Exploring Criminal Justice Trends in Central Indiana

Key findings

• Neighborhoods on the near northeast side of Indianapolis have the highest risk factors for criminal justice involvement. 
• Increased suspensions and expulsions increase the likelihood of later justice involvement by youth, even when controlling for other factors. 
• In 2024, 17% of Black students in Marion County were suspended or expelled, compared to 8% of white students. That gap has persisted since 2011. 
• Multiracial students are also consistently suspended or expelled at higher rates than white students. 
• In 127 of Marion County’s 253 census tracts, the Black juvenile charge rate is at least five times the white rate. In many of these tracts, white youth were not charged at all. 
• Since 2010, juvenile charges for white, Black, and Hispanic youth have declined. Charges have fallen by 86% for white youth, 90% for Black youth, and 80% for Hispanic youth. 
• From 2014 to 2024, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department (IMPD) recorded thousands of use-of-force incidents. The majority of these involved non-lethal tactics: weight leverage, handcuffing, takedowns, and other physical restraints were most common.  
• From 2018 to 2021, Black residents made up 48% of jail bookings despite representing just 27% of the county’s population. 

Background

The path into the criminal justice system does not start with an arrest. It often begins much earlier, shaped by the environments where children grow up. Communities play a powerful role in shaping opportunities and outcomes. Structural factors such as poverty, unequal access to education, racial segregation, and high rates of neighborhood-level incarceration can create conditions that increase the risk of future justice system involvement.¹ These challenges are not randomly distributed; they are rooted in place. Understanding how place shapes risk is essential to creating more equitable and supportive environments for all people. 

To help visualize how this plays out in Indianapolis and surrounding communities, we developed a composite risk score for each census tract. This score draws from four indicators known to correlate with higher odds of justice system contact later in life: child poverty, educational attainment, racial diversity, and incarceration rates. These indicators were selected as a condensed version of an earlier violent crime index created by the Polis Center to support funding allocations by Indianapolis-Marion County City County Council. (Polis 2020) Researchers have found these neighborhood factors—income, education, segregation, and incarceration levels—are linked to incarceration outcomes for children.^2,3 Each tract received one point for each of the following high-risk factors it exhibited: being in the top 20 percent in the Indianapolis Metropolitan Area for child poverty, adults without a high school diploma, or incarceration rates; or having low racial/ethnic diversity (defined here as a diversity index of 0.3 or lower). Tracts could score between 0 and 4 depending on how many high-risk thresholds they cross. 

Objectives

1. Examine risk factors in neighborhoods in Central Indiana such as poverty, unequal access to education, racial segregation, and high rates of neighborhood-level incarceration – Which can all create conditions that increase the risk of future justice system involvement. 
2. Identify criminal justice trends in Central Indiana, the communities most impacted, and how unequal policies contribute to a pipeline to incarceration. 

Community Conditions and Early Risk Factors 

Marion County census tracts by total risk score 

Source: Analysis and visualization by the Polis Center; Incarceration rates: Chetty 2018; Other data: 2023 American Community Survey via SAVI; Incarceration rates: 2010; others: 2023

Neighborhoods on the northeast side of Indianapolis have the highest risk factors for criminal justice involvement

Most of the neighborhoods south of 38th Street from Fall Creek east to I-465 have at least three of the risk factors. In Windsor Village Park, tract 3603.02, diversity is high, but nearly 7-in-10 children live in poverty and more than one third of adults have no high school diploma. In 2010, one out of every 14 adults was incarcerated.  

Conditions are similar in Near Eastside neighborhoods between Rural Street and Sherman Drive, south of I-70. In Brookside Park, one quarter of adults are without a high school diploma, and one third of children live in poverty. In tract 3549, near the Sherman Park industrial site (former RCA plant), 43% of children live in poverty. 

On the southeast side, from Fountain Square to Emerson Avenue, most neighborhoods have three risk factors present. Fountain Square, despite more than a decade of redevelopment, still has a child poverty rate of 35%, and 17% of adults have no high school diploma, which places it in the worst 20 percent of all census tracts in the metropolitan area. 

Tracts with moderate risk—scoring two out of four—are more widely distributed but still show clustering on the West Side, Far Eastside, and Lawrence Township areas. Tract 3307.02, just east of Post Road, has a 29% child poverty rate and 25% of adults don’t have a high school diploma. On the West Side, tract 3426, west of George Washington High School, reported 25% of children live in poverty and 41% of adults are without a diploma, though it has relatively low incarceration and moderate diversity. These moderate-risk areas may not show crisis-level indicators across the board, but the layering of two significant risk factors is still cause for concern. 

National research supports the importance of neighborhood conditions. According to the Opportunity Atlas from economist Raj Chetty and colleagues, children raised in low-income, racially-isolated neighborhoods are significantly more likely to be incarcerated later in life—even when their parents’ incomes are the same as peers from more advantaged neighborhoods.³ In fact, research shows that simply moving to a neighborhood with better socioeconomic conditions can reduce a child’s odds of future incarceration and increase lifetime earnings.⁴ In other words, place matters. 

In Indianapolis, the geography of risk echoes past patterns of disinvestment and exclusion. Neighborhoods that were redlined in the 1930s and 1940s, excluded from mortgage lending and targeted for segregationist policies, are still among those with the highest poverty, lowest educational attainment, and highest incarceration rates today.⁵ These are the same communities where youth face systemic barriers that increase their odds of future justice system contact. For a deeper dive into redlining and its relationship to current conditions, see “Residential Segregation in Indianapolis” in the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis.⁶ 

By mapping these indicators and identifying where multiple risk factors converge, we begin to see how place-based inequities shape life trajectories. Solutions must focus first on these communities. The structural disadvantages facing children in these communities are not incidental—they are systemic, layered, and measurable. And unless we intervene early—through education, housing, public safety, and youth supports—those disadvantages will keep producing the same results. 

Central Indiana census tracts by total risk score 

Source: Analysis and visualization by the Polis Center; Incarceration rates: Chetty 2018; Other data: 2023 American Community Survey via SAVI; Incarceration rates: 2010; others: 2023

Central Indiana census tracts with three or more risk factors

Tracts that fell in the worst 20% regionally for three or more measures 

Bold values represent high risk for that indicator (low diversity under 0.3 or top 20% in other measures). 

Source: Analysis and visualization by the Polis Center; Incarceration rates: Chetty 2018; Other data: 2023 American Community Survey via SAVI; Incarceration rates: 2010; others: 2023

Early system contact and the school-to-prison pipeline 

School discipline as a first point of contact 

In Marion County, school discipline rates for suspensions and expulsions have declined since 2011. Although they spiked in 2023, rates in 2024 returned to a more typical level, suggesting discipline issues after the COVID-19 pandemic were resolving back to normal levels. Yet racial disparities remain significant. 

Juvenile charges and geographic disparities 

While school discipline often marks the first formal contact youth have with the justice system, criminal charges are another key turning point. In Marion County, data on juvenile offense charges reveal stark disparities across geography and race. 

Juvenile charge rate by census tract in Marion County 

Source: SAVI

Tract-level data show that Black youth are charged with crimes at far higher rates than their white peers. In 127 of Marion County’s 253 census tracts, the Black juvenile charge rate is at least five times the white rate. In many of these tracts, white youth were not charged at all, making the Black/white ratio effectively infinite. Due to data suppression and small population counts, tract-level juvenile charging data is only consistently available for Black and white youth. However, at the county level, Hispanic youth also face elevated charge rates. For example, the juvenile charge rate for Hispanic youth in Marion County was 8.9 per 1,000 in 2020—twice as high as the rate for white youth (4.4 per 1,000). These patterns underscore that racial disparities extend beyond any single group. 

Policing and initial system contact 

Use of force overview 

Police contact is another point at which people become entangled in the criminal justice system. In Marion County, use-of-force records, arrest data, and tract-level crime rates reflect both the commonality and complexity of these encounters. 

Reported use of force incidents are about half of what they were in 2021. Use of force has fluctuated over the past decade, but it is difficult to discern trends from reporting changes. From 2014 to 2021, reporting may have become more common as the pressure for police transparency increased. Beginning in 2022, new reporting requirements excluded some minor actions from reporting and no longer required the location of each incident. 

In 6% of use-of-force incidents, the only charge filed was “Resisting Law Enforcement.” In these cases, there was no underlying criminal offense—only resistance itself. Most of these incidents were initiated under the service type “Arrest” with no additional context recorded, making it difficult to determine what triggered the police response. The existence of over 1,000 such incidents suggests that the act of resisting alone can justify force, even in the absence of any other alleged crime. 

Traffic stops and escalation 

Crime and risk in place 

Justice system contact is shaped not only by behavior or identity, but by geography. Census tract-level data show that exposure to crime and enforcement risk varies dramatically across Indianapolis. (For detailed crime rate maps, visit SAVI’s Crime and Safety Topic Profile.) In 2021, property crime rates in some tracts exceeded 350 per 1,000 residents, while others reported rates close to zero. Violent crime followed a similar pattern. 

Importantly, these differences are correlated with structural risk factors. The composite risk score from above—based on poverty, low education levels, racial isolation, and prior incarceration rates—shows a strong relationship with violent crime (r = 0.54). This suggests that systemic disadvantage increase the risk of both experiencing violence and police contact. 

Among the ten tracts with the highest total crime rates, six have multiple risk flags, including neighborhoods like Martindale-Brightwood, the Far Eastside, and 38th & Meadows. Others, like Twin Aire and the South Side, also score high on both crime and risk factors. However, two high-crime tracts in Downtown Indianapolis have no structural risk flags. This highlights an important distinction: some crime is tied to neighborhood distress, but other crime—especially in urban commercial districts—reflects non-residential activity such as nightlife, tourism, or commuting. 

Summary

Arrests and use of force reflect how disparate community risk play out in everyday police encounters. The use of force is frequently justified by subjective terms like noncompliance or resistance, and in many cases, resisting is the only charge filed. These outcomes are not random. High-crime tracts with layered disadvantage face more enforcement, more force, and more arrests. Meanwhile, black residents are disproportionately stopped and charged. In Indianapolis, geography and identity continue to shape who enters the system. 

Jail and detention 

Jail as a middle chapter in system contact 

In Marion County, jail is not the end of the line in the justice system—it is often the next step in a chain of encounters that begins with school discipline, escalates through policing, and culminates in detention. Most people in jail have not been convicted of a crime. They are awaiting trial, often for low-level offenses, and often because they cannot afford to pay bond. This pattern continues and amplifies the racial and geographic inequalities seen throughout the system. 

Racial disparities in detention 

Racial disparities in the jail population are striking. From 2018 to 2021, Black residents made up 48% of jail bookings despite representing just 27% of the county’s population. White residents made up 51% of jail bookings and 54% of the population. Other races and ethnicities were not reliably reported in this dataset. Black men alone accounted for 36% of all bookings—more than any other demographic group. These disparities are not isolated; they mirror the overrepresentation of Black students in school discipline, and Black drivers and suspects in use-of-force incidents. They show how the cumulative burden of enforcement falls hardest on Black communities

Half of people who are booked remain in jail for fewer than three days 

Percentiles by length of stay in Marion County jails, 2018-2021 

The role of jail in the system 

Jail plays a transitional role in Marion County’s justice system, serving not as an endpoint but as a waypoint in a broader pattern of involvement. For most individuals, it is a temporary setting during the pretrial period, often tied to the severity of the charge and to barriers like unaffordable bail or court processing delays. As previous sections have shown, these burdens are not evenly distributed. The same communities disproportionately affected by school discipline and police contact are also overrepresented in jail bookings and longer stays. 

Rather than reflecting the most dangerous offenders, the jail population reflects upstream disparities in enforcement, opportunity, and access to alternatives. Its composition underscores how place-based disadvantage and racially disparate decision-making accumulate across systems—ultimately shaping who ends up held, for how long, and under what conditions. 

Prosecution and conviction outcomes 

Persistent disparities — or reflections of earlier inequities? 

At the prosecution stage, racial disparities remain evident — but the nature of those disparities becomes more complex. Rather than uniformly worsening, disparities in case outcomes often reflect cumulative disadvantages built earlier in the system. In the 2023 SAVI report Equity in Criminal Prosecutions, we outline the latest trends in prosecution and equity issues within the system.¹⁰ 

Reforms in practice 

Recent reform efforts by the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office show promise. The 2019 decision to stop prosecuting most low-level marijuana possession led to an 85–96% decline in those charges across all racial groups. Still, a small number of cases continue to be filed — mostly against Black residents — raising questions about the discretion and consistency of reform implementation. 

Similarly, the dramatic decline in “Driving While Suspended” cases — from over 370 per month in 2017 to just 21 in 2022 — reflects the impact of diversion programs and legal workshops. One major contributor to this decline was the launch of Second Chance Workshops in 2019, which allowed individuals with suspended licenses to work with attorneys to waive unpaid fees and restore their driving privileges. According to the Vera Institute, more than 2,000 licenses have been reinstated through these workshops. The Marion County Prosecutor’s Office emphasized that these cases often involve no threat to public safety and that the workshops reduce unnecessary prosecution for poverty-related offenses. 

Incarceration and reentry 

Long-term incarceration in Central Indiana 

Incarceration is one of the most visible and enduring consequences of contact with the criminal legal system. Although many individuals in the system experience pretrial detention, others are sentenced to serve time in state prisons. Prison incarceration marks a major inflection point in a person’s life, disrupting employment, housing, family stability, and health. In Central Indiana, particularly in Marion County, prison use has remained high and remarkably consistent over the past decade after declining from a peak in 2006. 

Marion is not the only county in the Indianapolis region with a high rate of imprisonment. As of the most recent data, Madison County’s rate was 1,947 per 100,000 — nearly twice the state average. Madison County’s high incarceration rate likely reflects similar structural risk factors found in many high-risk Marion County neighborhoods. Areas of Anderson, the county’s largest city, show elevated levels of poverty, low educational attainment, and prior incarceration—mirroring the same conditions that correlate with justice system involvement elsewhere in the region. These upstream disadvantages likely contribute to higher incarceration rates, even in a smaller county context. 

Morgan (1,127), Hancock (946), and Shelby (1,671) Counties also exceeded 900 per 100,000. In contrast, Hamilton County’s rate was just 314 per 100,000, the lowest in the region. This local variation underscores broader patterns of geographic and racial inequality in criminal justice outcomes. The same counties with higher arrest and jail disparities often have elevated prison rates as well. 

While many system contacts lead only to arrest, summons, or short jail stays, incarceration in state prison often reflects a deeper level of disconnection from alternatives — legal representation, diversion, mental health support, or access to pretrial release. In this way, prison trends are shaped by upstream disparities, not just case severity. The consistency of Marion County’s prison rate over two decades, despite efforts at reform, suggests that broader systemic changes are needed to meaningfully reduce incarceration. 

 In the second half of this section, we will turn to what happens next: the process of returning home. Even after release, the experience of incarceration continues to shape individuals’ lives, limiting opportunities and compounding disadvantage. We examine barriers to employment, housing, and health care for those returning from prison, as well as recent policy efforts aimed at improving reentry outcomes. 

Returning home: barriers to reentry 

Criminal records limit access to housing and employment. Many leave prison without IDs, job prospects, or a connection to healthcare—barriers that compound risk and undermine stability. 

In 2025, Governor Mike Braun signed Executive Order 25-46,¹² directing Indiana agencies to address these gaps head-on. The order cites that people released into homelessness are 50% more likely to reoffend, and those without employment face a 52% recidivism rate, compared to 16% for those stably employed. The Indiana Department of Correction was ordered to set measurable benchmarks, identify those at high risk of homelessness, expand job support through the Hoosier Initiative for Re-Entry (HIRE), and coordinate access to services and family reunification. A statewide report is due in June 2026. 

The policy marks a shift toward a more intentional approach. But its long-term impact will depend not just on coordination—but on whether returning citizens are treated as neighbors with futures, not former offenders with records. 

A systemic pipeline 

The findings in this report make one thing clear: the criminal legal system is not a set of isolated decisions, but a layered structure that begins long before a person is incarcerated. School discipline, neighborhood-level disadvantage, police contact, jail bookings, and prison admissions are all connected—and disparities compound over time. 

Relationship between risk score and crime rate

High crime rates are tracts in the top 25% regionally 

High risk scores are tracts with a score of three or four 

Source: Risk score developed by the Polis Center. Crime rates from Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department

The final visuals underscore how these dynamics play out across Central Indiana. The above map of Marion County reveals where structural disadvantage (as measured by a composite risk score) and public safety concerns (crime rate quartile) converge. Neighborhoods shaded deep purple—such as parts of Martindale Brightwood, Twin Aire, and the Far Eastside—are facing both high risk and high crime. Meanwhile, tracts in pink stand out as high-risk communities with low recorded crime, places where systemic disadvantage is severe, but enforcement may be less concentrated. Blue tracts indicate high crime but relatively low structural risk—often downtown, where enforcement intensity is shaped more by commercial or public space activity than by residential conditions. 

At the county level, a different kind of disparity emerges. In suburban counties like Hamilton, Boone, and Hancock, Black residents are overrepresented among those arrested and jailed. For example, in Hamilton County, Black residents make up just 4.2% of the population but 31.8% of arrests—an arrest disparity ratio of 7.6. In Shelby County, the jail population is 6% Black despite a county population that is only 1.2% Black. These disparities are even more extreme than those found in Marion County, where racial disproportionality is high but somewhat more aligned with population. 

Black residents are overrepresented in every Central Indiana county’s jail and arrest numbers 

Jail population: 2022, arrests: 2024, population: 2023 

Source: Vera Institute, National Incident Based Reporting System, American Community Survey 5-year estimates

Taken together, these maps and metrics paint a portrait of a justice system shaped by place, race, and policy. While incarceration is the most visible endpoint, the drivers of inequality are upstream: in neighborhoods, schools, housing policy, and enforcement patterns. Any lasting solutions must begin there, too. 

Long-term incarceration in Central Indiana

Conclusion

This report provides a comparative analysis of criminal justice involvement outcomes alongside socioeconomic and environmental factors. Our findings reveal a clear pattern: neighborhoods with higher risks (less diversity, increased poverty, lower education attainment) tend to have higher chances of experiencing criminal justice involvement than neighborhoods with lower risks of those indicators. These challenges are not randomly distributed but rather they are rooted in place. Understanding how place and policy shapes risk is essential to creating more equitable and supportive environments for all people. 

Data Sources

Table 1: List of all indicators by source, year, and geography

Acknowledgments

Contributors: Jay Colbert, Asger Ali, Kayla Duncan, Alli Kraus, Katharine Brunette, Nigama Pervala, and Sharon Kandris

Endnotes

1. The Polis Center. (n.d.). Who is in the Marion County Jail? Exploring Length of Stay through an Equity Lens. SAVI. Retrieved June 4, 2025, from https://www.savi.org/feature_report/who-is-in-the-marion-county-jail-exploring-length-of-stay-through-an-equity-lens/
2. Goin, D. E., Rudolph, K. E., & Ahern, J. (2018). Predictors of firearm violence in urban communities: A machine-learning approach. Health & Place, 51, 61–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2018.02.013
3. Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., Hendren, N., Jones, & Porter, S. R. (2018). The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility. Census.Gov. https://www.census.gov/library/working-papers/2018/adrm/CES-WP-18-42R.html
4. Chetty, R., Hendren, N., & Katz, L. F. (2016). The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment. American Economic Review, 106(4), 855–902. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20150572
5. The Polis Center. (2022, April 14). Modern Redlining in Indianapolis? SAVI. https://www.savi.org/modern-redlining-in-indianapolis/
6. Ryan, J. (2023, February 7). Residential Segregation in Indianapolis. Encyclopedia of Indianapolis. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/c239c88a2f8f4c4aae45f1b229f22748
7. Wald, J., & Losen, D. F. (2003). Defining and Redirecting a School-to-Prison Pipeline. New Directions for Youth Development, 2003(99), 9–15.
8. The Polis Center. (2021). Equity and Criminal Justice: The Cradle to Prison Pipeline in Indianapolis. SAVI. https://www.savi.org/feature_report/equity-and-criminal-justice-the-cradle-to-prison-pipeline-in-indianapolis/
9. The Vera Institute of Justice. (n.d.). Marion County, Indiana | Incarceration Trends. Retrieved June 4, 2025, from https://trends.vera.org/state/IN/county/marion_county
10. The Polis Center. (2023, March 23). Equity in Criminal Prosecutions: Analyzing Case Filings from the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office. SAVI. https://www.savi.org/equity-in-criminal-prosecutions-analyzing-case-filings-from-the-marion-county-prosecutors-office/
11. Adams, D., & Reynolds, L. (2002). Bureau of Justice Statistics 2002: At a Glance | Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/bureau-justice-statistics-2002-glance
12. Braun, M. (2025, February 3). Executive Orders. Indiana Governor Mike Braun. https://www.in.gov/gov/newsroom/executive-orders/