Fact Checker: Klobuchar cites bad data to claim credit for reducing black incarceration
By Glenn Kessler Glenn Kessler The Fact Checker Email Bio Follow March 21 at 3:00 AM “If you look at the data, you will see there was a 65 percent decrease in incarceration of African Americans when you go from the beginning of my term to the end.
The Facts Klobuchar was the top prosecutor for Hennepin County, the state’s largest, from Jan. 3, 1999, to Jan. 3, 2007, until she was elected to the Senate. The county includes Minneapolis, so about 1 in 5 people in Minnesota live there. We also noticed that the drop in Hennepin County was mirrored by statewide figures. So did that mean that it was a statewide phenomenon — or that the county was the main cause of the overall result?Indeed, when we moved away from rates and looked just at raw numbers, we saw that the jail population did not change much from 2000 to 2001. The Vera website also breaks down the data according to white, African American, Latino, Asian and Native American.
In 1999, the overall rate of prison admissions from Hennepin County to the state prison system was 168 people per 100,000 residents between the ages of 15 and 64. In 2006, Klobuchar’s last full year in office, the overall rate of prison admissions was 169 people between the ages of 15 and 64. The Pinocchio Test While Klobuchar relied on publicly available data from a credible source, we believe it should have been apparent to her that something was wrong with it. She claimed that the drop took place “from the beginning of my term to the end.” In reality, much of the drop took place in just one year — a year that should have been memorable to a prosecutor if such a change in the incarceration rate of African Americans actually had taken place.
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