Black youth in Iowa continue to be punished more severely than white peers for criminal offenses. According to The Sentencing Project’s latest analysis of disparities in youth incarceration (a category covering detention centers, residential treatment centers, group homes, and youth prisons), Iowa remains among the ten states with the highest overall Black youth incarceration rate, as well as one of the ten states with the greatest Black/white disparity in youth incarceration.

Those statistics reflect only one aspect of a larger problem. Early this year, the final report from a Juvenile Justice Task Force established by the Iowa Supreme Court acknowledged that “Gender and racial disparities are present throughout the system.”

Iowa is in the early stages of implementing the task force’s 55 recommendations, at least seven of which relate to racial disparities. (Many more address out-of-home placements for youth.)

However, advocates say Iowa must do more to address the ongoing disparities. And while an expanded diversion program is keeping many young people out of the juvenile justice system, one Iowa county with a particularly troubled history on youth incarceration is in the process of building a much bigger detention center.

Five of the eight Iowa counties with the largest Black populations “had trial juries that were fully representative of their jury-eligible Black population” during 2022 and the first half of 2023, according to data analyzed by the Iowa-Nebraska NAACP. However, trial juries in Polk County and Scott County failed to hit that benchmark, and Dubuque County was “particularly problematic,” with zero Black members of any trial jury during the eighteen-month period reviewed.

The same review indicated that trial juries in Linn and Woodbury counties were close to being representative of the area’s jury-eligible Latino population, while Latinos were underrepresented on juries in Johnson, Marshall, Scott, and Polk counties, and particularly in Muscatine County.

Russell Lovell and David Walker, retired Drake Law School professors who co-chair the Iowa-Nebraska NAACP Legal Redress Committee, examined juror data provided by the Iowa Judicial Branch and presented their findings at the 11th Annual Iowa Summit on Justice and Disparities in Ankeny on November 3.

Russell Lovell was troubled by the segregation and discrimination he witnessed growing up in a small Nebraska town and resolved to work on civil rights while attending law school in his home state during the late 1960s. His passion for justice extended beyond his nearly 40-year career as a Drake Law School professor and recently earned Lovell an award from the Notre Dame Alumni Association “for his outstanding dedication to advancing civil rights and his commitment to providing experiential learning to the next generation of lawyers.”

Iowa-Nebraska NAACP President Betty Andrews nominated Lovell for the Rev. Louis J. Putz, C.S.C., Award, citing his “fifty years of exceptional NAACP pro bono civil rights advocacy.” As co-chairs of the Iowa-Nebraska NAACP and Des Moines Branch NAACP Legal Redress Committees, Lovell and fellow Drake Law Professor Emeritus David Walker have collaborated on eight amicus briefs submitted to the Iowa Supreme Court. They have also successfully pushed for systemic reforms to make Iowa juries more diverse.

The Iowa Chapter of the National Bar Association recognized Lovell’s civil rights work and advocacy for representative juries in 2020.

Iowa is tied for seventh among states with the highest disparities in Black incarceration rates, according to new analysis from the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative. Data released on September 27 show Black Iowans are about nine times more likely than whites to be in prison or jail, and Native Americans are about thirteen times more likely than whites to be incarcerated in Iowa.

Betty Andrews, president of the Iowa-Nebraska NAACP, said in a statement that the findings “underscore the need for systemic reform.” She called on Iowa to “take action in every facet of the justice process.”

Dana James, the founder of the Black Iowa News website and email newsletter, has launched a print version of the publication in time for Juneteenth celebrations around the state. James told Bleeding Heartland she plans to publish the Black Iowa Newspaper quarterly this year, with the goal of monthly printing during 2024.

Although Iowa has a long tradition of Black journalism—the Iowa Bystander newspaper was founded in Des Moines in 1894—the state has been without a print newspaper produced by and for Black Iowans for some time. Jonathan Narcisse, the last publisher of the Bystander, moved the paper to a digital-only format several years before his death in 2018.

Rachel Bruns is a volunteer advocate for quality maternal health care in Iowa. This essay was originally published in the Des Moines Business Record’s Fearless publication.

While we see regular news coverage about challenges accessing maternal health care in Iowa and the related racial disparities, I rarely see the mention of higher cesarean rates as a relevant factor in those disparities.

April is Cesarean Awareness Month, and April 11-17 is Black Maternal Health Week. The overlap of these initiatives is relevant given the higher cesarean rate for Black people across the country and Iowa. 

ReShonda Young is an entrepreneur from Waterloo and a co-founder of Bank of Jabez.

Imagine a race between two people from New York to California. One person receives a bicycle and the other an airplane. The first to get to California is the winner. It’s a structurally unfair race for the bicyclist.

That’s what the wealth gap is like for Black families in America. It’s an impossible race. White people have a 400-year advantage on wealth, power, and economic mobility. And it bears stating: the system is not broken — it was rigged like this by design. The pervasive, generational inequality is systemic and structural.

Iowa’s health and human services budget for the coming fiscal year includes a $500,000 appropriation for a new “maternal health” initiative modeled on an ineffective, wasteful Texas program.

But the bill, negotiated by House and Senate Republicans and approved on party-line votes in both chambers May 23, does not extend postpartum coverage for Iowans on Medicaid, a documented way to reduce maternal mortality.

Senator Joe Bolkcom represents Iowa City and has been a leading voice in the state legislature for updating Iowa law on cannabis.

This March 22 marks the 50^th anniversary of an important report from the Shafer Commission, a group appointed by President Richard Nixon, tasked with studying marijuana and issuing policy recommendations. The group’s findings called for the decriminalization of cannabis possession in the U.S., but alas, the suggestions went unheeded.

Fifty years later, Iowa remains one of nineteen states where you can still be locked up for minor cannabis possession.

No state in the country has placed a higher proportion of Black youth in juvenile facilities than Iowa, according to a new Sentencing Project analysis. The Black youth placement rate in Iowa was more than double the national average in 2019, and young African Americans in Iowa were nearly nine times as likely as their white peers to be committed to facilities such as “detention centers, residential treatment centers, group homes, and youth prisons.”

Josh Rovner was the lead author of Black Disparities in Youth Incarceration, which the Sentencing Project published on July 15. The two-page report included statistics on youth placement in Washington, DC and the 36 states where at least 8,000 residents are African Americans between the ages of 10 and 17.

“Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.”

-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1967 book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

Remington Gregg reminded me of that observation today in this Twitter thread “on lesser quoted words of Dr. King and sitting in your discomfort as a white person in America.”

As 2020 began, one of my goals was to put a lot of writing energy into coverage of racial disparities or other topics particularly impacting people of color in Iowa. I got off to a decent start a few days into the year with a deep dive on Julián Castro’s critique of the Iowa caucuses, which was partly grounded in this state’s relative lack of diversity. I marked the last Martin Luther King, Jr. Day with a post about an exhibit on “redlining” and other racist housing policies in Des Moines. That piece ended up among the 25 most-viewed that Bleeding Heartland published during a year of higher traffic than ever.

But as the year progressed, other pressing political topics–the Iowa caucuses and their aftermath, turnover on the Iowa Supreme Court, the Iowa legislative session, a huge number of competitive election campaigns, and of course the the coronavirus pandemic–consumed most of my headspace.

A disproportionate number of African Americans and Asians are among the 188 Iowans who have died due to novel coronavirus, according to figures the Iowa Department of Public Health published for the first time on May 4.

Iowa’s confirmed novel coronavirus infections have sharply increased since the state expanded testing late last week. As hundreds of new cases were identified among employees of meatpacking plants, the share of Iowans with COVID-19 who are people of color also rose.

For the first time on April 14, the Iowa Department of Public Health released information about novel coronavirus (COVID-19) infections by race and ethnicity. The results won’t surprise anyone who has been following the news from other parts of the country: a disproportionate number of Iowans with confirmed COVID-19 infections are African American or Latino.

Activists and some Democratic legislators had pushed for releasing the demographic information after a senior official said last week the public health department had no plans to publish a racial breakdown of Iowa’s COVID-19 numbers.

Meanwhile, Iowa reported its largest daily number of new COVID-19 cases (189) on April 14, fueled by the outbreak that has temporarily shut down a Tyson pork processing plant in Columbus Junction (Louisa County). At her daily press conference, Governor Kim Reynolds again praised efforts by meatpacking companies to slow the spread of the virus and keep workers and the food supply chain safe. However, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) has highlighted unsafe workplace conditions for employees of meatpacking plants, a group that is disproportionately Latino.

Midwestern states continue to have greater “racial disparities in economic opportunity and economic outcomes” than do other regions of the U.S., while “policy interventions designed to close those gaps are meager,” concludes a new report by Colin Gordon of the University of Iowa and the Iowa Policy Project.

Gordon’s findings are consistent with past research showing that African Americans in Iowa face pervasive barriers in many areas of life. By some measures, our state’s racial disparities are among the worst in the Midwest region and the country.

Stacey Walker has chaired the Linn County Board of Supervisors since January. He delivered this State of the County Address on May 8. -promoted by Laura Belin

It is with great pride that I stand before you today, with the awesome task of presenting the state of the county address: an occasion I’m sure everyone here has been looking forward to since the date was announced. I know in my heart that you’re all here because you want to be, and not because your employer bought a table and needed it to be filled.

My sincere thanks to the women and men of the League of Women Voters for doing the hard work of organizing this event – and many others – designed to keep the general public informed of and engaged in the happenings of our democracy. You all are heroes.