The Hispanic-American Incarceration Rate Has Fallen
But it remains relatively high even after adjusting for age and sex
By Jason Richwine on September 7, 2021
Because so many immigrants to the U.S. in the past 50 years have come from Latin America, the socioeconomic status of Hispanic Americans is of interest to immigration researchers. Stanford Professor Keith Humphreys recently pointed out the encouraging news contained in a Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report: The Hispanic incarceration rate has been moving downward toward the non-Hispanic white rate, especially over the last 10 years. Humphreys suggested the decline is all the more notable because Hispanics are younger on average than non-Hispanic whites, and young adults are of course the most crime-prone age group.
So what do the age-adjusted numbers look like? The BJS report cannot tell us, but we can use the American Community Survey (ACS) to investigate. The ACS is an annual mini-census that records whether respondents are “institutionalized”. Institutionalization is not the same as incarceration, but among the non-elderly it’s a decent approximation. (See “Methodological Notes” below for more on this topic.)
Each cell in the following table displays a ratio — the Hispanic institutionalization rate divided by the non-Hispanic white rate — and each ratio is statistically adjusted to account for differences in age, sex, and region of residence. The top portion uses 2009 ACS data the bottom portion uses 2019 data. For example, U.S.-born Hispanics with Mexican ancestry had an institutionalization rate that was 2.3 times as high as non-Hispanic whites of the same, age, sex, and region in 2009. By 2019, that ratio had declined to 1.9.
https://cis.org/Richwine/HispanicAmerican-Incarceration-Rate-Has-Fallen
