The Justice Center has extracted Alaska data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics report discussed in the accompanying article in order to compare the Alaska prison population with the populations of similar states. In an effort to understand the disparity in our rankings we have examined the Alaska data in different ways.
Many states have lower incarceration rates.
Five of these states are among the states with the lowest general populations, but the remainder are considerably larger. While most of the small states listed in Tables 1 and 2 are rural with very few large metropolitan areas, in Alaska more than half of the population is urban, thus perhaps contributing to its rather high incarceration rate. Another possible difference between Alaska and states with lower incarceration rates is the proportion of the population that is minority. None of these ten had a minority population which comprised more than 13 per cent of the general population. Massachusetts' minority population was 12.9 per cent of the total and Rhode Island's 11.0 per cent.