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County team begins to tackle racial disparities in criminal justice
from Steven Elbow's article in the CapTimes:
We've heard a lot of talk about the staggering racial disparities in the state's criminal justice system in recent years. Wisconsin has routinely ranked at or near the top of states for the rate at which it locks up blacks compared with whites. And Dane County's progressive reputation has been tarnished by the rate at which it sends black offenders to prison - nearly half of black men between the ages of 25 and 29 residing in the county are either incarcerated or under court-ordered supervision. According to a study by Pam Oliver, a UW sociology professor, black men in Dane County are 21 times more likely to be incarcerated than white men. And according to a Justice Policy Institute report in 2007, black men in Dane County were 97 times more likely to be incarcerated for drug crimes, the second-highest rate in the nation.
A team from Dane County will take on the daunting task of tackling that problem, meeting for the first time on Monday. It will be their job to take recommendations released last fall by the Dane County Task Force on Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System and make them work.
