California jail incarceration rates highest in sparsely populated counties

CalMatters reported yesterday that incarceration rates are highest in rural California.  Here are some excerpts from Nigel Duara's story, covering a new report from the Prison Policy Institute, a non profit seeking to end mass incarceration: 

The report takes newly available data from California prisons to show where inmates come from – not just their home counties, but their neighborhoods. The group’s stated intent is to show lawmakers where they can better direct public dollars.

The neighborhoods where incarcerated people come from often have a higher percentage of Black and Latino residents than the state average, according to the report, while the counties that host the prisons are predominantly white.

The effect has been “the siphoning of political power from disproportionately Black and Latino communities to pad out the mostly rural and often predominantly white regions where prisons are located,” the study found.

Unsurprisingly, the most populous counties send the most people to state prison. Los Angeles County had the most people incarcerated, followed by Riverside and San Diego counties.

I've written about this issue before here and here, among other posts. 

But in some counties, though they have fewer total people in state prisons, the rate of incarceration is much higher than the statewide average of 310 per 100,000 people.

Tiny Kings County in the San Joaquin Valley has the state’s highest incarceration rate at 666 per 100,000, the study found.

Shasta County ranked second among counties that send people to prison, with 663 county residents incarcerated per 100,000 people. The county of fewer than 200,000 is framed by mountains to its north, west and east. People move there for cheap land and open spaces, or burrow further into its hills to escape creeping modernity, Bowman said.

“And then we have those who have moved up here for political reasons and I’ll just leave it at that,” Bowman said with a laugh.  

Bowman is director of Shasta County's program to help "formerly incarcerated people transition back to life outside."  He says the three drivers of crime in that far northern California county are high housing costs, untreated mental illness and drug trafficking.  

In one Shasta County Census tract that encompasses most of the city of Redding, more than one in every 100 people is in a state prison.

To be clear, both Shasta County and Kings County are metropolitan counties, but they are sparsely populated compared to many in the state.  The screenshot captured above shows that an even less densely populated county, Mendocino, has a considerably lower rate of jail incarceration, and nonmetro counties like Mono and Calaveras also have low incarceration rates.  Incarceration rates in nonmetro Alpine and Amador are also low, but they creep higher in other sparsely populated nonmetros, like Plumas, Lassen, Sierra, Inyo and Mariposa.  In other words, it's not clear to me that there's a strong rural correlation to high jail incarceration rates.  Depends on how you define rural, including at what scale--at the scale of the county or below.  

Prior posts about rural jail populations are here.