Prisons miscount Hispanics as white: Study credits California, Texas for adjustments

06/01/2001

By Ed Timms / The Dallas Morning News

Official prison statistics in some states significantly underreport the number of minority inmates by counting Hispanics as whites, according to a new study.

"Counting Hispanic/Latinos as whites hides the magnitude of incarceration of people of color," said Barry Holman, the report's author. "What has been rather antiseptically referred to as a 'racial disparity' is really a gaping divide between whites and nonwhites that far outstrips minority levels in the population or in committing crime."

The report by the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, a nonprofit group that examines criminal justice issues, criticized how several states, including New Mexico and Arizona, count their inmates. But Texas and California were held out as states that had changed their procedures and now have accurate counts.

The report tracked prison populations state-by-state between 1985 and 1997. Mr. Holman is director of public policy for the center.

"It doesn't take much for anyone to see that this is a big problem for the country at a time when Latinos, as the census has confirmed, [are] the largest ethnic minority and a very important part of the current and future workforce of the country," said Charles Kamasaki, senior vice president of the National Council of La Raza.

In August, the civil rights group began a study of the nation's criminal justice system and expects to issue a report in a few months.

Tommy Espinoza, a senior official with La Raza in Phoenix, said that many Hispanics "don't have the financial resources to litigate and probably deal with the undercurrent of discrimination in the system."

Recent controversy over alleged racial profiling by law enforcement officials, he said, may reflect what Hispanics confront throughout the criminal justice system. Mr. Kamasaki said he suspected that Hispanics were "lumped in with whites" in racial profiling to narrow the apparent disparity between whites and blacks.

According to the report released Thursday, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and New York were among the states having significantly higher minority inmate populations than official statistics suggest.

Texas and California both undercounted their Hispanic inmate populations in 1985, but later changed how they were counted. In 1997, the official count in those states accurately reflected inmate demographics, according to the report.

The report stated that New Mexico's prison population was reported as being 83 percent white in 1997, but the actual percentage was 28.9 percent. In Arizona, 79.6 percent of the inmates were reported as white in 1997, but the real figure was 30.8 percent. In 1997, New York reported that 43 percent of its inmates were white, but it was 18.3 percent. New York's prison population doubled between 1985 and 1997, and minorities accounted for more than 90 percent of the new prisoners.

The report also made several recommendations. Topping the list: "States and the federal government should adopt uniform guidelines for gathering and reporting prisoner data on race and ethnicity."

Sam Houston State University criminologist James W. Marquart said that tracking demographic trends in the prison population is useful to policy-makers and prison officials.

"If you're seeing a spike in the Hispanic population, you want to try to account for that ... and then develop policies to stem the tide," he said.

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