The scholarly debate over the nature and cause of the significant racial disparities in prison incarceration rates in the United States has taken on renewed intensity in recent years. Two sorts of activities have spurred the debate. On one hand, researchers such as Alfred Blumstein (1982), Jan Chaiken and Marcia Chaiken (1982), and Joan Petersilia (1983) have begun to use powerful analytic and conceptual tools to scrutinize the hypothesis that racism or racial discrimination exists in the criminal justice system, or that it is the cause of the racial disproportionality of our prisons. On the other hand, minority scholars and public opinion leaders have begun a very visible and vocal attack on the results of the conventional social science community. (See, for example, National Minority Advisory Council on Criminal Justice, 1980.) These activities have stimulated much discussion among public policymakers and legislators. Ranking black members of the U.S. Congress, for example, have gone on record by questioning social science research findings that purport to show that racial discrimination in certain aspects of the criminal justice system does not exist - or, at least, that its alleged existence is not a cause of the greater representation of blacks in the prisons or the criminal population. Economists have not been leaders or even active participants in this debate. This is surprising for several reasons. Many of the conventional tools of econometrics can be called upon to resolve some of the statistical issues in dispute; post-Beckerian models are likely to yield more than negligible benefits in sorting out the theoretical effects of punishment on criminal activities; and radical labor market paradigms may prove useful in examining the historical evolution of prisons and punishment in America. A brief overview of a number of different areas of research on race and punishment will illustrate the inherent potential as well as the unrealized promise of economic approaches.

The Political Economy of Antiracism Initiatives in the Post-Durban Round by Samuel L. Myers Jr., Lajune Thomas Lange and Bruce Corrie. Published in volume 93, issue 2, pages 330-333 of American Economic Review, May 2003

Female headship among black families long has been more pronounced in the United States in comparison with other ethnic groups. E. Franklin Frazier's classic study of the black family in the 1930's placed a distinct emphasis on the disproportionately high number of urban Negro families with women heads. Frazier's work suggested that throughout the pre-World War II period almost one-quarter of black families were headed by women. In the mid-1960's, female headship among black families was the subject of Johnson Administration policy planner Daniel Moynihan's notorious characterization of the black family as enmeshed in a tangle of pathology. But while the subsequent debate between disciples of Moynihan's pathology-disorganization perspective and the proponents of the strength-resiliency perspective raged, the proportion of black families with female heads has risen markedly. The proportion climbed from slightly less than 25 percent in 1965 to an astonishing more than 40 percent by 1980. Female headship also has grown among white families, but the rate of increase has not approached that among blacks. Between 1965 and 1980, the percent of white female-headed families rose from 9 percent to close to 12 percent.

The conventional wisdom is that African-Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians are underrepresented among faculty in postsecondary institutions because they are underrepresented among Ph.D. recipients. Thus, the putative solution to the problem of minority faculty underrepresentation is to increase the supply of minority Ph.D.’s. In our book, Faculty of Color in Academe: Bittersweet Success (Turner and Myers, 2000) we point out that the supply-side argument has several flaws. In this and a companion paper (Myers and Turner, 2003) we replicate and update the analysis performed in Chapter 7 of our book using more recent census data and a larger sample for 1990. Once again, we demonstrate that an autonomous increase in the Ph.D. supply, uniform across all groups, would leave the representation of African-American and Hispanic faculty largely unchanged. This conclusion challenges the view that the underrepresentation of minority faculty is solely a supply-side phenomenon that can be addressed primarily by increasing the pipeline for new minority Ph.D.’s. Although a strong case can be made for increasing the minority pipeline, the pipeline itself does not appear to be the central cause of the continued underrepresentation of minority faculty. I. The Problem: At every point in the educational pipeline from the Bachelor’s degree to the doctoral degree, African-Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians are substantially underrepresented.