The Kansas Department of Corrections has been faced with overcrowding for years.
According to the American Legislative Exchange Council, in 2012, the state facilities' capacity was exceeded by 236 inmates. Next, add this fact: Kansas's prison population was expected to grow by 22.6 percent during the next 10 years.
To combat this issue, now-retired Kansas Department of Corrections Secretary Ray Roberts has spoken publicly about new policy initiatives under the 2013 Justice Reinvestment Act to reduce the number of offenders returning to prison for technical violations. However, what about the inmates whose sentences are not up anytime soon? Here are some data concerning the state's prison population.
The Prison Policy Initiative is a nonprofit organization dedicated to research and advocacy campaigns concerning mass incarceration. From their website, one can ascertain who is overrepresented and underrepresented in Kansas's prisons.
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Using 2010 Census data, the initiative determined that 3,306 per 100,000 blacks are currently incarcerated in Kansas. By contrast, 873 per 100,000 Hispanics, 1,197 per 100,000 American Indian or Alaskan natives, and 418 per 100,000 whites are in prisons.
Even though blacks make up 6 percent of the state's population, they form 31 percent of the state's prison population. Whites make up 78 percent of the state of Kansas, and only half of the prison population. This underrepresentation of whites in Kansas prisons has been present in data taken during the past decade.
This trend is not unusual in the United States – the rate of imprisonment for blacks is seven times higher than for whites.
The Bureau of Justice estimates that one in three black men in this country will spend some time behind bars.
What about gender? According to
data collected by the Kansas Legislative Research Department, men vastly outnumber women in the state's prisons. As of October 2014, 771 women were incarcerated in Kansas jails. Compare this with 8,788 men imprisoned.
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