Does racial impact statement reform reduce Black–White disparities in imprisonment: Mixed methods evidence from Minnesota

Abstract

Increasingly scholars have argued that, if the United States is to reduce Black–White disparities in incarceration, it is necessary to move away from race‐neutral efforts and ensure that policies consider race. Despite this perspective, criminal legal policies have almost exclusively been race‐neutral, with one general exception at the state level: racial impact statement reform. Although racial impact statement reform exists now in 10 states, no scholarship has empirically examined the implications of this approach for racial disparities in imprisonment. Using a mixed methods approach, we begin to fill this gap by examining the implications of Minnesota's racial impact statement reform on Black–White imprisonment rate disparities. Our quasi‐experimental results do not suggest that Minnesota's reform reduced Black–White disparities in imprisonment. Our legislative analysis suggests that the null effects we observed were likely due to the fact that racial impact statements are responses to legislation that has already been proposed, and that the legislation proposed in Minnesota was not sufficient to significantly address Black–White imprisonment disparities, regardless of the extent to which these statements impacted the votes of legislators.