Racial Disparity in Houston’s Pretrial Population

There has been no shortage of discourse surrounding racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system.

In fact, the need to address these inequities have emerged as a central tenet of most viable criminal justice reform efforts. However, missing from the ongoing dialogue concerning race, crime, and justice, are attempts to evolve from the mere documentation of disparity’s presence to action through empirically informed policy recommendations, program development and intervention designs. The following report represents one such localized movement toward action in Houston, Texas, the third largest criminal justice system in the nation, whereby we examine those behavioral characteristics and systematic responses that underlie the state of racial/ethnic disparities in the jail system.