Monroe County NAACP branch member Guy Loftman at a Monday Justice Fiscal Advisory Committee meeting. (Courtesy of Community Access Television Services (CATS))
Black people have historically been and continue to be jailed at disproportionately higher rates in Monroe County — now more than ever.
That’s the conclusion of a study presented by a member of the Monroe County NAACP branch to the fiscal advisory group for a new county jail.
The topic of the Justice Fiscal Advisory Committee’s discussion Monday was diversity, equity and inclusion; more specifically, how to invest in and promote racial, ethnic and gender equality within the local justice system.
As part of that conversation, the group heard from Guy Loftman, a former attorney in Monroe County and local NAACP branch member of 25 years.
“When I first joined the NAACP (…) I believed that Monroe County was a place of equity and fairness and an oasis of racial justice,” Loftman said. “It’s a myth. It’s a myth that, especially, white people are very fond of. In my experiences, most Black people know that’s a myth perpetuated by white people.”
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A study by the local NAACP branch found that from Jan. 1 to March 31, 2023, Black people made up, on average, 26.5% of inmates at the Monroe County Jail. The estimated Black population of Monroe County is 3.9%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
That means Black people are overrepresented in the jail by 681%.
“Stated another way, we would expect seven or eight Black people to be in the jail at any time,” a letter from the branch states. “Instead, there have been over 50.”
The local branch has studied overrepresentation of Black people in the jail for the last 25 years. That figure — 681% — is nearly double the average amount by which Black people were overrepresented in the jail between 1997 and 2017.
Loftman said that on average, Blacks make up 26.5% of the inmate population despite making up just under 4% of Monroe County’s population. That means the makeup of Black inmates is seven times higher than it would be if the two populations were proportionate.
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“This is a worse number than we have ever seen,” Loftman said. “In four years, we’ve seen an almost 400% disparity in our incarceration. It was actually much higher in this three-month period than we had seen before.”
The exact reasons for the disparity being higher now than before is not clear.
Loftman said that overall, the jail population has been down since the COVID-19 pandemic and has not shot back up to pre-pandemic numbers.
“Even though there were fewer people in jail, it did not help with Black disproportionality; in fact, Black disproportionality seems to have grown during that period,” he said. “I cannot tell you why this happens, but we do know from countless studies that inferior healthcare, poverty, inferior schools and bias at every step of the criminal justice system contribute to these disproportionate outcomes.”
Historical data presented by Loftman may also help shed light on the situation.
A previous study by the local branch found that in 2000, Black people made up about 9.5% of all bookings and somewhere between 3.5-4% of the county’s population. Calculations show they were overrepresented in the jail by about 300%.
As part of that study, Loftman said the branch was able to determine why each person was arrested and whether the arrest was officer-initiated. The study concluded that officer-initiated arrests were predominantly against white people, not Black.
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The study also found there were a disproportionate number of arrests for failure to appear in court and probation violations.
“In other words, most people were coming into jail not because they committed new crimes, but because they couldn’t get along with the criminal justice system,” Loftman said. “The people who are coming into the jail are often there because they have failed the system where the system has failed them.”
According to the study, Black people were held two to three times longer than white people from the time of arrest until the time they were released on bond.
It also found about 26% of Black inmates participated in pretrial diversion compared to just 7% of whites. Pretrial diversion is a program where certain low-level offenders may have their charges dismissed by completing conditions such as participating in a substance abuse class, counseling, or community service. Alternatively, offenders may also pay fees.
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The greatest challenge for equity in pretrial diversion, according to Loftman, is that people in the criminal justice system are often required to pay for their own rehabilitation despite being economically challenged.
“To ask for people to come up with the money to pay for their rehabilitation is going to fail,” Loftman said. “If Monroe County wants to be a real leader in the State of Indiana — and to the best of my knowledge, in the nation — what we’ll do is we’ll fund the criminal justice system fully, so we don’t need to depend on defendants to pay for their own rehabilitation — because that is never going to work.”
In his closing thoughts to the committee, Loftman did not blame any member for creating the problems he addressed earlier but said they are all responsible for solving them.
“We’re never going to come up with a perfect solution, but we’ve got to come up with meaningful ways to try,” he said. “If we’re going to address equity and race and ethnicity in the criminal justice system, we’re going to do it by solving overall problems in the criminal justice system as much as we are by just trying to directly address race.”
Deputy prosecutor April Wilson, who sits on the committee as a non-voting member, said it’s important to understand what causes people to be incarcerated — especially as the county considers ways to prevent people from entering the system.
Other committee members said they want to narrow in on specific kinds of data they think is important moving forward.
Wilson said the length of time someone is in jail is nuanced, and it’s necessary to consider whether they’re incarcerated, for example, on a violent felony charge or a misdemeanor.
“Those variances are some of the fleshing out of data points that I hope that we include so that we can try to narrow down the most impact that we can all have as a community,” she said.
