Iowa has one of the country’s worst rates of racial disparities in prison and jail populations, according to a new study from a think tank focused on criminal justice issues. The analysis by the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), a nonpartisan Massachusetts-based nonprofit, found Iowa in a four-way tie as one of the states with the seventh-worst for such disparities.
Relying on data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a division of the U.S. Department of Justice, PPI compares incarceration rates for white and Black residents in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The population statistics were from 2021, the most recent year for which the data is fully available.
For the country as a whole, the incarceration rate in state prisons for Black residents was six times higher than that for white residents. In Iowa, that disparity rises dramatically. Black Iowans are 9.1 times more likely to be incarcerated in a state prison than their white counterparts.
Non-Hispanic white Iowans make up 84 percent of the state’s population, but account for only 64 percent of those in state prisons, according to the study. Black Iowans represent 4 percent of the state’s population but 25 percent of the people in state prisons. The percentages are identical for the racial disparities in county jail population in Iowa.
“The cards are stacked against Black Iowans in our legal system every step of the way,” ACLU of Iowa Executive Director Mark Stringer said in a statement following the release of the PPI study.
This new analysis is just the most recent to find profound racial disparities in Iowa’s criminal justice system. In 2020, the ACLU published a report looking at racial disparities in arrests for marijuana possession. Overall, Black Americans were 3.84 times more likely than white Americans to be arrested for possession, but Black Iowans 7.26 times more likely to be arrested for possession.
“How many more studies will it take for Iowa to fully address this continuing crisis?” Betty Andrews, president of the Iowa Nebraska NAACP, said in response to the PPI analysis. “These disparate findings underscore the need for systemic reform.”
In addition to examining racial disparities, the PPI analysis also highlighted Iowa’s overall rate of incarceration, which is “higher than almost any democracy on earth.”
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics statistics, Iowa locks up 582 people per every 100,000 residents. That’s less than the overall U.S. incarceration rate (664 per 100,000) but more than five times the rate of Canada (104 per 100,000).
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