2. The statistics do back it up.
3. "This gender gap is about six times as large as the racial disparity that Prof. Starr found in another recent paper."
https://web.archive.org/web/20180428124536/https://www.law.u...
4. Yes, skin color certainly does not appear to be a dominant factor, and maybe not a factor at all as you write.
The gender disparity is interesting and I wasn't aware of it's severity. Thanks.
[1] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/03/19/race-class-deba...
How to explain the difference? Well, the blog post doesn't control for other variables. Such as, crucially, how much crime do people commit and how severe are those crimes?
The UofM study did control for such factors.
And yeah, how much crime people commit varies and, yeah, has a pretty severe impact on how much incarceration happens. If you didn't control for these variables, the male/female disparity would be incredibly more severe, as the vast majority of inmates are male.
And if you look, you will see that the research the blog post references comes from an advocacy group.
It's a tough sell because statistics don't back it up; there are other significant factors at play.
There are certainly some biases against men but i think you are overestimating this one. Are you accounting for the differences between men and women?
The success of African immigrants suggests that the effect really has nothing to do with skin color, but other societal and cultural factors. Luckily society and culture are both mutable.