Racial inequalities deepened in U.S. prisons during COVID: Nature

LONDON, April 20 (Xinhua) -- The proportion of jailed people who are Black or Latino in the United States increased during the COVID pandemic, Nature, a leading scientific journal, has reported.

Around the start of the pandemic in early 2020, the proportions of Black and Latino people in the U.S. prison population began to increase, while the proportion of white people started decreasing, according to an article published Wednesday by Nature.

The researchers who made the surprising discovery attribute it largely to the shorter sentencing, on average, that white people receive in the U.S. courts.

"Black people are, on average, serving sentences that are 20 percent longer than white people," Brennan Klein, a network scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and a co-author of the study, was quoted as saying.

Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, a sociologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said the results could also change how policymakers focus efforts to reduce racial inequities in the system.

"I think what makes this paper really powerful is that we can see that ... the sentencing still had this enormous, enduring effect of racism," she said.