An alternative explanation is, of course, that the cultural assumptions of the state institutions in law, education, politics, etc predisposed, for example, the police to target certain groups specifically, which would lead to excess arrests, and convictions for that group compared to the norm and hence reproduce the statistics which justify continued discriminatory intervention,
Maybe, for example, these ‘defendants’ are linked by other common social indices, poor housing, poverty, unemployment, unequal access to state services, broken families, etc.
But these were never seen as prime factors, but secondary to the ‘obvious’ fact in this case skin color.
Thus this was an immigrant problem.