Russel Sage Foundation

Amid punitive shifts in criminal justice and immigration control in the 1980s and 1990s, Latinx individuals made up a growing share of the incarcerated population in the U.S. These disparities intensified during the country’s “War on Drugs,” which resulted in the disproportionate arrest of young Black and Brown men. Public policy expert Ashley Muchow will investigate whether a similarly punitive turn in immigration control over this period – which featured the use of local jails to detain deportable noncitizens – aggravated ethnic arrest disparities. Using county-level arrest data from California between 1980 and 2004, Muchow will examine whether the adoption of intergovernmental service agreements to detain immigrants in local jails increased rates of Latinx arrest.