American Black prison overrepresentation actually lags the average subordinate-rate across OECD

Evidence

Furthermore, it is widely recognized that the United States imprisons a disproportionately large share of its Black citizens. For example, the Tournier (1999) OECD analyses disclosed that African Americans were imprisoned at nearly four times the rate of the American population as a whole. More interestingly, however, this degree of overrepresentation of Black prisoners was no greater than (in fact, it was even slightly lower than) the average degree to which migrants (i.e., subordinates in the European context) were overrepresented in the prisons of OECD nations. Inspection of the average imprisonment rates across the fifteen OECD polities disclosed that the average degree to which subordinates were imprisoned compared to their proportion in the total population was 5.13, while the degree to which African Americans were overrepresented in American prison cells was only 3.91. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 63

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the persistent US-centric framing of mass incarceration and criminal justice bias — a striking comparison that reframes American exceptionalism in incarceration as one instance of a broader cross-national pattern tied to subordinate-group status.
• SEED: Angle: ‘American mass incarceration is not American exceptionalism — subordinate status explains prison overrepresentation more than national criminal-justice character’ — a data-driven piece challenging both right and left framings.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 63