Thread: AZ:Hispanic males are now majority in county jails

Hispanic males are now majority in county jails
by JJ Hensley - Jul. 7, 2009 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic
There's a shift under way in the Maricopa County jails.

The population of White male inmates, after growing steadily for more than a decade, has dropped in the past five years, while the population of Hispanic male inmates has increased to the point that they make up the ethnic majority, according Sheriff's Office data.

Experts say the explanation for the increase is largely due to overall population trends coupled with a series of recent laws and policy decisions targeting illegal immigrants.
The majority of Hispanics in county jails are not in the country illegally. However, most of the illegal immigrants jailed as a result of immigration-enforcement efforts are Latino.

In 2006, County Attorney Andrew Thomas issued an opinion allowing prosecutors to charge illegal immigrants as co-conspirators in their own smuggling. Voters also approved Proposition 100, which denies bail to illegal immigrants.

In 2007, the Sheriff's Office, Phoenix police and the state Department of Public Safety entered into agreements allowing officers and deputies to receive Immigration and Customs Enforcement training. Voters approved the Legal Arizona Workers Act, the state's employer-sanctions law.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio has used ICE-trained deputies to conduct crime sweeps in neighborhoods with high Hispanic populations and work-site raids, which frequently result in arrests for warrants and other crimes that have nothing to do with immigration.

Arpaio pointed to his policy decisions and the new laws as a reason for the jail-population shift, particularly the denial of bail to illegal immigrants.

"They're staying there. They're not getting the revolving door. When we arrest them, they can't get right out on bond," Arpaio said.

On average, about 12 percent of the inmates in county jails have immigration holds. Some of those inmates are picked up on suspicion of crimes such as identity theft or illegal entry, while other inmates with immigration holds are brought in for outstanding warrants or crimes such as DUI.

"These numbers don't represent a pattern of crime, they reflect a pattern of enforcement," said Alessandra Soler Meetze, executive director of the Arizona ACLU, a group that is suing the Sheriff's Office over allegations of racial profiling.

Arpaio said his deputies and other law-enforcement agencies weren't looking to arrest minorities and pointed to the Hispanic population's rapid growth.

Still, putting large numbers of police officers and deputies in Latino neighborhoods would clearly result in more Latinos going to jail, said Nastassia Walsh, a research analyst with the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.,-based group that advocates alternatives to incarceration.

"What you see across the country, and probably one of the main reasons why there is so much of a disproportionate minority portion of the prison population is because law enforcement tends to focus on lower-income communities and communities of color when they're doing their enforcement," Walsh said.

About 8,000 men are in county jails each day, a number that's remained unchanged in the past five years.


• The number of Hispanic men in county jails increased by more than 28 percent between 2004 and 2008, from 2,751 in 2004 to more than 3,500 last year. The number of Hispanics in Maricopa County increased by more than 20 percent, from 982,000 in 2004 to more than 1.18 million in 2007, the last year with ethnic data available from the U.S. Census.


• The number of White men in county jails fell nearly 18 percent, from 3,580 to 2,938 in that same time span, while the number of Whites in the county rose by almost 7 percent.


• The number of Black men in county jails continued to increase, from 986 to 1,158 in that five-year period, and now make up more than 14 percent of the jails' male population. Blacks make up about 4 percent of the county's population.

Jail officials said those population shifts have led to increasing ethnic tensions among inmates. Officials instituted a pair of rare systemwide lockdowns in the past two months, including one last week after intelligence indicated a large-scale disturbance between Black and Hispanic inmates, officials said.

The lockdown was lifted on Thursday and a small disturbance erupted the following day. Arpaio described the incident as "racially motivated," and officials locked down a unit of the Lower Buckeye Jail.

These population shifts have occurred while Maricopa County, like the rest of the country, has seen an overall decline in violent crime.

Walsh said a similar pattern emerged during the late 1990s, when violent crime was on the decline and incarceration numbers continued to rise. "Law enforcement focused their efforts on drug crime (in the 1990s) and because they're a 'victimless crime,' they're very rarely reported as crime," she said. "Because crime is going down, police have more time to go look for people who are here illegally, or for people who are selling drugs."

But the raw data makes it difficult to draw any conclusions about the types of crimes residents of different ethnic backgrounds commit.

"I can only go on statistics in the jail, but that doesn't mean that everybody committing crime is arrested, there could be 1,000 people committing a crime that aren't arrested," Arpaio said. "That's pretty tough to try to make that qualification (about race and crime), you can't just go by what we got in jail."

Republic reporter Daniel González contributed to this article.


http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/ ... t0707.html

This is absolute crap coming from Walsh and the whole bent of the article is biased enough to make one upchuck.
What is not mentioned is the rapid increase in Latino population, which is famous for being here illegally, and the decreased white population who has probably moved somewhere else, since they can't speak Spanish.
And as far as jobs Americans will do, crime has always been a part of that so we don't really need any guest workers to help fill a void.