Comparing racial make-up at St. Louis County Jail (SLCJ) to the overall racial make-up of St. Louis County.

When critically assessing law enforcement in our community, it is important to start with facts. However, there are few records made easily available to the general public that allow us to visualize systemic racism within the criminal justice system. While arrest records and court files are often considered public information, it takes some legal know-how and special access to get the data. The following charts were made using the jail roster on October 17th, 2020 in order to examine the relationships between sex, race and incarceration in St. Louis County, Minnesota.

In the first chart, the racial demographics at the SLCJ are compared to the demographics of the county as a whole. This chart shows that there is a clear disparity as non-white individuals account for 35% of those incarcerated and only 9% of those residing in the county. On this particular day, for every 10,000 white residents of the county, there were approximately 4.8 white people in jail. But for every 10,000 non-white residents of the county, there were 26 non-white people were in jail. Put another way, on October 17, non-white county residents were jailed at a rate more than five times that of white residents.