if it was really designed to be like this, if this was like a conspiracy to put more Black and brown people in prison, I’m pretty sure I would have seen indications of that,” he said. “I can’t say ever saw that. What I did see is a sort of callous disregard, extreme indifference to the racially disparate impact of certain policies.”
But Jones called the disparities in the prison population a “late indicator” of racism upstream, and said that Black people know there is purposeful racism behind the policies that result in those disparities.
“This thing about, is it purposeful, is yes,” he said. “Questioning whether or not it’s happening on purpose is literally disrespectful to the people that it’s happening on purpose.”