This Indiana county sends more people to prison than San Francisco
America’s prison population is on the decline amid a push to reduce mass incarceration. But the trend is not being followed in less populous counties, where people are about 50 percent more likely to go to prison than those in large counties.
Exemplifying the small-county zealousness is Dearborn County, Indiana, which sends more people to prison per capita than nearly any other U.S. county, the New York Times reports. In 2014, the county sentenced more people to prison than San Francisco, even though the U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 2013 fewer than 50,000 people lived in Dearborn County. More than 837,000 live in San Francisco.
Dearborn County “represents the new boom in American prisons: mostly white, rural and politically conservative,” the story says.
Crime is falling at about the same rates in rural and urban areas, so that isn’t the source of the differences, the story explains. Rather, the disparities reflect different attitudes about punishment, especially in cases involving theft, drugs, weapons and drunken driving.
The Times provides an example of a Dearborn County defendant who “picked the wrong county to sell 15 oxycodone pills to an undercover officer.” Donnie Gaddis might have received no more than six months in prison 20 miles away in Cincinnati, and would have likely received drug treatment or probation in some larger cities, the story says. In Dearborn County, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
About one in 10 adults in Dearborn County is in prison, jail or on probation. The statistic, the Times says, “is driven less by crime and poverty than by a powerful prosecutor, hard-line judges and a growing heroin epidemic.”
The difference in incarceration rates between cities and small towns, especially for drug crimes, has led to a modest reversal in racial disparities in prisons, the Times reports. The number of new black prison inmates dropped by about 25 percent from 2006 to 2013, the number of new Hispanic inmates dropped by about 30 percent, and the number of new white inmates dropped by about 8 percent.
