Incarceration rates highest among rural Californians

Shasta County in rural northern California has a number of the state’s highest incarceration rates. Ask Robert Bowman what’s happening, and he takes an extended, deep sigh. 

“It’s a perfect storm of bad,” he mentioned. 

Bowman, director of the county’s program that helps previously incarcerated folks transition again to life exterior, identifies three primary drivers of crime in Shasta County: excessive housing prices, untreated psychological sickness and drug trafficking. 

Those are a number of the identical components blamed for crime in different California counties that rank among the highest for incarcerated folks, in keeping with a report released this morning by the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit that seeks to finish mass incarceration. 

The report takes newly obtainable information from California prisons to indicate the place inmates come from – not simply their house counties, however their neighborhoods. The group’s said intent is to indicate lawmakers the place they’ll higher direct public {dollars}. 

The neighborhoods the place incarcerated folks come from typically have the next share of Black and Latino residents than the state common, in keeping with the report, whereas the counties that host the prisons are predominantly white. 

The impact has been “the siphoning of political power from disproportionately Black and Latino communities to pad out the mostly rural and often predominantly white regions where prisons are located,” the research discovered.

Unsurprisingly, essentially the most populous counties ship the most individuals to state jail. Los Angeles County had the most individuals incarcerated, adopted by Riverside and San Diego counties.

But in some counties, although they’ve fewer whole folks in state prisons, the speed of incarceration is way increased than the statewide common of 310 per 100,000 folks.

Tiny Kings County within the San Joaquin Valley has the state’s highest incarceration price at 666 per 100,000, the research discovered.

Shasta County ranked second among counties that ship folks to jail, with 663 county residents incarcerated per 100,000 folks. The county of fewer than 200,000 is framed by mountains to its north, west and east. People transfer there for reasonable land and open areas, or burrow additional into its hills to flee creeping modernity, Bowman mentioned. 

“And then we have those who have moved up here for political reasons and I’ll just leave it at that,” Bowman mentioned with fun.

In one Shasta County Census tract that encompasses many of the metropolis of Redding, multiple in each 100 folks is in a state jail.  

Disparities additionally persist in cities like Los Angeles, the place the neighborhoods of Watts and Crenshaw have more than five times the incarceration price of Bel-Air and Brentwood, in keeping with the research’s calculations.

“There’s fewer Beverly Hills in our community,” Bowman mentioned. 

But lots of the identical points that crop up in Los Angeles and San Francisco are true in far northern California: homelessness, untreated psychological sickness and a resistance among locals to new building or low-income housing. 

Bowman factors to a proposed micro shelter at a Lutheran church in Redding that may function transitional housing for as much as 5 folks. Neighbors hung an indication on a series link fence: “Tiny Houses = Big Problems.” The shelter is expected to open this fall.

“If you have billions of dollars to spend, but yet your community is overwhelmingly ‘not in my backyard,’ then you can get nothing done,” Bowman mentioned. 

The Prison Policy Initiative report relies on numbers offered by the state of California which, for the primary time in its 2020 Census, counted jail inmates of their house districts as a substitute of the cities and counties the place they’re incarcerated. 

The thought was to finish what opponents referred to as “prison gerrymandering,” which counted jail inmates as residents of their jail’s county. California ended that apply in 2011 with AB 420, signed by former Gov. Jerry Brown, however the legislation didn’t take impact till 2020. Ten different states have taken comparable steps. 

This 12 months’s redistricting maps have been the primary to rely incarcerated folks of their house districts. The course of to closing approval by a state impartial fee was fraught and messy, however has to this point survived with out a authorized problem. 

“Our hope is really that policymakers and service providers will use this data to kind of direct some of their thinking on how they make choices about the people that they serve,” mentioned Prison Policy Initiative spokesman Mike Wessler. 

“For lawmakers, we hope that they’ll take a look at how many people in their own communities are lost to incarceration every single day.” 

The Prison Policy Initiative research was taken from a snapshot of the 122,000 folks in state prisons on April 1, 2020. It doesn’t rely folks in federal jail or immigration detention, nor does it rely those that have been recognized in courtroom proceedings as homeless. 

Among cities with at the very least 20,000 folks, Compton in Los Angeles County had the highest price of incarceration, with 979 folks incarcerated per 100,000 residents. It additionally has the next Black and Latino inhabitants than the state common, which the report’s authors say mirrors a nationwide development. 

“This suggests that policing, arrests and incarceration are disproportionately concentrated in a handful of Black communities across the county, such as Compton with its large Black population,” wrote the report’s authors, Emily Widra and Felicia Gomez. 

One Census tract in Kern County stands out. Just east of downtown Bakersfield, the one-square-mile tract had 2,944 residents and 74 folks in state prisons, or greater than two out of each 100 folks.

Kern County additionally leads the state in murder price, a statistic the county’s residents and legislation enforcement battle to elucidate. For the sixth consecutive 12 months, the county led the state with a murder price of 13.7 homicides per 100,000 people. The statewide common is six homicides per 100,000.

“Some of the smaller rural counties often are overlooked but actually have some of the highest incarceration rates in the entire state,” Wessler mentioned. “A lot of these rural areas are also facing significant economic challenges.”

You don’t must remind Bowman of the Shasta County STEP-UP program for not too long ago launched inmates. First, in 2018, the Carr Fire displaced thousands of people in an space that was already struggling to regulate housing prices. Then, within the pandemic, wealthier residents of the Bay Area and Sacramento Valley began transferring north, pushing up rents and residential values. People already on the financial fringe have been pushed to its edge. 

“Because now, landlords could charge whatever they want and there’s no reason for them to open up their homes,” to inexpensive housing packages, Bowman mentioned. “They can get someone who is displaced while their home’s being rebuilt (and) they can get a higher rent from that individual or family. So that’s a huge issue.” 

He is, nevertheless, finally optimistic. 

“I think that there are a lot of good people that are trying to do the very best they can,” Bowman mentioned. “It just takes time for the numbers to come down.”