At least 40,000 Hispanic inmates have been misclassified in the Florida Department of Corrections

SEATTLE - A study has shown that the misclassification of inmates by law enforcement officials can have a serious impact on how certain groups are perceived by authorities once they are in prison.

In the state of Florida, at least 40,000 potentially Hispanic inmates have been classified as non-Hispanic white according to an analysis conducted by the Miami Herald of the inmate database from the Florida Department of Corrections. Although that number seems high, the actual figures could be a lot more, as the data collection was based on the U.S. Census Bureau's list of common Hispanic last names.

According to their findings, inmates with potentially erroneous demographic information make up almost a tenth of the half-million inmates that have passed or are currently incarcerated in Florida prisons since the 1950s.

Experts say that misidentification makes it impossible to track racial bias. This could be another example of the racial profiling Latinos have faced in recent years.

A joint study conducted by Erik J. Girvan and Heather Marek for the American Psychological Association in 2023 showed that, ethnic stereotypes or attitudes regarding Hispanics, may negatively impact criminal sentencing decisions regarding people perceived as Hispanic by actors in the legal system.

While Hispanic or Latino is an ethnicity, more than 80% of law enforcement agencies use it as a race when collecting information from drivers during traffic stops, according to a sample of 69 departments studied by one expert on racial profiling.

Last year, the Bureau of Justice Assistance along with the Council of State Governments Justice Center launched "Justice Counts", a project that aims to standardize metrics in the country's criminal justice system.

A report published in 2023 conducted by Nancy Rodriguez from the University of California, Irvine, found out that, out of the arrest and detention data by race and ethnicity collected from 14 cities, just 30% of the records capture Latino or Hispanic ethnicity data separately from racial characteristics while the other 70% capture Latino ethnicity as a single race.

The study also showed that, in most cases, police officers are the ones to determine someone's race or ethnicity.

"Every state is different in how their police departments define who is Hispanic, and many don't consider that Latinos can be of any race," Alex del Carmen told Axios last year. The Tarleton State University criminologist also added that "instead, police default to white. It's almost like the racial category supersedes the ethnic category," del Carmen added.