Drug Penalties to Prison Pipeline: Assessing the Degree to which States with Stiffer Drug Penalties Have Higher Incarceration Rates of Non-White Prisoners.

This paper examines why states with stringent drug control legislation typically have disproportionately higher rates of incarceration among non-white inmates. It focuses on non-white prison populations at the state level. There is existing data supporting the impact of racial biases in my research, which compares general incarceration rates across different races and correlates this data with specific drug policies enacted. Nonetheless, the data might suggest that race could be an unreliable variable in this study, particularly as the statistics in this report solely represent those in local, state, or federal custody and exclude the approximately five million individuals on probation or parole. The study's data indicates that if racial biases contribute to disparities in incarceration rates, they may arise from variables distinct from ecological power threats. My article presents an alternate perspective, asserting that racial preferences alone do not explain the disparities in incarceration rates across states and their drug laws. I apply a multivariate regression model to assess the degrees of racial imprisonment inequality among states, hence filling the gap in the contemporary research on this topic to some degree. Additional elements to consider include inmates' socioeconomic condition and its influence on incarceration and recidivism. This paper's research extends the hypothesis of recidivism rates linked to lenient criminal justice penalties. This analysis shows that the harshness of drug penalties will result in a higher proportion of non-white convicts at the state level if they influence the incarceration rates of non-white inmates.