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Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Race and Incarceration in Whatcom County and WA.

"The hypersegregation of the black poor in ghetto communities has made the roundup easy. Confined to ghetto areas and lacking political power, the black poor are convenient targets. ... The enduring racial isolation of the ghetto poor has made them uniquely vulnerable in the War on Drugs. What happens to them does not directly affect—and is scarcely noticed by—the privileged beyond the ghetto’s invisible walls. Thus it is here, in the poverty-stricken, racially segregated ghettos, where the War on Poverty has been abandoned and factories have disappeared, that the drug war has been waged with the greatest ferocity. SWAT teams are deployed here; buy-and-bust operations are concentrated here; drug raids of apartment buildings occur here; stop-and-frisk operations occur on the streets here. Black and brown youth are the primary targets.[emphasis added -RMF]"  -Michelle Alexander "The New Jim Crow" 

Is Whatcom county a racist county in a racist state? I won't pretend to have the complete answer in this post.  I do know that something Bellingham and Lynden (two of Whatcom County's biggest cities) have in common, is that you can often spend the whole day downtown in either without ever noticing a person of color! And that makes it somehow very different from where my wife and I grew up in Oakland, CA.  This post will examine the county jails of WA and question whether or not racial bias is a part of Whatcom County and Washington's law and justice system.  Below is a table of WA state jails and their counts of  Total Population, Average Daily Jail Populations of 'People of Color'  (not white) and the all white populations of those 39 WA counties. City and regional jail data is appended  with no additional population data.

Some notes on the data and methodology: I explain below some of the disadvantages of working with Average Daily Population as data points and the problems matching the less granular WASPC with the more granular Census county population data. I will await more data from WASPC before publishing more. Code for this post is here. Analyzing racial composition ratios to look for implicit or explicit racism in the state law enforcement system is tricky, complicated and makes me nervous. My data sources[1,2] and code are public, so if you have some problem or thoughts with this, feel free to comment and link to your own statistical analysis. If you have some links to other statistical discussions on this subject, please let me know.

Personal/Political Note: We are considering voting millions of dollars of sales taxes and bonds for an expanded jail system in Whatcom County this fall, so more information and viewpoints the better. The financing as is proposed now will be to continue 2/10 of 1% of a retail sales tax in perpetuity for public safety, operations, expansion. 1/10 of 1%  will be used to bond for the original jail construction. That last 1/10% is said to send $6M /year to the bond holders and will probably sunset at 30 years.  Either way, this is hundreds of millions of dollars sent to incarceration and law and justice needs. We aren't King County here. Whatcom County is max 215K people,  and that total probably includes Canadian daytime shoppers and guests!

I don't believe in a fascist or comfortable version of democracy. I've spent some time in my life reading the founding fathers and I don't think a comfortable democracy that supports the status quo is what they had in mind. Discussing racism is never comfortable for a county and state as white as Whatcom and Washington. I don't believe that lack of comfort makes the discussion any less urgent, important or necessary.

   County.City TotalPop AverageDailyJail PeopleOfColorInJail AllWhiteInCountyPop
1         King  2079967             2031                 892       1458264
2       Pierce   831928             1133                 489        633432
3    Snohomish   759583             1028                 240        609413
4      Spokane   484318              893                 185        435049
5        Clark   451008              761                 114        393912
6     Thurston   265851              414                  92        220470
7       Yakima   247687              792                 457        217859
8       Kitsap   254183              435                  91        211797
9      Whatcom   208351              408                  92        181897
10      Benton   186486              686                  70        169791
11      Skagit   120365              238                  70        109337
12     Cowlitz   102133              291                  35         93845
13       Grant    93147              211                  90         86245
14    Franklin    87809              192                  16         79825
15      Chelan    74588              265                  70         69971
16       Lewis    75128              205                  26         69831
17      Island    79275               54                  12         68398
18     Clallam    72715              125                  17         63811
19 GraysHarbor    70818              145                  20         62130
20  WallaWalla    59844               71                   5         55150
21       Mason    60711              115                  13         53587
22     Whitman    46827               41                   7         39843
23    Kittitas    42522               92                  19         39082
24     Stevens    43650               41                   2         39015
25     Douglas    39804               NA                  NA         37288
26    Okanogan    41290              166                  63         34008
27   Jefferson    30228               48                   8         27593
28      Asotin    22189               58                   6         20944
29   Klickitat    20861               47                  12         19370
30     Pacific    20561               42                   5         18480
31       Adams    19179               26                  18         17372
32     SanJuan    16015                2                   0         15129
33 PendOreille    12985               28                   1         11855
34    Skamania    11340               25                   5         10549
35     Lincoln    10250               23                   5          9668
36       Ferry     7667               33                   2          5862
37   Wahkiakum     4067                7                   0          3807
38    Columbia     3985               10                   1          3761
39    Garfield     2215               10                   3          2114
40    Aberdeen       NA               12                   1            NA
41      Auburn       NA               NA                  NA            NA
42    Enumclaw       NA               20                   3            NA
43        Fife       NA              203                  84            NA
44       Forks       NA               28                   3            NA
45   Grandview       NA                8                   5            NA
46    Issaquah       NA               62                  10            NA
47        Kent       NA              117                  41            NA
48    Kirkland       NA               16                   1            NA
49    Lynnwood       NA               40                  17            NA
50  Marysville       NA               44                  11            NA
51   Nisqually       NA               NA                  NA            NA
52   OakHarbor       NA               NA                  NA            NA
53     Olympia       NA               25                  NA            NA
54    Puyallup       NA               49                  10            NA
55      Renton       NA               NA                  NA            NA
56       SCORE       NA              618                 269            NA
57   Sunnyside       NA               45                  27            NA
58   Toppenish       NA               20                  18            NA
59      Wapato       NA               59                  25            NA
60  YakimaCity       NA               60                   7            NA

A long list of data like that can be overwhelming. Let's look at some stacked horizontal bar charts. Click to Enlarge the Charts!:

Here's are some tables that look at race and incarceration in Whatcom County and all of WA state. "POC" = 'People of Color' defined by WASPC (e.g Black, Hispanic, Native American, Other/Asian):

   Jail Year White Black Hispanic NatAmerican Other UnRace POC
Whatcom 2014   251    21        0          65     6     65  92
Whatcom 2013   281    22       31          73     3      4 129
Whatcom 2012   303    27       36          87     5      4 155
Whatcom 2011   274    24       31          85     5      4 145
Whatcom 2010   304    22       26          78     4     NA 130

  Year White Black Hispanic NatAmerican Other UnRace  POC
1 2014  8642  1924      849         604   408    202 3785
2 2013  8330  1857      557         575   378    517 3367
3 2012  8695  1945      403         585   398    579 3331
4 2011  8698  2061      666         607   415    328 3749
5 2010  8113  1889     1721         535   481      0 4626

Looking at volume data like this can confusing because it doesn't necessarily tell us what we want to know for each county: Is the percentage of people of color higher in a specific county jail than that county population? Is a particular racial identity over represented in that jail?  To do this, I merge 2014 county population data from the Census with WASPC ADP (Average Daily Populations) for white : nonwhite populations in WA county jails. I derive the ratio K where

 K  = (PCTNotWhiteJail -  (1 - PCTWhitePop))

such that K=0 would represents a ratio of White:NotWhite in the county jail equal with the county population ratio for White:NotWhite. If K is negative, that county jail has a larger percentage of those white than the local county population.  Unfortunately, that's not the case for most counties in WA. The summed counties of WA have a 10% K ratio indicating that state jail system incarcerates "People of Color" at a higher ratio than the representation of "People of Color" in the state.

t1 =sum(NotWhiteAloneInJail)/sum(AverageDailyJailPopulation)
t2 = sum(AllWhiteInPop)/sum(TotalPopulation)
K = t1 - (1 - t2) 
K = .107124

Matching the ratio of any particular race from the more granular Census racial categories with the less granular WASPC racial categories will have to be saved for another post and more data. Statistically, using average daily population as data points is poor and inaccurate statistical practice. I have asked the WASPC for the raw data and will republish this paper when I receive such. For now, averages as data points is all I have. There are lots of problems with a generalized statistic such as this, not the least of them being that counties lease beds from others and at least two counties (Douglas, Chelan) share a regional jail. However, at least 15 counties have K ratios over 9.9%. In the case of Whatcom County, clearly we are incarcerating both black and Native American at rates much higher than their representation in the general population.  For city and some regional jails (bottom of this list), I do not compute K.

   County.City PCTNotWhiteInJail PCTWhiteInPop      K
1        Ferry              6.1%         76.5% -17.5%
2    Wahkiakum              0.0%         93.6%  -6.4%
3      Stevens              4.9%         89.4%  -5.7%
4      SanJuan              0.0%         94.5%  -5.5%
5  PendOreille              3.6%         91.3%  -5.1%
6   WallaWalla              7.0%         92.2%  -0.8%
7     Franklin              8.3%         90.9%  -0.8%
8        Mason             11.3%         88.3%  -0.4%
9       Benton             10.2%         91.0%   1.3%
10     Clallam             13.6%         87.8%   1.4%
11 GraysHarbor             13.8%         87.7%   1.5%
12     Pacific             11.9%         89.9%   1.8%
13     Whitman             17.1%         85.1%   2.2%
14       Clark             15.0%         87.3%   2.3%
15   Snohomish             23.3%         80.2%   3.6%
16     Cowlitz             12.0%         91.9%   3.9%
17      Kitsap             20.9%         83.3%   4.2%
18    Columbia             10.0%         94.4%   4.4%
19      Asotin             10.3%         94.4%   4.7%
20    Thurston             22.2%         82.9%   5.2%
21       Lewis             12.7%         92.9%   5.6%
22   Jefferson             16.7%         91.3%   7.9%
23      Island             22.2%         86.3%   8.5%
24     Whatcom             22.5%         87.3%   9.9%
25     Spokane             20.7%         89.8%  10.5%
26    Kittitas             20.7%         91.9%  12.6%
27    Skamania             20.0%         93.0%  13.0%
28        King             43.9%         70.1%  14.0%
29     Lincoln             21.7%         94.3%  16.1%
30   Klickitat             25.5%         92.9%  18.4%
31      Pierce             43.2%         76.1%  19.3%
32      Chelan             26.4%         93.8%  20.2%
33      Skagit             29.4%         90.8%  20.2%
34    Okanogan             38.0%         82.4%  20.3%
35    Garfield             30.0%         95.4%  25.4%
36       Grant             42.7%         92.6%  35.2%
37      Yakima             57.7%         88.0%  45.7%
38       Adams             69.2%         90.6%  59.8%
39    Aberdeen              8.3%           NA%    NA%
40      Auburn               NA%           NA%    NA%
41     Douglas               NA%         93.7%    NA%
42    Enumclaw             15.0%           NA%    NA%
43        Fife             41.4%           NA%    NA%
44       Forks             10.7%           NA%    NA%
45   Grandview             62.5%           NA%    NA%
46    Issaquah             16.1%           NA%    NA%
47        Kent             35.0%           NA%    NA%
48    Kirkland              6.2%           NA%    NA%
49    Lynnwood             42.5%           NA%    NA%
50  Marysville             25.0%           NA%    NA%
51   Nisqually               NA%           NA%    NA%
52   OakHarbor               NA%           NA%    NA%
53     Olympia               NA%           NA%    NA%
54    Puyallup             20.4%           NA%    NA%
55      Renton               NA%           NA%    NA%
56       SCORE             43.5%           NA%    NA%
57   Sunnyside             60.0%           NA%    NA%
58   Toppenish             90.0%           NA%    NA%
59      Wapato             42.4%           NA%    NA%
60  YakimaCity             11.7%           NA%    NA%

In her work "The New Jim Crow", Michelle Alexander defines an apartheid racial caste system which she labels as 'mass incarceration' This 'caste system' functions to racially oppress people of color and take as "collateral damage" those white prisoners caught in this system.  With ratios of imprisonment in many counties in WA so clearly over represented by 'minority' racial populations, Ms. Alexander's framework has relevance for crime, law, and social justice in WA and Whatcom County. Below are some additional charts. Data in these charts is derived from the WASPC. In the following three charts, 'Percentage ADP (Average Daily Population)' gives the percentage (listed on the horizontal axis in decimal) of  Black, Hispanic, Native American in all WA county jails. Click to Enlarge the Charts!




Native Americans are very clearly over represented in some of the county jails, particularly in Yakima and Whatcom which are much smaller counties by population than Spokane, Snohomish, and King. This chart compares those five counties for imcarceration of Native Americans by volume. The years 2010 - 2014 are represented bottom to top and left to right.

Both the nominal ADP (average daily population)  and the percentage ADP (SpecificRace.ADP/ADP.Total) of some racial minorities is much smaller in some counties than others because of various factor like county size and the ratio of that jail population to that counties population. The following two charts look at Average Daily Population and Black.ADP/ADP (percentage) for Black Americans. In the second charts we can see that jails like SCORE and KING County have nearly 30% or more of their populations from Black Americans. Matching the ratio of any particular race from the more granular Census racial categories with the less granular WASPC racial categories will have to be saved for another post and more data.


The next two charts give us representation of  ADP for mid to small sized counties close to Whatcom in size and location. The first excludes those who are white.



1 comment:

Dan McShane said...

Thanks for working these numbers and for the previous post