The overall incarceration rate in the United States is extremely high by international standards. Moreover, there are large racial disparities, with the black male rate of imprisonment being 5.5 times the white male rate in 2014. This paper focus on how this black-white imprisonment ratio has...

We examine the behavior of the incarceration rate and the racial disparity in imprisonment for black women and compare this to the results for black men over the period 1978-2016. At the beginning of our sample, the racial disparity is high and of similar magnitude for both groups. Black women...