Out of every country in the world, the United States has the highest incarceration rate per 100,000 people. The United States is an anomaly compared to the rest of the world and has the most people behind bars of any country. There are more than two million Americans in prison compared to 1.6 million in China and 673 thousand in Brazil. The incarceration rate, in 2016, was at the lowest level in the United States in 20 years but is still the highest in the world at 655 per 100,000 adults. It was around 2008 that the incarceration rate peaked at 1,000 per 100,000 adults(Gramlich, 2018). Since then the incarceration rate has been consistently falling and there are several reasons why. Crime rates have fallen recently and with it the number of arrests and consequently the number of people in jail. Also, reductions in prison sentences for thousands of inmates were reduced and lowered the federal prison population. As more states legalize marijuana it will be interesting to see the impact that has on the prison population. Theoretically, it should lower the number of inmates being arrested and inmates who are currently in jail for marijuana related offenses should be released earlier than expected.
West Virginia is not one of the states that have legalized marijuana. So for this project, I created a Tableau document that analyzes the prison population in each county of West Virginia. The first visualization takes the number of people in the county who are currently incarcerated divided by the adult population of that county and then multiplied by 100,000. This allows for a standardized statistic that allows you to compare counties of different sizes. It turns out that Webster County has the highest incarceration rate per 100,000 of any county in West Virginia. My next visualization was similar and showed the female prison population by county. I chose a gender breakdown over racial because many West Virginia counties are not racially diverse and a datapoint of 0 per 100,000 isn’t interesting. Many of the counties are also very rural and not densely populated so a few still had zero women who were currently incarcerated. But again, Webster County had the most incarcerations per 100,000 adult women in the state. One of the counties with the least amount of crime and residents currently imprisoned is Tucker county. They have a female prison population of 0, a male prison population of only 89 per 100,000 and low violent&property crime rates. The final visualization plotted the property crime per 100,000 adults against violent crime per 100,000 adults for each county. Property crime is defined as a category of crime that includes, among other crimes, burglary, larceny, theft, motor vehicle theft, arson, shoplifting, and vandalism. Property crime is a crime to obtain money, property, or some other benefit. This may involve force, or the threat of force, in cases like robbery or extortion. Each dot on the graph represents a county and the colors show if the county is small/mid, rural or suburban. There is also a trend line that shows the relationship between violent and property crime. The graph shows that counties with a lower amount of crimes tended to stay near the trend line while counties with higher levels of crime had more variance like Wyoming County.
References
Gramlich, J (2018, May 02). U.S. incarceration rate is at its lowest in 20 years. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/02/americas-incarceration-rate-is-at-a-two-decade-low/