Only 3 U.S. States Bother to Study How Sentencing Rules Affect Minorities

Earlier this month, Oregon became only the third state in the United States to adopt a bill mandating "racial impact statements" for proposed changes to prison sentencing laws. The concept borrows from better-known fiscal and environmental impact statements, analyses designed to anticipate how policies or development projects might affect a local budget or ecosystem. If a new highway will likely degrade a watershed, for instance, we probably want to know about that ahead of time, not years after it's built.

Similarly, criminal justice policy often disproportionately affects minorities, and in ways that we fail to thoughtfully consider ahead of time. One in every nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 is incarcerated in the U.S., with rippling consequences for their future employment and voting rights, not to mention the stability of whole urban neighborhoods. In Oregon, blacks are six times as likely as whites to end up in prison. And racial disparities show themselves in other ways: As Richard Florida wrote earlier this week, using just the latest example, Stand Your Ground laws statistically appear to introduce bias against black victims in favor of white shooters in states with such self-defense laws.