Segregation and African-American imprisonment rates for drug offenses

• Results from a sample of 198 counties with populations of more than 250,000 people reveal that White isolation is negatively related to the rate at which African-Americans are admitted to prison for drug crimes.
• The dissimilarity index has no effect on the prison admission rates of African-Americans for drug offenses.
• The relationship between the percentage of African-Americans living in a community and imprisonment rates for drug offenses is nonlinear.

Scholars argue that the dramatic increase in the African-American incarceration rate that occurred after the civil rights era was in part a reflection of the declining utility of residential segregation as a modern form of social control. Existing research has not thoroughly investigated the association between racial segregation and prison admission rates. Using 2002 data for 198 metropolitan counties, this research examines the relationship between two dimensions of racial residential segregation and African-American prison admission rates for drug offenses. The results from a multivariate regression analysis reveal that the prison admission rates of African-Americans for drug offenses are lower in counties where White residents are more residentially isolated from African-Americans. The admission rates are unaffected by the dissimilarity index. Consistent with recent research on the level of coercive control, the findings suggest that the effect of the percentage of African-Americans residing in an area is nonlinear.