• Rebecca Fielding-Miller, Hannah L F Cooper, Sharon Caslin, and Anita Raj.
• Department of Medicine, Center on Gender Equity and Health, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA. rfieldingmiller@ucsd.edu.
• J Urban Health. 2020 Feb 1; 97 (1): 112122112-122.

AbstractThe mass incarceration of African Americans is both a driver of racial health inequalities in the USA. Systemic social biases which associate African American men with criminality, violence, and as a particular threat to white women may partially explain their over-representation in the criminal justice system. We combined data from the Washington, DC Metro Police Department (MPD) and the American Community Survey to test whether neighborhood-level gender, race, and economic makeup were associated with elevated drug-related arrest disproportions for African American men. We found that African American men were significantly overrepresented in all drug-related arrests across the District, and that this arrest disproportion was significantly higher in neighborhoods that had a higher percentage of white female residents. The association between race and gender was somewhat attenuated, but not completely eliminated, when we introduced socio-economic variables to our model. Addressing the social determinants of criminal justice disparities must account for the intersection of race, gender, and economics, rather than considering race in isolation.

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